in every way but fact, I know Verity is yours,’ he said with that new gentleness in his voice. ‘You took on even more than Bran when you accepted Verity as your own, for whatever reason you felt you must.’
‘There was no choice. She is my child.’
‘Don’t take me for a flat any longer. I’ve been one for the ten years I stayed away from you for her benefit as well as your own. Now I see why there was such fury in your eyes when you first told me to take my dishonourable intentions straight to hell all those years ago, such a steely need in you to keep you and your child safe at whatever cost. I suppose going back home would mean admitting you’d failed.’
‘No, there is no going back. Verity would have been left on the doorstep of the nearest foundling hospital on a bitter night like this one if I let them get their hands on her. If I even wanted to go back now, they would find a way to rid themselves of her the moment I took my eyes off them,’ she told him, the defiance, hurt and grief she’d felt after their reception of the fact Verity had survived her rough birth sounding harsh in her voice at that terrible truth.
‘I doubt they would have brought themselves to carry out such an inhuman scheme, whatever threats were made in the heat of the moment,’ he said as if she had taken Verity and stolen away on some childish whim.
‘Exposing unwanted babies to the elements, given even the slim chance they might be found and raised to some sort of life by the parish, is an everyday sin in a world that despises tiny children for the mistakes of their parents,’ she said bitterly. ‘So, yes, they refuted her as coldly as an unwanted kitten and would have dealt with her as lightly if I had let them,’ she said, refusing to spare him when she had all the details of Verity’s terrible beginning etched on her memory, to live with for the rest of her life as best she could.
‘Why did her mother sit by and let you take her babe?’ he prompted so gently she let the information past her numb lips before her mind could leap in and argue he should not know so much about them.
‘Her mother was my twin sister and she died in childbed,’ she told him, the sorrow of it heavy in her heart, memory so vivid it could have happened yesterday.
He knew so much she hadn’t wanted anyone to know now, at least until Verity was old enough to hear the truth. She wondered if that day would ever come when all it could bring her was sadness at the fact Daphne refused to name the father of her child, even as she lay dying.
‘The other half of you,’ Luke said, as if he knew the bond of twins was tighter than that between ordinary siblings.
‘We weren’t identical,’ she said with a wobbly smile as she recalled the many differences between herself and Daphne, despite that shared birthday. ‘I can’t tell you how shocked everyone was when it was the quiet and angelic twin who threatened to disgrace the family name, not the one they always predicted would come to a bad end. From the day we were born Daphne was the sweet little angel to my devil, although she was as capable of mischief as I was. We argued and fought like cat and dog at times in private and she sometimes let me take the blame for our sins because I looked as if I deserved it. I supposed one of us might as well be punished as both.’
‘And yet you truly shared your sins about equally?’
‘More or less,’ she admitted cautiously.
‘You were the dog with the bad name being hanged for it, were you not?’ he asked as if he already knew she’d taken curses and blows for her sister more often than for herself, because somehow she needed the good opinion of others far less than her sister had done.
‘What if I was? We had each other and precious little attention from anyone but our nurse after our mother died. Daphne made it up to me by bringing food and books when they were forbidden me, or thinking up a new adventure to distract us from my latest punishment. I wasn’t a saint and we were both heedless and unruly. I expect the aunts were right to say we were a sad burden to them and our brothers are much older than us. They blamed us for our mother’s death, although Mama didn’t die until we were five, so that’s about as logical as blaming Verity for whatever sins Daphne committed. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’m not so innocent I don’t know she had a lover, but I never caught her out in an assignation, saw a love note passed to her, or overheard a furtive greeting to give me a clue who he was.’
Hearing herself saying far too much again, Chloe forced her mind back into the present and glared at him for luring her into a past she still found it hard to revisit.
‘What of your father?’ he asked blandly, as if they were engaged in polite conversation instead of talking about the upending of her young life.
‘What of him?’ she said, wondering how different hers and Daphne’s lives might have been if their father loved them half as much as Luke did his daughter.
‘Where was he in all this?’
‘Away. He used to claim he couldn’t abide the sight of us because we were such a painful reminder of our mother, but I found out later he’d installed a mistress in his town house before she was even cold in her grave. Whatever the truth, he spent his time in London or Brighton, or at his main seat in Northamptonshire where his daughters were not permitted to join him. Until we threatened to bring such disgrace on him even he couldn’t ignore us, we rarely saw him from one year to the next.’
‘What did he do when he recalled the twin daughters he’d left to raise themselves as best they could?’
Oh, but he was good at this, Chloe decided, even as she heard herself answer as if nothing stood between her ears and her tongue. ‘He came back,’ she said with a shudder. She hugged herself even tighter to ward off the terrible day of his return.
‘I suppose he would have to, once your sister was with child.’
She rounded on him to rage at his insensitivity, but he bewildered her before the words could leave her mouth by stripping off his viscount-warmed superfine coat and wrapping her in the heat of his body by proxy.
‘You’ll be cold,’ she protested even as she snuggled into the seductive smoothness of the silk lining and warmth of him and breathed in the unique scent of clean man and lemon water and sandalwood.
‘I’m a tough northerner, don’t forget,’ he argued with a wry smile.
How could she not want him when he stood there, so completely masculine and would-be cynical, and made her heart turn over with wanting this unique man in her life? In his shirtsleeves it was impossible to ignore the width of his shoulders and the lean strength of his mature body. She could imagine him at twenty, the young husband of a silly little débutante without the sense to see what a fine man she’d wed, and wondered how they would have gone on if they had met when she was young and impulsive and silly and married each other instead.
Impossible, Chloe; he’s almost nine years older than you are and was a father and a widower before you left the schoolroom, she chided herself, yet she couldn’t get the idea out of her head that, if he’d only waited for her to grow up, everything could be so different for them now. At six and twenty to her seventeen and steady as the rock his northern eyrie stood upon, he would have been steadfast as granite when Daphne’s loneliness and need for love and approval brought the world tumbling down on the Thessaly twins. A pipe dream, she dismissed that fantasy of love and marriage with him, and did her best to see them as others would. She shivered again at the thought of the sneers and jeers that would greet the revelation they’d been closeted in this room so long and only talked of past sins, not committed a whole pack of new ones.
