The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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       Chapter Ten

      ‘Do you think that just once during our acquaintance you could be sensible and come here to get yourself properly warm, Mrs Wheaton?’ he barked in fine Lord Farenze style and set her rocking world back on an even keel. It felt so familiar, his lord-of-all-I-survey guise, that she came back to the present and found she liked it a lot better than the past that had haunted her for so long, despite not being able to be more to him in it than she already was.

      ‘I should give your coat back and leave,’ she managed with a weak smile for the man now glowering at her with such impatient concern he could break her heart.

      ‘Flim-flam,’ he asserted with a wave of his hand that dismissed convention and the rules of master and servant as if they didn’t exist. ‘The important thing is for me to know who you really are, so I can make your idiot of a father realise what he’s done and put it right. He should at least grant you an income so you may bring up your niece as the lady you truly are, instead of standing by with his hands in his pockets. Virginia may have relieved him of the need to provide for his grandchild, but he has a duty to his remaining daughter, whether he likes it or not.’

      ‘He proved my sister and I were dead to him when he sent us to the remotest place he could think of so she could have Verity alone and unseen. Anyway, I saw a notice of his death in the papers over a year ago, so even you can’t harry him to do his duty in his grave, Lord Farenze.’

      ‘Luke,’ he corrected impatiently and how she wished she could call him so. ‘If the rogue was alive, it would be, “Behave as a gentleman should or else”, and think himself lucky he was my senior so it was not, “Before I kill you with my bare hands,”’ he said, the gruff rumble of his voice coming to her as much by feeling as sound.

      ‘Thank you.’

      She couldn’t help the wobble in her voice as she tried to find words to say how it felt to know he cared. She’d lost so much she could have had if fate was kinder, but told herself Verity outweighed it all. Chloe knew her youthful choices would not have been wise if she had made her début in society.

      She would have scandalised the ton with her wild ways and headlong temper, but she was banished to a remote farm with her pregnant sister before either of them had been properly noticed by the polite world and saved them the task of disapproving of her. According to her father and the aunts, one twin could not be introduced to society without the absence of the other being remarked. She wondered how they accounted for the disappearance of both Thessaly twins, but doubted anyone recalled their existence now.

      ‘I don’t want pity,’ she made herself add.

      ‘Should I pity a slip of a girl who refused to turn away from a helpless infant because a killer told her to? Or be furious you were forced to renounce all you should have had before you could grasp it? If I heard this sorry tale at second hand I might pity you, I suppose, but as it is I can’t offer you aught but my respect for your courage, as well as my lack of surprise at finding out you’re as stubborn with everyone else as you have always been towards me.’

      ‘Thank you, I think. Your family and friends must be gathered in the drawing room by now, though, and wondering where you are, so I suggest we abandon this topic and get on with the business of the day. You have more pressing matters to deal with than a weary housekeeper with a sad past,’ she said as she did her best to renounce the fairytale of him admiring her.

      ‘Eve is my family and I only have one true friend staying here to concern myself with,’ he informed her dourly.

      ‘I have a ten-year-old daughter and my reputation to guard,’ she replied and it seemed to jar him out of his king-in-his-own-country frame of mind.

      ‘We both know that’s not true now,’ he said as he crossed the room to loom over her instead of walking away, as she told herself she wanted him to.

      ‘Verity is my niece and not my daughter in the strictest sense of the word, but you knowing the truth changes none of it.’

      ‘Does it not?’ he swung round and demanded, direct and passionate as she had always suspected he was under the icy self-control he tried to fool the world with. ‘Is that truly all the difference you make between the “us” of today and of yesterday, Mrs Wheaton? Today I know you have never loved a man so wildly you had to bear his child alone when you were barely out of the schoolroom; never gave yourself wholly and completely to another man’s passion and need and haste for complete possession of you, one lover to another. If you think that’s nothing, I’m as mistaken in you as I was ten years ago, or yesterday afternoon when I saw you sad-eyed and pale at the loss of my great-aunt and your home of ten years and wanted you so urgently across all that frost and stone I’ve burnt like hot iron for you from then to now.’

      Chloe stood dumbstruck and searched her mind for some phrase that could turn them back to lord and upper servant and came up blank.

      ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he mocked her silence.

      She struggled against the weary impatience in his voice as he waited for her to produce a glib excuse. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘you leave me nothing to say.’

      ‘Not even, “No, never even look at me again with all this in our heads to remind us of what you just admitted?” Can’t you even bring yourself to deny it as you have since we first met and longed for each other as lovers?’

      ‘No, it’s as true for me as you say it is for you. From the first moment I set eyes on you and let myself regret for a second I must put Verity before my own wants and needs. Her existence makes sure I can’t be what we both want.’

      ‘My mistress?’ he insisted ruthlessly, as if he must get the words out of her to repay the weary frustration of a decade.

      ‘Yes,’ she admitted at last, as polite lying was impossible today.

      ‘I could have seduced you back then if I’d persisted, but I didn’t.’

      ‘Oh well done, Lord Farenze, how very noble of you,’ she forced herself to half-sneer and half-praise him, as if his chilly, and true, résumé didn’t hurt.

      ‘Luke,’ he corrected as if determined she should learn a name she could never use. She found him cruel for that and let her glare tell him so.

      ‘I didn’t seduce you because you were so young and vulnerable and it would lessen us both too much. You have no right to reproach me; we both know I would have ruined a virgin if I’d ignored my scruples. Back then I had a young daughter to raise on my own as well and I wanted her to respect her father when she was old enough to know what the world said. I couldn’t face her with you on my conscience when that day came,’ he insisted as if it was important she understand he had his own СКАЧАТЬ