The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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       Chapter Fifteen

      ‘I need to speak with you privately, Mrs Wheaton. Meet me in the Winter Garden in half an hour if you please,’ Luke demanded when he tracked down his housekeeper to the linen room, where she seemed to be having an urgent consultation with the head housemaid about torn sheets, of all things.

      From the flash of temper in her magnificent eyes at his order he felt lucky he hadn’t come across her alone and she had to keep to her role in front of the maids. He smiled like a besotted idiot as he ran down the backstairs, as if it was what a viscount did, and went out to the stables to speak to Josiah Birtkin about travel arrangements and how this place could be kept safe and cautious whilst he was away. The thought of being parted from Chloe, Verity and Eve while he carried out Virginia’s quest added a bite of nerves to his elation as he finished his conversation and went to seek a far more crucial one.

      * * *

      It could be another clear morning, if only the mist would clear. Instead it hung about this sheltered valley and he wondered if he should have asked Chloe to meet him outside on a day when frost seemed to hang in the very air, waiting to crystallise their breath. The wintery statue at the heart of the place was still staring into the distance, but Luke resisted the urge to confide his thoughts to his unresponsive stone ears. Some things were so private they should only be said to the person concerned.

      ‘There you are,’ Chloe’s pleasantly husky voice observed from so close it made him start and her frown turned to a satisfied smile.

      ‘As you say,’ he drawled as annoyingly as he could manage and from the flags of colour burning across her cheeks he’d succeeded a bit too well in rousing her temper this time.

      ‘How dare you order me to meet you out here in the middle of my duties like this? What do you imagine the household will make of such a hole-and-corner encounter, Lord Farenze?’

      ‘That I wish to speak to you in private and can hardly do so inside with so many eager ears tuned to our every move, I expect,’ he replied with a shrug part of him knew was wrong when he was master and she was playing the upper servant.

      ‘Why would you need to be private with me?’ she demanded haughtily and Luke took a deep breath of frosty air and prepared to tell her.

      ‘So I may ask you to marry me again, of course,’ he managed to say casually, as if it was what viscounts always did of a foggy morning, when they employed housekeepers as magnificent as this one.

      ‘Just like that?’ she demanded and he wondered if he’d miscalculated by stirring her into enough fury to be her true self instead of Mrs Wheaton.

      ‘No, not just like that,’ he said with a stern frown of his own. ‘After a decade of denial and deception—’ he heard her draw breath to annihilate him with negatives ‘—I’m done with pretending it doesn’t matter that we wasted ten years because I was too stupid to see past your disguise and my wife’s shoddy little love affairs to the woman you truly are, Chloe Thessaly.’

      ‘You can’t call me that here,’ she argued with a shocked look about in case old Winter at the centre of the garden might pass her identity on.

      ‘Nobody is in earshot and there are eight-foot-high hedges all about us, but are you ashamed of me then, my lady?’

      ‘Never that, my lord,’ she shot back so urgently he had to hide a satisfied grin.

      ‘Then when do you intend telling the world who you truly are?’

      ‘When the time seems right,’ she muttered crossly and shifted under his steady gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she admitted with a heavy sigh. ‘Soon,’ she added as he continued to watch her as annoyingly as he could manage when all he really wanted to do was kiss her speechless and a lot more it was as well not to go into right now.

      ‘When Verity is of age, or has run off with the boot boy perhaps? Or when hell freezes over and I’m so old and grey even you don’t want me any longer?’

      ‘I shall always want you,’ she said unwarily and he couldn’t help his broad grin at the declaration he most wanted to hear on her lips.

      ‘Marry me, then,’ he managed to say before he could launch himself at her like a lovestruck maniac.

      ‘You could do so much better,’ she said, avoiding his eyes as she watched the stony statue as if he fascinated her and Luke found he could even be jealous of inanimate objects now.

      ‘I could ask nobody better suited to be my wife,’ he assured her as he cupped large hands about her face, so she had to look up and let him see the doubts and questions in her amazing violet-blue gaze, as well as the heat and longing that made his heartbeat thunder with exhilaration and desire. ‘I never met a woman I honoured so much or wanted so badly, Chloe,’ he told her shakily and hoped he had managed to put all he was feeling into his own gaze, for once. ‘You’ve made me into me again,’ he said and grimaced as all the words he couldn’t put together clogged up in his head. ‘I don’t have the right words. I’ve been trying not to admit it for a decade, but I love you and I won’t stop doing it, even if you walk away.’

      ‘I can’t marry you, Luke.’

      * * *

      Chloe let herself gaze up into his fascinatingly hot grey eyes and saw pain and anger there before he decided No wasn’t enough this time. It felt as if the frantic beat of her heart might choke her as she gazed up into all she’d ever wanted and had to say it anyway. Love was there in the flare of gold about his irises, the hidden depths of green at the heart of his gaze that looked back at her.

      Luke, Lord Farenze, was finally showing her the tender places in his heart, the hopes and dreams in his complex mind and she was hurting him all over again. Tears swam in her eyes СКАЧАТЬ