The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ but it didn’t mean she could let him marry her and make Verity into a bastard again.

      ‘Why not?’ he breathed, so close she wondered how she could still be so cold.

      ‘I have a daughter,’ she said sadly.

      The blighted hopes and dreams young Chloe once wept over so bitterly while missing stubborn, noble, infuriating Lord Farenze in her bed seemed as nothing, now she had to renounce everything mature Chloe wanted to give her lover.

      ‘Oh, Luke, don’t frown at me and shake your head. I know you’re a good man and I’m a coward, but I can’t let Verity grow up with Lady Daphne Thessaly’s shame blighting her life. You need a pristine wife with an innocent heart, not me.’

      ‘Why would I want a tame little tabby kitten when I can have a lioness who’d fight for our cubs with her last breath?’ he said with a refusal to be fobbed off that made temptation tug so powerfully she had to look away.

      ‘I am fighting for one of them now.’

      ‘No, you’re denying we could fight the world for her together. I won’t accept this as your final answer, Chloe Thessaly,’ he said with a determination that made her knees wobble and her breath come short. She loved him so much she felt herself weakening and turned to watch the foggy garden to stop herself admitting she would only ever be half-alive without him.

      ‘Virginia’s quest for me is to find out who Verity’s father was. I will do my best to do so, but after that I’ll wed you, whoever he turns out to be,’ he told her.

      It sounded as much a threat as a promise, until he ran an impatient hand through his sable pelt of hair and let out a heartfelt sigh. ‘Lord above, but you’re a proud and stubborn wench, Lady Chloe Thessaly,’ he informed her with exasperation.

      Chloe sighed at the angry intimacy of them here in this foggy garden and longed for a forever after to spend with him. She spared a thought for Virgil, begging Virginia to wed him rather than be his scandalous lover as she would have offered to be. They must have realised after two previous marriages bore no fruit there was a strong chance she was barren, but even that didn’t seem as huge a barrier to love and marriage as Verity’s future happiness was to her.

      ‘I’ll wed you or nobody,’ Luke told her so stubbornly she almost believed him and her unhappiness seemed about to double. ‘Although heaven only knows why I’d saddle myself with such a steely female for life,’ he grumbled.

      ‘How charming. You look very much like a grumpy mastiff denied a juicy bone right now, my Lord Farenze.’

      ‘What a sad pair we are then; you look like a queen about to have her head cut off,’ he replied, eyebrows raised and a challenge to deny it in his sharp look.

      ‘Nobody else would want us if they knew what a sorry pair we are,’ she agreed.

      ‘They’d better not want you, but if we’re not to be united in marital disharmony, I suppose I’d best be off about Virginia’s business,’ he told her with a look that said it was her fault. They could be married inside the week and have a wedding night before he went, if not a honeymoon on the way.

      ‘Wait for a better day,’ she urged, all the imaginings of a woman terrified that her lover might never come back taking shape in her mind.

      ‘If I wait out one more night under the same roof as you, Lady Chloe, I shall either run mad or break down your door from sheer frustration. I need to be gone, but first you have to tell me everything you can remember about your sister’s visit to Scotland all those years ago.’

      ‘I don’t know much, she never told me.’

      ‘Tell me what you do know, then, for it is sure to be more than I do.’

      ‘Daphne went off to our father’s Scottish estate to stay there with his sister while her husband was in Ireland, supposedly to be instructed how to go on in polite company, then make a début of some kind in Edinburgh society. My father was deep in debt by that time and had secretly agreed to marry her off to a pox-ridden but very wealthy old duke as soon as they could fool the world she chose such a fate of her own free will.

      ‘Papa was furious when his plan went awry and the old man wanted his money back and Daphne was sent home in disgrace. We were sent away so she could have Verity at a remote and tumbledown property on Bodmin Moor that my father had won in a card game and couldn’t sell, but Daphne still refused to tell me who her lover was. She said it was best I didn’t know, then I wouldn’t be embarrassed when I was presented and had to meet his relatives.’

      ‘He must come from a gently bred family at the very least then; she could have met one of the neighbours during her time on your father’s estate, I suppose, properly out or no,’ he said with a preoccupied frown.

      Chloe thought fascination with his quest was already overtaking his frustration that she’d refused to marry him, but she put that grief aside for later and did her best to help him with what was probably an impossible task.

      ‘Daphne was desperate to escape marriage to that dreadful old reprobate, but she had always dreamt of a gallant hero who would come and rescue her from the lonely lives we lived at Carraway Court. I wouldn›t be surprised if she took any lover happy to have a sixteen-year-old girl in his bed in a desperate attempt to get herself with child and escape marriage to such a man.’

      ‘She was no older than my Eve when your father tried to sell his own child to the highest bidder, then? What sort of a father would consign his own child to a life of such misery and frustration?’

      ‘The Thessaly sort,’ Chloe said sadly, regretting the gaps in hers and Daphne’s lives and contrasting them with my Lord Farenze’s fierce love for his only child. ‘He was no sort of father at all and only wed my mother because she was heiress to the Carraway fortune. I don’t suppose he was faithful to her, or even particularly kind. Such a hard-hearted man can do a fearsome amount of damage to his children, so Daphne and I ought to have been grateful he favoured our brothers and despised us as mere girls, I suppose.’

      ‘He was your father and ought to have been proud of his spirited and beautiful daughters. But why did he send her to Scotland with his sister and not you?’

      ‘Because I was openly rebellious and Daphne always chose the course of least resistance, then did as she wanted to as soon as his back was turned. He thought she was meek and tractable and would do as he told her, in so far as he thought of either of us as beings and not his chattels to be disposed of as he chose.’

      ‘Miserable old fool.’

      Somehow his round condemnation of her late father made her smile, even if it wobbled and flattened at the thought of all that cold idiocy had cost the Thessaly twins.

      ‘He was, but you can see why Daphne longed so desperately for a lover when she had so little affection from anyone other than me in her life, can you not?’

      It came out more as a plea than a demand he understood her twin and she was grateful for the warmth of his hands as he folded her cold ones in his and watched her with a mix of admiration and exasperation in his intent gaze.

      ‘And what of Lady Chloe Thessaly? Was she supposed to stand alone and become the prop for her weaker sister whenever a lover let her down? You must have felt so alone, my love, so forsaken, when your sister and companion was bundled away like that.’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ