The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

Farenze is a viscount; I am his housekeeper and lords do not marry servants. Forget such wild flights of fancy and get into bed, love. Your Miss Thibett would be the first to say you need a decent night’s sleep before you’re ready to face world trade and the laden caravans of gold, jewels, silk and spices that will be winding their way through far-off, exotic lands even as we speak.’

      Her imagination caught by the idea of those processions of camels laden down with fine cloth and exquisite treasures, Verity allowed Chloe to walk her to her room and help her undress, then get into bed. Verity asked for a story and how to resist when she usually insisted on reading herself to sleep and this might be the last time Verity let her be her mother? Chloe dreaded telling her the tale of her birth and felt like crying herself by the time they wandered a little way along that ancient road in their imaginations and Verity’s eyes got heavier and heavier until she slept at last.

      Chloe let her voice trail away, then gazed at her precious child as if she had to fill her mind with Verity as she was now. Tomorrow Verity might hate her for a pretence begun when nobody else cared enough about Daphne’s child to save her from death or a lonely life at the mercy of the parish.

      Shaking her head to keep back the idea things were better as they were, Chloe went to her own room earlier than usual to struggle with the knot her life seemed tangled into all of a sudden. Someone had lit a fire for her and she knew exactly who had ordered it. Luke’s thoughtfulness at a time when he had hundreds of other things to think about made tears sting as she gazed into the glowing flames and wondered how he’d ever managed to fool anyone he was an unfeeling recluse.

      She loved Luke Winterley and finally admitted to herself she had loved him far too long. The fact of it, fresh and vital in her heart as she knew it would be to her dying day, made her content and full of hope for all of a minute. Yet if she emerged from whatever fate her family had told the world she had met to wed my Lord Farenze, Verity would be exposed as the reason Lady Chloe was supposed to have died with her sister in the first place.

      Her brothers would walk through fire rather than publically admit they’d let one sister give birth with only her twin to help her and a rapidly sobering midwife, then forced Chloe out to starve with her dead sister’s child after even that ordeal didn’t kill the poor little mite and they had to rid themselves of her by other means.

      Chloe sat watching the fire with tears sliding down her cheeks as she bid farewell to a dream she hadn’t let herself know she had. She had Verity and a secure future many a woman left with a child to bring up alone would envy her. Verity’s future was secure as well and she ought to be dancing on air. Instead she must fight the heavy weight of grief and an urge to sob her heart out on the threadbare rug she had decreed good enough for her bedchamber, so at least nobody could accuse her of gilding her own nest.

      Luke could condemn her thrift and look at her scratch bedchamber with offended distaste, but she had lived among the cast-offs of a bygone age most of her life and was used to making do. Carraway Court had been neglected and down at heel for as long as she could remember and the older servants would shake their heads and say how different it was in her grandfather’s day, before their mother wed her lord and he took all the rents, then left the Court to go to rack and ruin.

      Even then they whispered of gambling and extravagant mistresses and how even an earl couldn’t bring such low company to his late wife’s home with her daughters in residence. Chloe wondered bitterly why her father and brothers cared so much about the family name when they blighted it so enthusiastically.

      A sentence from Virginia’s letter slotted into her mind as if her mentor had whispered in her ear and a possible plan formed. Lady Tiverley was an amiable feather-head, but she was the daughter of a far richer and more respectable earl than Chloe’s father had ever been and moved in the highest social circles. If such a lady whispered the truth in a few well-placed ears, could Daphne and her romantically mysterious child become the heroines of such a sad tale? It was a faint hope and her heart beat like a marching drum at the idea she and Luke could love openly after all.

      Then she remembered Daphne lying in that rough bed, dying and feverishly demanding that Chloe promised her never to love a man so recklessly. She wasn’t Daphne, or a vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl with no protector now, though. Anyone who wanted to take advantage of her would have to get past Luke Winterley first, even if he was the one wanting to take it. She smiled at the thought of him holding aloof from Farenze Lodge for so long, because she had said No and they each had a daughter who would be damaged if she didn’t. He could deny it as often as he pleased, but her love was a noble gentleman from the top of his midnight locks to the tip of his lordly boots and how could she not love him? It was admitting it she had trouble with.

      First she must talk to Verity and insist Luke told his own daughter the truth about them as well. Lying in bed, torn between wild hopes and abject terror, the weight of four people’s hopes and dreams seemed to press her into the mattress. Even as the wonder of ‘perhaps’ made her heart lift with joy and her toes and a good many other places tingle with anticipation, Chloe couldn’t bring herself to believe her impossible fairytale might actually come true.

      Fumbling Virginia’s letter from the pocket of her neatly discarded gown, she jumped back into bed and relit her candle. She had talked Verity to sleep; now she let Virginia do the same for her. Chloe was very glad in the morning that her candle had sat firmly in a night stick, since it had gutted without her even being aware she had gone to sleep with it alight and slept peacefully the whole night long.

       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