The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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 as she thought of the young man he’d been—scarred so badly when his dreams were trampled in the dust by his shrew of a wife. He needed her to love him back, and love him back she truly did, 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