The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

voice in her head while she read the words he seemed more able to put on paper than bring on to his tongue to woo her with when they were together. Wasn’t that just like him? Yet would she love him half as much if he was glib and careless and ready to pour forth his every emotion?

      Here on the West Coast of this fair land the gorse is in blithe flower outside my window, and the sight and heady, astringent scent of it reminded me so sharply of my prickly Lady Chloe that I had to set pen to paper in order to dream of you as I write and wish we could be together again, but this time in every way that word knows how.

      Typical of him to begin with an insult, then turn it into a charm, she decided as she fingered the paper where his pen had scratched, then been mended and refilled with ink, bringing the scene to life so vividly it was almost as if she had been sitting nearby, shaking her head at his impatient curses, while all that had to be done before he could continue.

      As dreaming of you is all I seem able to do at the moment, I might as well sit here and suffer the frustrations of the damned, while I imagine you with your knitted brows and a quick shake of that clever, unwise head of yours as you wonder if I have finally run mad from missing you in my life and especially in my bed.

      She stopped as she read that once again and stared unseeingly at the wonderful portrait of Virgil and Virginia over the mantelpiece. As always, it showed two lovers so lost in love they couldn’t spare their very expensive artist friend time to look anywhere but into each other’s eyes. When her heart stopped racing at the very idea of Luke here with her, saying things like that and holding her as if he couldn’t bear to let her go, she focused on the painted likeness of those other lovers and frowned.

      Was taking all your lover had to offer part of the true generosity of love? How would she know, never having been one in any sense until now? Even if it took a daring leap of faith and imagination, the risk could be well worth taking though. Sinking a little deeper into the cushions of the chaise she’d shared with him the day Virginia’s will was read, she took up Luke’s letter again and let herself imagine him writing it with such un-Luke-like candour it made a tender smile lift her lips at the very thought of him putting so much on paper for her.

      This is such a beautiful land, full of contradictions and surprises, so really it’s a lot like you. I’m sure you’ll like it when I get you here for a visit with no lost lovers to unmask at the end of it and, I sincerely hope, no forced politeness to a relative of yours I couldn’t warm to if lost in an icy waste alone with her. I would rather snuggle up to an icicle than your once so famously beautiful paternal aunt, my Chloe.

      Lady Hamming is still outwardly attractive, but not even her close family dare touch her, presumably fearing her chilliness is catching. I’m surprised she hasn’t given poor Hamming frostbite or turned him into an ice statue after so many years of marriage, but he seems to consider her a marvellous curiosity it’s best not to try to understand rather than his comfortably familiar companion through life.

      Chloe smiled fleetingly at his vivid picture of an aunt she had no desire to know after she had conspired to sell Daphne to a depraved old lecher. Luke had laid her aunt’s character open to her without any need for them to meet and she knew he was protecting her again. Chloe frowned and wondered why she wasn’t offended by the notion—especially after swearing never to let another man shape her life the day she left Carraway Court for the last time.

      ‘Is it part of love; learning to let someone make your burdens lighter?’ she mused out loud. ‘I really wish you two would pay attention and answer a few of my questions,’ she told the painted lovers across the hearth crossly. ‘What can I be expected to know about true love, after being brought up a Thessaly?’

      As if they had answered, which was clearly impossible, the portrait of the first ‘princely’ Earl of Crowdale and his devious countess in an exquisitely painted book of hours, before her father sold it, seemed to sparkle before her mind’s eye. Little doubt those two rogues adored one another, she decided, recalling them turned towards each other and holding hands as if that was the bare minimum of contact they could endure. The Thessaly family made a good start on loving immoderately and against the odds. What a shame so few of their line carried on the tradition, she felt she was being told now and wondered if Virgil and Virginia would scold her wariness if they truly could see her now.

      ‘Good point,’ she conceded, ‘although I never actually knew them.’

      ‘You knew me.’ Virginia’s voice, even richer and more full of suppressed laughter and devilry than Chloe remembered, seemed to echo in her mind and add weight to lying, loving Lady Crowdale and her pirate lover. ‘I’m one-half of us two, my dear Chloe, and a love like ours doesn’t fade and die when facing a challenge,’ the imaginary Virginia added.

      ‘Death is quite a challenge,’ Chloe replied out loud, very glad she had shut the door behind her when she came in here to read and dream of her love.

      ‘Only if it stops you living in the first place,’ Lady Virginia’s voice seemed to add before she withdrew from their non-conversation and was only a painted image again: fabulous Lady Virginia, Comtesse, Marquise and now Lady Farenze, sitting for her third marriage portrait and unaware of anyone but the man she’d married for love.

      Luke’s letter continued, and how could she miss a voice in her head when his loving words were right here in front of her?

      The only way Lady Hamming reminds me of you is in how opposite you are to her in every way. It’s been like trying to chip away at granite to get anything about your sister out of her or hers, but at last Hamming let fall something about the ‘sad business’ as he called it last night, while we dipped too deep into a bottle of aged malt whisky he’d managed to hide from his wife and her equally frosty butler; it cost me the devil of a head this morning, but at least this visit north of the Border hasn’t proved a wild goose chase after all.

      I’m sure Hamming could have been a decent man with more will-power and less frost in his life, but he was busy on his Irish estates that spring, so her ladyship was unchecked by any softer impulses her lord may have. He knows something was done in his absence, but it will probably cost me a few more sore heads to get the whole tale out of him.

      I really don’t know how you manage to think yourself unimportant to me when I’m risking my poor Sassenach constitution to find the name and fate of your sister’s mystery lover. Apart from that, and being parted from you and Eve when I least want to be, I must admit that I have an easy enough role in all this.

      Poor Peters seems to be faring less well in London, since he had to treat with some of the worst rogues the place can hold and visit its lowest hells to find the true depth of your elder brother’s decline. It truly is a decline, Chloe, in every sense of the word. The wider world appears to think your younger brother more led into evil than devoted to it, but the current earl would make Francis Dashwood and his silly Hell Fire Club blush.

      Nobody in Crowdale’s inner circle would be surprised to hear how deplorably he and your father treated you and Lady Daphne and little Verity, but Peters tells me a very wealthy City merchant is rumoured to be about to permit Crowdale to marry his only child, a seventeen-year-old, naïve schoolgirl available to pawn for a title at just the wrong moment. Any whisper of his heartless conduct towards his little sisters and niece until that alliance is sealed will blight the whole plan.

      Chloe gasped with pity for the very idea of that unfortunate girl being left at the mercy of such a man. Her brother certainly wouldn’t balk at wedding an innocent for her father’s money when his father had done the same thing to her mother. She resolved to do whatever she could to stop the marriage, but not even her disgust at such a scheme could dim the glow of happiness she felt at being loved by such a fine man as Luke Winterley. Most men who lusted after an upper servant would have schemed to get her dismissed, or forced her to become his mistress ten years ago, but even now Luke had gone away and let her be when she begged him to, while he waited for her to believe the unbelievable.

      For years he’d avoided this house when he clearly loved it, in order to make sure an