A YEAR OF SCANDAL

A gentleman for every season

At the mercy of a ghostly matchmaker, four gentlemen must perform a shocking task. But claiming their inheritance might just lead them to the women who will steal their hearts!

Don’t miss this wonderful new quartet by Mills & Boon® Historical Romance author

Elizabeth Beacon!

First out:

THE VISCOUNT’S FROZEN HEART

Available August 2014

AUTHOR NOTE

Welcome to THE VISCOUNT’S FROZEN HEART, the first book in my new quartet of novels A Year of Scandal. Each book is set during a different season of the year. THE VISCOUNT’S FROZEN HEART starts the series off in January, with a new beginning for dark and brooding Luke and the most unlikely housekeeper he has ever met.

Each book should stand alone, but I would love you to meet the rest of my heroes and heroines as A Year of Scandal unfolds. Thank you for being my tolerant, loyal readers. This book is dedicated to all of you. I really hope you enjoy it.

The Viscount’s Frozen Heart
Elizabeth Beacon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ELIZABETH BEACON lives in the beautiful English West Country, and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, become a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the Inexhaustible Lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines work, and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

Previous novels by the same author:

AN INNOCENT COURTESAN

HOUSEMAID HEIRESS

A LESS THAN PERFECT LADY

CAPTAIN LANGTHORNE’S PROPOSAL

REBELLIOUS RAKE, INNOCENT GOVERNESS

THE RAKE OF HOLLOWHURST CASTLE

ONE FINAL SEASON

(part of Courtship & Candlelight) A MOST UNLADYLIKE ADVENTURE GOVERNESS UNDER THE MISTLETOE (part of Candlelit Christmas Kisses) THE DUCHESS HUNT THE SCARRED EARL THE BLACK SHEEP’S RETURN

Did you know that some of these novels are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Author Note

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Copyright

Chapter One

Luke Winterley, Viscount Farenze, turned to help his daughter down from the carriage and watched Eve eye the fine house nestled into the rolling Wiltshire hillside like a jewel bedded on winter-pale green velvet.

‘If only I had remembered Farenze Lodge was this beautiful I’d have teased you to bring me here a long time ago, Papa. I do recall Aunt Virginia giving me a sugarplum after I fell down the steps and cut my knee as a little tot, but that’s about all,’ she said and he had to smother a pang of guilt as he handed Eve’s small but formidable maid from the carriage before answering, since he had kept Eve away so he wouldn’t have to spend any more time here than necessary.

‘No wonder that event stuck in your memory, but, yes, it is a very fine house,’ Luke said with the second look the Palladian villa’s neat elegance always deserved.

He had to brace himself for the empty feel of it without the last Viscountess Farenze here to make it a home, though. It was his duty to see Eve didn’t feel the loss of her great-great-aunt even more acutely here, despite his own sorrow and frustration, and the less anyone knew about that second, rough-edged emotion and how hard it always bit him under this roof, the better.

‘It doesn’t seem anywhere near as vast to me now as it did back then,’ Eve said, as determined to be cheerful for him as he was for her.

‘No, it was built as a home, for all its grace and classical proportions,’ he replied rather absently. It was currently home to a full complement of grieving staff and one very inconvenient housekeeper.

The mere thought of Mrs Chloe Wheaton waiting inside this serenely lovely house made him want to groan out loud, but somehow he kept silent and smothered another pang of guilt that he was about to make her homeless. He couldn’t live under the same roof as Chloe Wheaton, yet still he felt this urgent need to see her again, if only to find out if she was as bitterly overwound by ten years of avoiding each other as he was.

‘Virginia and Virgil liked their comfort, although I’m sure she would have done her best to love Darkmere if he really wanted to live there. Luckily he was always far happier in the home they made together here,’ he told his daughter.

Somehow he must distract himself from Mrs Chloe Wheaton’s presence here one more time, or he would end up wanting her almost beyond reason again. She was a widow with a young daughter. He had no right to long for her with this nagging, nonsensical ache whenever they were in the same county, let alone the same house.

‘I don’t remember your Uncle Virgil, Papa, but he looks far too rakish and cynical in that portrait of him in the gallery at home to fall deep in love with anyone, however lovely Aunt Virginia must have been sixty years ago.’

‘Ah, but that was painted before they met and Virginia was a woman of character as well as an exotic beauty if her portraits are to be believed. I thought them the most deeply devoted couple I ever encountered and I’m far more of a cynic than Virgil ever was,’ he said with a smile that went awry as he missed them both for the first time now Virginia had joined her beloved the other side of eternity.

‘I’m not so sure you’re as hard-headed as you think, Papa, but this is a fine house and it certainly feels as if it’s been done with love.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Luke said with a brooding glance at the lovely place.

Unlike his predecessor, he loved Darkmere Castle and the stark beauty of its airy, windswept setting, but could see the attraction of having a smaller, more modern dwelling to retreat to on an ice-cold January afternoon like this one. He would need to spend part of the year here if he was to make sure it remained the gracious and elegant home Virgil and Virginia had always intended it to be. He cast a brooding glance at the lush parkland and rolling hills around him and decided most men would think him a fool or a liar if he said it was a mixed blessing. Yes, Mrs Chloe Wheaton would have to leave if he was to live here for very long, for both their sakes.

Even as he reaffirmed the rightness of his decision he saw a slender feminine figure come to stand below one of the half-lowered blinds at the long window of Virginia’s bedchamber to see who had arrived. Luke felt his heart jar, then race on at the double when the youthful housekeeper of Farenze Lodge visibly flinched under his fierce scrutiny. She met it with a proud lift of her chin and an icy composure he could only envy.

He couldn’t swear under his breath with Eve standing so close she could hear every syllable, yet a clutch of unwanted need tightened its hot claw in his gut while he gazed back with furious hunger. It seemed my Lord Farenze wanted the dratted woman as hotly as ever and he still couldn’t have her.

* * *

He’s here, whispered the siren voice of unreason as Chloe glared at her bugbear and did her best to ignore it. He’s come back to you at last, it whispered yearningly and she wished she could silence it for ever. It sprang back to life like some annoying spectre, refusing to be banished to outer darkness whenever she tried to pretend Lord Farenze was a gruff and disagreeable gentleman she could forget when she left for good. Since Virginia became so ill they lost hope of her survival, the thought of the viscount’s arrival to mourn his beloved great-aunt only added to her desolation.

Yet she still felt a charge crackle in the air when he set foot on the straw-muffled gravel. Chloe knew who the latest arrival at Farenze Lodge was by some misplaced instinct, so why was she standing here staring at him like an idiot? Lord Farenze quirked a haughty eyebrow as if to ask why she had the right to stare? He was master of Farenze Lodge and so much more and she was only the housekeeper. Her inner fool was so hungry it kept her gazing at him even after she’d made it clear she wasn’t going to shrink and tremble at the sight of him.

‘Imbecile,’ she muttered to herself.

He looked dominant, vigorous and cross-grained as ever. She could see that his crow-black hair was untouched by silver and too long for fashion when he mockingly swept off his hat and gave her an almost bow; dark brows drawn sharply above eyes she knew were nothing like the simple grey they looked from here. Close up they were complex as he was; silver grey and would-be icy, but with hints of well-hidden poetry and passion in the rays of gold and green at the centre of his clear irises. She wondered if such feelings would die if a man refused to admit he had them long enough.

Recalling a time when he’d almost swept them both to disaster on a raging tide of wanting and needing, she did her best to pretend her shiver was for the cold day and this dark time in both their lives, not the memory of a Luke Winterley nobody else at Farenze Lodge would recognise in the chilly lord on the gravel sweep below. The besotted, angry girl of a decade ago longed for him like a lost puppy, but mature Mrs Wheaton shuddered at the idea of succumbing to the fire and false promise of a younger, more vulnerable Lord Farenze and knew she had been right to say no to him.

‘Who is it, my dear?’ Culdrose, her late mistress’s elderly dresser, asked from her seat by the vast and luxurious bed.

‘Lord Farenze, Cully,’ Chloe said with an unwary sigh and almost felt the older woman’s gaze focusing on her back.

‘And very good time he’s made then, but why call him “imbecile” when he got here as fast as he could?’

‘You have sharp ears, Cully. I wasn’t talking about Lord Farenze,’ Chloe said and promised herself she’d break free of his compelling gaze any moment now.

‘I may have white hair, but my wits haven’t gone a-begging. His lordship is a fine man, as any woman with two good eyes in her head can see. You’ll only be a fool if you lose your wits over him.’

‘I shall not,’ Chloe murmured and turned away with a dignified nod she hoped told him: I have seen you, my lord. I will avoid you like the plague from now on, so kindly return the compliment.

* * *

What was so special about the woman his toes tingled and his innards burned at even the sight of her from afar? Luke told himself to be relieved when she broke that long gaze into each other’s eyes across yards of icy January air. He didn’t want more reminders of how close to disaster he once walked with her. Feeling ruffled and torn by feelings he didn’t want to think about right now, he did his best to let the frigid breeze cool his inner beast and shivered at the idea of how cold it would be to ruin a good woman’s reputation and mire her little girl’s prospects with scandal.

He was six and thirty, not a green boy with every second thought of the female sex and an incessant urge to mate. If she could turn away with such cool disdain, he would get through this without begging for her glorious body in his bed. She was an upper servant; he recalled the fate of such women whose lovers wanted them so badly that they married beneath them out of desperation and shuddered. He might not like her much just now, but he couldn’t wish such a fate on a woman he respected for her strength of character, even if it got confoundedly in the way of the pleasure they could have had in each other if she wasn’t so sternly armoured against it.

‘I wonder how it feels to love someone as deeply as Virginia did,’ Eve mused and jarred Luke back to here and now. His heartbeat leapt into a panicky race at the idea his daughter had inherited her mother’s ridiculous romantic notions.

‘Painful and dangerous, I should imagine,’ he replied brusquely.

‘Now I think it could be wondrous and exhilarating to love the right person and have them love you back, Papa.’

‘Your mother would have agreed with you, time after time,’ he cautioned and shuddered at the memory of his wife falling in ‘love’ again and again as soon as she decided her young husband wasn’t her ideal after all.

Sometimes traces of Pamela’s pettish outbursts shook him if Eve pouted mulishly, or flounced out of the room in a headlong temper, but his Eve was too kind-hearted to treat a man as if he had no more feelings than a block of wood. He often wondered how such a loving child came from such an ill-starred marriage.

‘Please choose someone worthy of you when you marry, Eve,’ he cautioned. ‘Don’t accept the first beau to say he loves you one day and someone else the next.’

‘I’m not an idiot, Papa, and you’ll end up a lonely old cynic when I do find a fine man to spend my life with if you’re not careful.’

‘I want you settled before I find a suitable wife.’

Eve grimaced and rolled her eyes. ‘Suitable?’ she echoed dubiously. ‘Aunt Virginia would hate to hear you speak so. It sounds as if you’re expecting to choose a wife from an emporium and have her delivered to the church on an appropriate day for a wedding, complete with her bridal attire and a suite of attendants.’

‘Although you’re an impertinent young miss, I have to admit Virginia wasn’t happy with the idea,’ Luke said, his last conversation with his great-aunt by marriage running through his mind a little too vividly for comfort.

‘You only married That Fool because your father and stepmother threw her at your head and it seemed a good idea at the time,’ Virginia raged when he unwarily set out his plan to remarry as soon as Eve was settled. ‘If you wed a “suitable” young lady, at least have the decency to fall in love with a mistress.’

Virginia had given a weary sigh when he smiled cynically at the very idea of loving a female he must marry to beget an heir.

‘No,’ she argued with herself. ‘Don’t. No woman deserves to marry the cold fish you think you are, then watch you love a hussy instead. You’re a passionate man under all the starch and to-hell-with-you manner and another marriage like the last one will break you. Please don’t imagine you’ll be lucky enough to breed a sweet child on a ninny twice in one lifetime—no man deserves to be that fortunate.’

‘I’m not a lovable man,’ Luke said gruffly. His mistress’s enthusiasm told him he was a good enough lover, but lust wasn’t love.

‘Then your Eve and I secretly hate you, do we?’ Virginia argued. ‘And your staff and tenants loathe you behind your back as well, I suppose? Obviously they only put up with you brooding and barking at them because you pay well enough and don’t burn their cottages down for fun, or prey on their womenfolk when you feel the urge to rut. You married an empty-headed flirt who dedicated her life to falling in love with any rogue she took a fancy to when she had a good and handsome husband, but it wasn’t your fault, Luke. Your father knew he was dying and persuaded you to marry far too young, and how lucky for that harridan he wed after your mother died that Pamela birthed a daughter, then ran off with the first rogue who would have her.’

‘Lucky for me as well. I love Eve dearly,’ he had said stiffly.

‘Yes, yes I know, and James will be your heir if needs be. But he needs to be his own man instead and your second trip up the aisle will be a bigger disaster than the first if you only intend to wed a “suitable” wife,’ she warned a little too seriously for comfort.

‘If I thought James would manage the Winterley interests with half the dedication he puts into carousing, curricle racing and gambling, he could have it all with my blessing. If I were leaving my downtrodden tenants in safe hands when I meet my maker, there would be no need for me to remarry.’

‘Safer than either of you think, but James can’t spend his life waiting to step into your shoes; he deserves better.’

‘Does he indeed?’ Luke had replied harshly, wondering if even Virginia had any idea how deep the rift between them ran.

‘Papa?’ Eve prompted now and he wondered how Chloe Wheaton stepping into that window shot his concentration into the ether.

‘I should have made you stay home, Eve. For all Virginia wanted nobody to mourn her, her household loved her too much to carry on as if nothing has happened.’

‘This is real life, not a pretty fairy story, Papa,’ his daughter chided as if she were an adult and he the sixteen-year-old.

‘Then I suppose we’d better get on with facing this place without Virginia to welcome us, since you would come.’

‘Yes, I would. I loved her too.’

‘And she adored you from the day she laid eyes on the squalling brat you were back then, my Eve. It was beyond the rest of us at the time why she should, since you were screaming like a banshee about some new teeth we were all having trouble with at the time. Virginia spent three months at Darkmere every summer until you were old enough for us to meet her in Brighton for sea air and shopping, so you must know she loved you back, considering she couldn’t abide the place.’

‘I do,’ she said and looked so bereft he wanted to hug her, then send her back to Darkmere straight away, but he knew she was right—his daughter was almost an adult. He must let her make her own decisions, even if they went against his instincts to guard her from anything that might hurt her. ‘Why didn’t we come here instead when I was young, Papa?’ she asked. ‘You never stay at Farenze Lodge for more than a few days, yet you seem to love it almost as much as Darkmere.’

‘It’s easier not to,’ Luke replied carefully.

Easier for him, since it was either that or stay here and make Chloe Wheaton his mistress by stoking this fire between them until she gave in instead of dousing it as best he could by avoiding her. The lady had had some very pithy things to say when he was driven to suggest it years ago and it would have been a long siege, but something told him it would have succeeded in the end.

So how would it feel to love and be loved? Impossible; intolerable even and he didn’t love the woman and she certainly didn’t love him. He would wait a year or two and find his suitable wife once Eve had decided her own future. A pretty and biddable young widow or some sweet-natured, overlooked spinster lady he could marry for an heir would suit him very well. Even as he reaffirmed that sensible plan with his rational mind the image of a very different Mrs Chloe Winterley from the sad-eyed female he’d just seen drifted into his head and made him bite back a virulent curse.

The first summer day she strolled into his life she looked warm and open as well as ridiculously young and stunningly beautiful. That version of Chloe Wheaton jarred something into life inside him he’d thought he was far too cynical and weary to feel by the time he was six and twenty. Luke frowned now as he had then, because people who felt that vividly got hurt. He hadn’t wanted that lovely, ardent young creature with her red-gold locks escaping the bands she’d tried to confine them to end up narrowed and disappointed as he was, yet the woman he had just seen was nothing like the warm and irresistible girl he thought he’d met that day.

Somehow he had made himself leave her to swing her bonnet by its strings as she walked home to whatever well-to-do family she hailed from with impossible dreams in her heart he’d only wished he could make come true. No, he was too embittered and shop-soiled for such a hopeful young lady, he’d decided regretfully, even as he met her astonishing violet eyes and only just prevented himself falling headlong into them as if that was where he belonged. Riding away from her was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, but he’d been disillusioned about her even sooner than he had about Pamela.

Only a couple of hours later he found out the girl was Virginia’s new companion and supposed housekeeper, on the way back from visiting her baby daughter at nurse. A widow who claimed to be two and twenty and looked a young eighteen. Virginia had reassured him she was as well aware of the tallness of Mrs Chloe Wheaton’s story, but she hadn’t had so much fun in years. So what could he do about an encroaching so-called widow when Virginia did indeed seem almost as full of life again at last as she had been when her beloved Virgil was still alive?

Her furious rejection of his offer of a carte blanche ten years ago still rang in his ears as if she’d denounced him an arrogant and repellent rake only yesterday. If she still felt the same hellish tension that roared through him whenever he set eyes on her, she had learnt to hide it very well. Seeing her drawn and exhausted hadn’t helped him ignore it so regally though. Instead it laid a line of fellow feeling between them to see her so grief-stricken and he didn’t want to share anything with Mrs Chloe Wheaton.

Luke shook his head and thanked heaven he was wearing a long greatcoat to conceal how eagerly his body ignored his stern orders not to want the housekeeper as he turned his gaze away from the now empty windows and silently cursed himself for being such a fool.

Chapter Two

‘Who was that, Papa?’ Eve asked.

‘Whom do you mean?’ he asked stiffly, like a schoolboy caught out in a blatant lie, he decided, as he wondered what sort of blundering beast the wretched woman would turn him into next.

‘The lady at the window.’

‘A maid on the alert for mourners?’

‘She looked more like the housekeeper, although if so she looked very young for such a responsible role.’

‘She is,’ Luke replied grimly. ‘She must have been in the schoolroom when she met Wheaton.’

‘Who on earth is Wheaton? The January air seems to have addled your brain instead of sharpening it as you claimed it would when you left us to count church spires and grey mares while you rode most of the way here, Papa.’

‘I thought you two had enough schemes to hatch out for who was to do what and when after we got here to keep you occupied for a sennight.’

‘Slander; we’re not at all managing, are we, Bran?’ Eve quizzed her diminutive one time-nurse and now ladies’ maid.

‘Even if we was, we’d be well and truly talked to a standstill by now,’ Eve’s unlikely personal dragon answered with a sharp look that told Luke she understood his latest battle of wills with Chloe Wheaton even if his innocent daughter didn’t.

‘Well, now we’re here you will have too many people to talk to rather than too few,’ he warned as they climbed the shallow steps.

The hatchment over the door was a stark reminder why they were here and Luke felt the wrongness of this place without the lady who had loved and lived here for so long to bid him welcome. He sighed and told himself the next few days would pass and life would go relentlessly on, whatever he had to say about it.

* * *

‘Miss Winterley is with his lordship,’ Chloe remarked as she turned from the window and only wished she dared avoid the master of the house a little longer.

‘No doubt she had to plague Master Luke something relentless to make that happen. Very protective he is; a good father and a fine man, whatever that stepmother of his says.’

‘I imagine he takes little very notice of her,’ Chloe said absently.

Having been on the wrong end of his protective nature herself, ten years of enduring his distrust stung more sharply than it should. He was probably surprised she hadn’t run off with Virginia’s jewellery or the housekeeping money long ago.

‘That woman made the poor lad’s life a misery. I can’t understand to this day why Mr Oswald married her. Mr Oakham overheard her telling Mr James to do all he could to blacken Mr Luke’s name now the family are here to put the “old besom in her grave”, as the nasty-minded old crow put it. Lady Virginia wouldn’t have her over the threshold if she was alive to say her nay, but Master Luke was always too kind-hearted for his own good and no doubt he’ll let her stay.’

‘I’m sure Mrs Winterley will behave herself now his lordship is here, whatever she might say to her son. She seems in awe of Lord Farenze and I’ve heard he controls her purse strings.’

‘Then I hope he gives her short shrift one day; she deserves no better.’

‘I don’t want any more tension and upset, so please don’t put something noxious in her soup, Cully. She might never leave if she fancied herself too ill to travel and think how awful it might be if she once got her feet under the table.’

‘She’ll leave fast enough if I put a purge in her coffee, and good riddance.’

‘No, wait out the week and most of the mourners will go home and leave you all in peace,’ Chloe urged, trying not to wonder where she would be by then.

‘I suppose so,’ Culdrose agreed reluctantly, ‘but it’s hard to stay silent when we loved her ladyship dearly. I won’t have her name blackened now she’s not here to stand up for herself.’

‘Nobody would do so at her funeral. It would be disrespectful and heartless.’

Culdrose sniffed loudly; ‘I still caught the woman sneaking about her ladyship’s boudoir yesterday. Searching through her letters and personal things she was as if she had every right to do what she liked here. It’s as well we locked Lady Virginia’s treasures away in the strongroom after Oakham caught that Miss Carbottle taking her ladyship’s diamond brooch as a keepsake, or so she said. Keepsake indeed, she’s no better than a jackdaw.’

‘She does have a habit of taking anything pretty or shiny that’s lying about. Her sister always brings it back, but I’m glad you spared her the embarrassment. Now I must go down and greet Miss Winterley as she is the new mistress of the house. Promise you won’t make things worse between Mrs Winterley and the staff than they already are though, Cully?’

‘You know it’s my way to let my feelings out with them I trust to keep their counsel, so I don’t say aught I shouldn’t in front of the quality. Miss Eve being mistress of this house until his lordship marries again won’t go down well with Mrs Winterley though, you mark my words.’

‘So noted,’ Chloe said and went downstairs to do her duty.

Stupid to feel as if a knife had been stabbed in her heart at mention of Lord Farenze remarrying, as he must to beget an heir. Best not to think where she would go next until the mourners left either. Lord Farenze wouldn’t keep her on and she couldn’t stay even if he wanted her to, but there was a deal of work before she could walk away with her last duty to her late mistress done.

* * *

Luke signalled at the waiting footman to close the doors behind them against the icy easterly wind and missed Virginia’s imperious command to come on in do, lest she expire in the howling gale he was letting in.

‘Thank you, Oakham,’ he said, seeing the butler had set chairs near the blazing fire and offered hot toddies to Eve and Bran to stave off the cold. ‘I would wish you a good day, but we both know there is no such thing right now.’

‘Indeed not, my lord,’ the elderly manservant replied with a sad shake of his head that said more than words.

Even over the mild stir of activity Luke caught the sound of Mrs Wheaton’s inky skirts and disapproving petticoats as she descended the grand staircase and tried to pretend neither of them were really here. So, she steeled herself to meet the new master of the house, did she? Luke admired her courage even as he wished it would fail her and his senses sprang to attention. Even in buttoned-up mourning array she was hauntingly lovely, but close to she looked even more drawn and weary. Feelings that seemed far more dangerous than simple desire kicked him in the gut and he wished her a hundred miles away more fervently than ever.

‘Good day, Mrs Wheaton,’ he greeted her woodenly. ‘Please show my daughter and her maid to their rooms, then see their luggage is sent up.’

‘Good afternoon, my lord; Miss Winterley,’ she replied with an almost respectful curtsey in his direction.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wheaton,’ Eve said with a smile that seemed to relax the stubborn woman’s air of tightly wound tension. ‘I’ve heard so much about you. Great-Aunt Virginia was always full of your daughter’s quaint sayings and doings when she was a babe and she sounds a bright and lively girl now she’s at school.’

‘By “bright and lively” folks usually mean a limb of Satan, into every piece of mischief she can find. If the girl is anything like you were at that age, Miss Eve, Mrs Wheaton has my sympathy. I could fill a book with the things you got up to when you were a child,’ Bran said dourly.

Luke concluded Bran liked Mrs Wheaton for some reason and, whatever the facts of Eve’s birth, Mrs Brandy Brown was the closest thing to a mother his Eve had. He was grateful to the diminutive dragon for loving his daughter fiercely after losing her husband, then her own babe soon after birth, but he wished Bran would show her usual distrust of any servant likely to look down their noses at such a unique ex-nurse and ladies’ maid. The last thing he needed was closer contacts between his family and the Wheatons, but, if she diverted Eve from her grief, he supposed he would have to endure it.

‘My Verity is on pins to meet you, Miss Winterley, and Lady Virginia told her lots of exotic tales about the castle you live in and the wild Border Reivers who once fought over it. As my daughter persuaded her teachers I need her to come home, she will be here as soon as a carriage can be spared to fetch her,’ Chloe said ruefully.

A smile softened her generous mouth and lit her violet-blue eyes to depths of enchantment that would make a poet quiver with excitement when she talked of her only child. Even Luke’s workaday imagination wanted to go on the rampage when a red-gold curl escaped her black-trimmed housekeeper’s lace bonnet and threatened to curl about her heart-shaped face. Given freedom, her rebellious auburn locks would kiss her forehead with escaped fronds of red-gold fire. Or maybe they would lie in loose ringlets down the refined line of her long neck and on to white shoulders revealed by a gown cut to show off her womanly charms... Poetry be damned, the woman was a temptation to pure sin and never mind the romantic sighing of buffle-headed dreamers who ought to wake up to the realities of life.

‘She’s probably right,’ Eve was insisting softly and Luke had to rack his brains to recall who she was and what she was right about. ‘Papa would have it I should stay in Northumberland and sit out Aunt Virginia’s funeral, but that would only make me miss her more. Your daughter has lost a good friend, Mrs Wheaton.’

‘And you are a wise young lady, Miss Winterley.’

‘Oh, I doubt that, but you must call me Eve, ma’am.’

‘I can hardly do that if you insist on calling me so and it would be considered sadly coming in a housekeeper to address you by your given name.’

‘Then will you do so when we are private together? And I think we could resort to my rooms and send for tea now, don’t you? We must discuss how best to go on over the next few days and I’d rather not be Miss Winterley-ed all the time we’re doing it.’

Listening to his remarkable daughter do what he couldn’t and coax Chloe Wheaton upstairs to join her for tea and some gentle gossip, Luke sighed and met Oakham’s eyes in a manly admission: they didn’t understand the restorative power of tea or small talk and probably never would.

‘I have refilled the decanters in the library, my lord, or I could bring some of his late lordship’s best Canary wine to your room. I believe Mr Sleeford and his father-in-law are currently occupying the billiard room.’

Taking the warning in that impassive observation, Luke murmured his thanks and made his way up the nearest branch of the elegant double stairway. He entered the suite of rooms Virginia had insisted he took over as the one-day master of the house a year after Great-Uncle Virgil died and was glad Mrs Wheaton had ordered fires lit in all three rooms against his eventual arrival.

He was grateful for the warmth and sanctuary the suite promised him tonight, despite his reluctance to use it at first. With so many people gathering for his great-aunt’s funeral he must savour any peace he could get over the next few days.

* * *

As they sipped tea and discussed arrangements for the household over the next few days, Chloe wondered why Miss Evelina Winterley hadn’t been permitted to stay here during the decade Chloe had lived here. Lord Farenze and his daughter always joined Lady Virginia in Brighton or Ramsgate for several weeks every summer, but his visits to Farenze Lodge were so fleeting he rarely stayed so much as a night, let alone long enough to uproot his daughter and bring her with him. Fury flashed through her as the familiar notion she was the reason he had kept Eve away until now fitted neatly into her mind.

It was true that scandalised whispers spread through the neighbourhood when she first came here as Virginia’s companion-housekeeper, with a baby daughter and no visible husband all those years ago. If only they knew, she decided bleakly, weariness threatening to overcome her once more. She fought it off by using her anger with the new master of the house to stiffen her backbone, for she might be about to leave this place, but she intended to do it with dignity intact.

‘Lady Virginia told me I would like you if I ever had the chance, Mrs Wheaton, and I feel I know you already,’ Eve Winterley said as she refilled a teacup and passed it to her maid without even needing to ask if she would like seconds after their long journey.

Such closeness between mistress and maid should not surprise her, she supposed, but Chloe recalled Lord Farenze’s attitude to those he considered beneath him and contrasted it with his daughter’s more liberal one. Reluctantly she decided it spoke well of him that he was so relaxed about Mrs Brown’s role in his daughter’s life, then did her best to forget him for a few blissful moments.

‘And I’m very glad to meet you, Miss Winterley, even at this sad time.’

‘You will miss Lady Virginia as badly as any of us after being her friend and companion for so long,’ Eve said sincerely and for a long moment all three women sat thinking about how odd their lives felt without that vivid presence. ‘Although this is a beautiful house, Papa has never coveted it. He always said the Lodge was Aunt Virginia’s home and wouldn’t hear of her moving out of it when Uncle Virgil died. It’s quite lovely, don’t you think?’ Eve asked with a guileless look Chloe didn’t quite trust.

‘Exquisite,’ she said carefully.

‘No wonder Aunt Virginia couldn’t bear to leave when Uncle Virgil died, although I believe Papa was very worried about her when rumours went about she had run mad with grief, wasn’t he, Bran?’

‘Indeed he was, the poor lady.’

‘Papa says he wondered if she should still live here for her own sake then, but she couldn’t abide Darkmere and refused to set foot in our house in Kent. Papa could hardly evict Mrs Winterley from the Dower House there, so he let the subject drop when Virginia bought the house in Hill Street and we all went on very much as we were, or so I’m told, since I was but a babe in arms at the time and don’t remember.’

‘Her ladyship thought the Kentish house old and dreary and she said most of the chimneys smoked, so I doubt she would have wanted to live there, even if the Dower House was vacant,’ Chloe said, hoping her dislike of Mrs Oswald Winterley didn’t show.

She wouldn’t want to live within a day’s drive of the lady herself, given the choice, and, as Mrs Winterley reluctantly resided in the Haslett Hall dower house, instead of the fashionable London town house she thought Luke Winterley owed her, for some reason nobody else could fathom, Virginia had avoided Haslett Hall like the plague.

‘Papa had several chimney stacks rebuilt when he took over the Farenze estates, so I doubt any smoke now. He won’t have climbing boys used in any of our houses and if the sweep says they’re too small or crooked to use brushes on, he has the stacks rebuilt until they can be done that way without sending those poor little boys up into the dark to choke or get stuck.’

‘My little brother was put up chimneys when hardly old enough to walk and he didn’t live to see his tenth birthday. His lordship’s a good man,’ Mrs Brandy Brown insisted and Eve Winterley agreed then watched Chloe with expectant eyes.

‘To oppose such a practice he must be,’ she said as tactfully as she could and tried to pretend he meant no more to her than any good man would.

Liar, a more truthful inner Chloe prodded her uncomfortably, but somehow she would make it true. Ten years ago she had longed for gruff and embittered Luke, Lord Farenze, with every fibre of her being. At seventeen she’d been little more than a wilful, embittered child though; it took her daughter’s dependence on her to force her to grow up and realise she couldn’t have what she wanted and keep her self-respect.

Chloe sighed at the familiar tug of hot warmth she’d felt at first sight of the viscount in possession even today. No, it didn’t matter. Whatever she felt changed nothing. She only had to keep out of his way and stamp on any wayward desires left over from that heady time for a few more days then she would be free of him.

Yet this infernal tiredness was dragging at her like a pall and threatened to spin her back into dreams of forbidden things if she let her control slip. First there would be the old fantasy of the Chloe she should be—if life was fair. A charming, alluring lady who could win, and hold, the passionate devotion of gruff Lord Farenze as they danced off into a rosy future. An image of him; his expression impossibly tender as he made it clear how desperately he longed for her with every fibre of his cynical being, shimmered like a mirage.

Horrified, she snapped her nodding head upright and righted her empty teacup before it slipped from her slack grip and shattered. Oh, heavens, had she muttered any of that out loud? She met compassion instead of horror when she plucked up the courage to meet her new friend’s eyes, so perhaps not.

‘I hope you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs Wheaton, but you need a nap,’ Mrs Brandy Brown told her.

Chloe shivered at the thought of nightmare-haunted snatches of sleep she’d had since her beloved mistress died. ‘You must know how long a woman can go without sleep from your experience when Miss Evelina was a baby, Mrs Brown,’ she forced herself to say instead of admitting the turmoil had awoken old memories that haunted her dreams until she avoided her bed as if it was stuffed with thistles.

‘Aye, some nights the poor little mite cried as if her heart was broken and it was all I could do not to join her,’ the tiny, forceful little woman agreed with a rueful, loving look for the girl who seemed so equable nowadays it seemed hard to believe.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Chloe said with a picture of her own struggles to calm a restless and furious baby when Verity was teething, or ill, or just plain fretful and she felt about as useful as a tailor’s dummy, making her very glad those times were over for both their sakes.

‘His lordship used to put his little miss into a pack on his shoulders and carry her for miles over the moors until she slept at long last. I’d stay behind, telling myself they were quite safe and he could see like a cat in the dark and knows the paths across his land like the back of his hand until I fell asleep too, whether I wanted to or not. You had to cope with all that on your own and run this great house at the same time. It sounds as if you got through it stoutly enough all these years, but we’re here now, so at least you can have a rest when you need one,’ Bran told her with an earnest nod that disarmed Chloe and made her wonder if it might be bliss to lay her burdens down and do as she was bid after all.

‘Indeed you must, Mrs Wheaton,’ Eve told her with some of her father’s authority sitting quaintly on her slender shoulders. ‘Sleep is the last thing on my mind after hours shut up in that stuffy carriage dozing because there was nothing else to do—how about you, Bran?’

She gave the comfortable bed in the slip of a room the other side of the dressing room, reserved for a maid if her mistress wanted one close, a significant look and her maid nodded her approval of the unspoken idea. It looked just right for an afternoon nap if Chloe did happen to be as bone weary as she obviously looked.

‘I had a nice doze on the way to Bath this morning, as you know very well, Miss Eve, since you’ve been twitting me about it ever since.’

‘How disrespectful of me, but I think we should wrap ourselves up in cloaks and shawls to walk in that pretty Winter Garden I saw from the window on the half-landing. I’d like to stretch my legs and it would do us good to air our wits before it gets dark. Nobody will disturb you if I order them to leave our unpacking until we return, Mrs Wheaton, and Bran and I will soon have everything arranged when we get back. I can be very finicky about the disposal of my things when occasion demands and nobody will interfere.’

‘She can indeed, Mrs Wheaton,’ Bran agreed smugly and Chloe felt weariness weigh down as she wondered if she dare risk her dreams for once.

‘You would wake me the moment you came back in?’ she asked and heard her own words slur with tiredness, as if she’d been fighting it so long it now had to win.

Lord Farenze was here to shoulder the responsibility of the estate and the ageing staff and she would rather sleep than think about him.

‘If you can sleep through madam here ordering me about, you’re a better woman than I am,’ Bran said, then followed her young mistress from the room.

Chloe barely managed to slip off her shoes, unhook her gown and slip out of it before falling fast asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

‘Lasted as best she could until help came, if you ask me,’ Bran observed softly as soon as she and her young mistress were finally clear of the house unseen and able to speak freely.

‘Poor lady,’ Eve replied carefully.

‘Aye, she seems like one to me as well,’ Bran mused and met Eve’s speculative gaze with a thoughtful frown.

Bran did not believe a fairytale lay behind whatever made a lady become a housekeeper. Even if a story started out with garlands of roses and fairy dust, it rarely ended so in the stark light of day in Brandy Brown’s experience.

Chapter Three

Luke waited until his valet accompanied a footman upstairs, his luggage borne along as carefully as the crown jewels, before quitting his private sitting room with an exasperated sigh. He wondered why he’d employed such an exacting valet; he was old enough to dress himself and could tie a necktie that wouldn’t scare the horses. In a year or so he’d have to present a neat appearance for Eve’s début and his wife-hunting campaign, though, and it had seemed a sensible enough idea at the time. Right now he’d welcome a tramp across the countryside, or a long ride on a swift horse to banish his blue devils, but wealth, power and a title came at a cost so he ignored the urge to escape.

Hearing his stepmother’s sharp voice in the drawing room and the rumble of male ones from the billiard room, Luke tried to find some peace in the library. Virginia’s godson, the Marquis of Mantaigne, was ensconced in a comfortable chair by the fire, but Luke gave a sigh of relief. The air of world-weary cynicism Tom wore like a suit of armour drove women wild with desire for some odd reason, but he was good company and a loyal friend.

‘Tom, you rascal,’ he said, managing a genuine smile and a sincere manly handshake even on this sad day. ‘When did you get here?’

‘This morning—you must have travelled in my dust.’

‘You only had to come from Derbyshire and there was more mud than dust.’

‘How unobservant of me,’ Tom drawled.

‘Don’t try to hoodwink me that you’re too idle to take an interest in what’s about you, Tom. I know you too well to be taken in by the air of cynicism you use to keep the world at bay. Just tell me who has come here to gladden our heavy hearts and your estimate of how long I’ll be forced to house them for, there’s a good fellow.’

‘Whoever told you I’m a good fellow clearly needs disillusioning.’

‘I don’t pay much heed to the opinions of others when it comes to my real friends, my lord Marquis,’ Luke said and accepted the glass of fine burgundy his friend poured out of the decanter at his side with an almost smile.

Feeling more relaxed after the mellowing effect of the very finest wine and a shrewd and succinct summary of his assembled guests from Tom Banburgh, Luke left him to his solitude and the burgundy and avoided the groups in the billiard room and drawing room to go up and reassure himself Eve and Bran were settling in after the trials and discomfort of their long journey.

* * *

Chloe felt weighed down by sleep when she managed to blink her heavy eyes open and tried to gauge how long she’d been lost to the world. For a moment she had no idea where she was and had to force her eyes open to stop herself sinking under the weight of sleep beckoning her back like a siren. Virginia would probably be the first to order her to get up and face the world, so she blinked several times and did her best to banish the huge waves of sleep trying to drag her under again.

Even an upper servant could enjoy the luxury of a long stretch, so she yawned and extended her legs fully against the fine cotton sheets of Brandy Brown’s narrow bed, then reached her hands high above her head so her arms could feel the pull and strength of youth in them. She shook her head so the auburn locks tumbled down in a tangle it would take far too long to tease out when she’d already wasted goodness knew how long asleep when she should be up and doing.

‘Bran?’ a deep masculine voice questioned from the other side of the slightly open door and Chloe felt her heartbeat speed up like a greyhound after a rabbit. ‘You can’t be asleep because I saw you in the garden not five minutes ago. Where’s Eve and why is her luggage still cluttering up her bedroom?’

If she wasn’t in her shift with her hair falling down her back, she could call out a brusque answer and he would go away. Would that serve anyway? If she sounded assured and awake enough, he might go away rather than risk being discovered here with a female servant in the middle of a winter afternoon?

‘Mrs Brown is taking the air with your daughter, Lord Farenze,’ she managed to call out as if she was busy and didn’t have time for answering questions.

A stiff moment of shocked silence and she could almost feel him flinch at the sound of her voice a room and a half away. Unfortunately, she didn’t hear him walking away though. Yet did she really want him to? As usual her inner Chloe chose the worst moment to stage a revolution. She told her to be quiet and get back in her cage and stop there. She did want him to leave and sat up in the neat little tent bed, holding every muscle and sinew tense and still in the hope he would go. Something about the silence on the other side of the door told her he was still there, but a woman could always hope.

‘Why the devil are you unpacking Eve’s things when one of the maids could do it if Bran is busy?’

‘I...’ She ground to a halt and told herself if she hadn’t slept so deeply and so stupidly in the middle of a working day she might be able to find an answer that would satisfy him somewhere in her befuddled brain.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ he growled and was that really a thread of laughter in his deep voice?

Impossible—Lord Farenze and Mrs Wheaton had nothing to laugh about. There was no level of intimacy to put a hint of smoky amusement in his voice. She’d imagined it and now her inner Chloe was busy imagining more than she ought to all over again. Such as how it might feel to wake up in his bed with her mind misted with sleep and loving, then share the closeness of lovers with him as he teased her back to full awareness of where she was, and who she was with, in his own unique fashion.

‘No, it’s still in perfect working order,’ she managed to reply as if she was merely too busy to argue with him.

‘Then come out here and talk to me face to face; I refuse to hold a conversation through inches of fine mahogany.’

‘I can’t, I’m far too busy today, my lord,’ she managed and heard the note of panic in her voice as she sensed him stepping closer to the door in question and about to discover her sitting here in a state of scandalous disarray.

‘No doubt but, since I’m master here now, you must deal with me sooner or later. Far better to get the plans we must make for the next few days out of the way as soon as possible and rub along as best we can, rather than skirt round the subject all week and send the staff spinning about in opposite directions between us.’

He sounded as reluctant to have that discussion as she was, so why couldn’t he put it off until he was rested from his journey and she was back in her buttoned-up gown with her wretched hair wound safely under a neat cap and hidden away with feral Chloe, who so badly wanted to respond to him in every way a woman could?

‘Very well, my lord, I will meet you downstairs as soon as I have finished here,’ she said and heard the waver of uncertainty in her own voice.

Her reluctance to confront him with the memory of sitting here half-naked and all he could have been to her, if everything was different, wobbled in her too breathy voice. She didn’t dare stir in case he heard the rustle of crisply laundered sheets and realised she was in bed. Sitting frozen and speechless, she gasped in horror when he finally lost patience and thrust the door open.

Time seemed to stretch and waver as he strode into the little room then stopped dead, as if a wicked witch’s spell had frozen him in his tracks. He stood staring hungrily back at her and how could she fool herself everything that could have been between them was dead now?

He should turn and walk away of course; leave her to blush and squirm and be furious with herself for giving in to exhaustion and his daughter’s urgings to rest. He didn’t, though, and it was there in his eyes, the might be. Not a never, but a might be; a dangerous chance of more between master and servant than there ought to be.

A detached part of her seemed to be looking down on them; speculating how two rational human beings could look so much like codfish and still stare rapt into each other’s eyes as if they’d longed for the sight of the other all unguarded for the years they’d been apart. The rest couldn’t even find the presence of mind to squirm down in her bed and hide her disarray.

Now he looked like all the robber barons who founded his mighty dynasty rolled into one as he stood stock still, so vividly present he seemed to suck the air out of the room along with her common sense. Like a very well-dressed statue of a warrior prince, that annoying wanton Chloe remarked, would he was a little less still and a lot less well dressed. ‘Be quiet!’ she whispered, then covered her mouth. She couldn’t believe she was arguing with her wicked inner self with him in the room. Perhaps she really was going mad?

A wistful hope she might wake up and find she’d dreamt him made the tension drain out of her muscles for all of half a minute. Nobody could dream muscular, powerful, intimidating Lord Farenze when he was all too present. He was a living, breathing human being, staring at her as if being torn by a raging tumult of contrary emotions as well. There just wasn’t enough dreaming in the world to conjure up a man like him, here, locked in this particular moment with her.

‘I didn’t say a word,’ he managed in a rusty voice that sounded forced out.

‘Not you.’

‘You have a lover hidden under the bed?’ he barked as if he thought her everything a woman shouldn’t be if she wanted to retain her self-respect.

His hot eyes dwelt on her wildly flushed cheeks, shocked and hazy eyes and the tumble of hot gold curls she knew were in nearly as big a tangle as her tongue.

‘No room,’ he mused more softly and let his gaze explore the little room as if he’d never seen one like it before and saw the exposed space under the high little bed with what looked suspiciously like satisfaction, ‘nor a second door for a coward to escape through if he was in danger of being found and the closet’s not big enough.’

‘I don’t have a lover.’

Now she sounded like an outraged stage heroine and Chloe thought it as well he couldn’t see her toes curling under the bedclothes. His black brows rose and a smile of cynical appreciation she assured herself she would like to slap off his face kicked up his mouth and made him look nigh irresistible for a breathless moment.

‘Any man who saw you thus would be your slave as soon as he could persuade you into his eager arms. Say the word and we’ll adjourn to my own lonely and echoing suite along the hallway,’ he offered half-seriously.

‘Never, never, never,’ she shot back at him, spine rigid and chin high.

He couldn’t know she burned for his touch. Even the tips of her toes seared her with a need to be kissed and seduced that made a lie of her conviction there could never be anything between them, after she’d angrily informed him she would rather die than become his mistress ten years ago.

And he just stood there; let his complex grey gaze play over her as if she had been arranged here especially for his pleasure. He wanted her, the need in his complicated eyes was as real as the hot rush of heat between her legs. She clamped them together under the sheets then instantly regretted it as the movement drew his attention to the fact her breasts had rounded and peaked under the inadequate fine lawn chemise.

‘Oh, come now, ma’am,’ he gritted, as if her denial made him angry as finding her half-naked in Bran’s bed when she should be working had not. ‘We have a decade worth of wanting on the slate between us. Sooner or later we’ll have an accounting.’

‘No, there isn’t and, no, we won’t,’ she informed him as furiously as she could when sitting here nearly naked.

She could hardly thrust the bedclothes aside and run away when her legs would refuse to carry her and where would she run to without scandalising half the household and any guests who happened to be standing about with their mouths open?

‘I may be a fool, Mrs Wheaton, but not such a one I’m prepared to pretend to you that passion couldn’t break us, if we let it. It might do us both less harm if we admit its existence,’ he said sombrely and their eyes met.

Chloe almost said the words in her head—Why not try it and see? There it was again, her wicked inner self, whispering sinfully in her ears and offering lures she thought she’d cut off in their heady prime a decade ago. She squirmed and made herself be glad even the sleep still clouding her brain hadn’t let her speak that impossible invitation aloud.

Wasn’t it exactly the sort of rash remark that landed her and her twin sister Daphne in the suds in their younger days? Chloe clamped cold fetters on her wilder self at the reminder how it came about she was sitting here glaring at her new employer like a hungry she-wolf. If she was careful enough, they could go back to stiffly avoiding each other until she left.

‘It might not do that much harm to you,’ she muttered crossly and folded her bare arms across her chest; because she couldn’t endure him standing there knowing how much she wanted him.

‘I shouldn’t be too sure about that,’ he rasped as his hot gaze now dwelt on the exposed upper slopes of her breasts, Chloe looked down to see she’d only made them look fuller and even more rounded by seeking to hide her tight, need-peaked nipples from his fascinated gaze. ‘I’ve always known you could be my ruin,’ he murmured, looking ready to resign himself to it if he could climb into this narrow bed and make use of every tight inch of space it would leave him to seduce her until she screamed for him with a sombre house party of guests a mere misplaced call away.

‘No, never!’ she croaked and almost gave in to the urge to scissor her legs together to deny the hot need and frustration grinding at the heart of her.

He was here; not some fevered fantasy she had woken up with, as she so often had in the first days, weeks and years after he left Farenze Lodge as if the devil himself was riding on his shoulders. Until today she thought she’d banished that folly to outer darkness along with him and now she knew better.

‘If things were different, I could make you eat those words with one kiss and you know it,’ he said grimly.

‘They’re not though, are they?’ she whispered and almost sobbed at the years of regret she’d betrayed with those stark words. ‘Please leave me be, my lord. I should never have slept when there is so much to do and it won’t happen again, I assure you.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said gruffly. ‘When I first laid eyes on you today I thought you looked as if you might break if you didn’t bend soon. You’re too thin and look as if you haven’t slept or eaten properly in weeks.’

‘I can’t sleep and food seems to choke me at times,’ she admitted reluctantly.

‘Go on like this and you’ll make yourself ill. Do that to yourself if you must, but how can you risk shocking your daughter with your wan appearance when she sees you? She must be struggling to come to terms with losing Virginia, close as I know they had become to each other while she was growing up.’

‘Yes, she was heartbroken,’ Chloe said heavily, remembering how it felt to hold her sobbing daughter whilst she cried as if her poor heart might break the day Chloe had Lady Virginia’s coachman drive her to Bath so she could tell Verity Lady Virginia was dead.

‘So eat something,’ he demanded.

‘I have, at regular intervals.’

‘Then eat more and go to bed and sleep properly tonight, instead of pacing the corridors like a ghost and making the night watchman think he’s being haunted.’

His voice was brusque, but there was what looked like genuine concern in his eyes as he inspected her face. His well-hidden kindness touched her as she couldn’t let herself be touched by her employer. She rubbed her eyes self-consciously, pushed an annoying curl behind her ear and tried not to gaze back at him as if she might adore him, if things were different.

‘I must look like something the cat brought in,’ she muttered unwarily.

The wretched man stared at her with a glint of humour and something they’d both declared forbidden in the depths of those grey-, gold-and green-rayed eyes of his. She wanted to fall into them and never land on solid ground again for a long moment.

‘You must know you’re beautiful,’ he said wryly, almost as if talking to himself and being overheard by the wide-eyed sceptic in front of him.

She shook her head in hasty denial and tried not to love the fact he thought so.

‘But you’re still too thin,’ he insisted, ‘and you have shadows under your eyes a Gothic heroine would envy.’

‘Well, she’d be welcome to them,’ she said unwarily and the quirk of humour kicking up his fascinating mouth became a true smile.

There was all the warmth and hope and unwary fellow feeling in them that had nearly carried them over the precipice a decade ago. Chloe felt them both balance on the edge of the inevitable again. It felt terrible and utterly desirable, as if even their thoughts were cursed to curl up together and purr with delight at being reunited.

He reached out a long finger, as if he wanted to physically brush the shadows away from her eyes. She felt the whisper of his almost touch on her skin and gasped with hope and fear at how much she wanted it. She slicked parched lips with her tongue and watched him hesitate, had the sense of a strong man fighting what he knew was wrong, yet he was still drawn on by what felt so strong between them it could overrule everything, if they let it. There was curiosity and impatience in his eyes, before he blanked them and my Lord Farenze was himself again; remote, self-assured and cynical and as distant from the housekeeper of Farenze Lodge as ever.

‘Eve and Bran are coming,’ he warned her huskily.

Chloe strained her senses to catch a hint of whatever sound or instinct told him they were about to be rescued from folly, whether they wanted to be or not.

‘Pretend I never came in here. Act as if you woke up the moment they asked what I’m doing here,’ he whispered.

Chapter Four

Lost for words again, Chloe nodded, then burrowed her face into the pillows and drew the bedclothes over her chilled shoulders. At least pretending to be fuzzy with sleep would give her time to pull wanton Chloe into line and forget he’d been here as best she could. If she proved as obedient to the curb as his rampant side, she had nothing to worry about.

‘Bah!’ she muttered crossly into the pillow, ‘just bah, my Lord Farenze!’

No danger he might hear her. He was back through the door and nearly closing it again before she could slide down the bed and cover her now-shivering body. Nobody else would ever know he’d found her here, heavy-eyed with sleep and wanton desire.

She heard Miss Winterley express surprise at her father’s presence in an over-loud voice meant to warn Chloe not to start awake and betray herself and felt a hard flush of shame burn her cheeks at the thought she knew of Luke Winterley’s presence all too well. She felt it in every fibre of her being and the man was Miss Winterley’s father, for goodness’ sake.

‘You took my book,’ he replied and if his excuse sounded lame and defensive, it might explain what he was doing here better than a smoother lie, designed to cover something clandestine and shocking.

‘And there are none downstairs in the famously well-stocked library Aunt Virginia and Uncle Virgil amassed between them?’ Eve asked, as if she knew very well her father had really stumbled on the housekeeper enjoying a nap in the wrong place at entirely the wrong time, but how could she?

‘Not the one I was reading before you stole it,’ he said grumpily.

‘And now I am reading it, so you would be stealing it from me. I can’t believe you to need distraction so badly, especially in the midst of a house party you must play host to, that you need to barge into my bedchamber when I am not there and try to repossess part of your library, Papa. I’m not even going to think about the list of tasks awaiting you here that you reeled off as an excuse for not being able to spend much time greeting neighbours who call to express their condolences.’

‘I didn’t know then how much distraction I’d need,’ he muttered darkly.

Chloe’s eyes stung at the sound of him so gruffly sheepish it opened up a host of new temptations inside her. She didn’t want to love him and screwed her eyes shut in denial of any tears tempted to come further.

‘Don’t be such a cross old bear, Papa,’ Eve told him and Chloe could hear the rustle of her skirts as she marched up and hugged her father.

Wrong to envy Eve such ease with her father, that ability to breach the chilly touch-me-not air he normally carried about with him like a shield.

‘I’ll try not to be, my she-cub, but there will be reasons aplenty for me to growl over the next few days.’

‘Aye,’ Brandy Brown added from what sounded like a position just inside the room, ‘you’ll need the patience of a saint before the vultures fly off at last.’

‘They’re not all vultures, Bran,’ Eve chided.

‘We don’t know them well enough to judge what they are yet, my lamb,’ her maid said cynically and Chloe decided there was no need to worry about Eve Winterley with such a formidable protector at her side, as well as a father who would clearly walk through fire to keep his beloved daughter safe.

‘I know Lord Mantaigne and Great-Uncle Giles perfectly well and even Uncle James isn’t as savage and sarcastic as he used to be. Aunt Virginia was always trying to persuade him to live a steadier life, so perhaps he will turn over a new leaf in her honour.’

‘And I’m a Dutchman,’ Chloe thought she heard Lord Farenze mutter darkly and wondered what divided the half-brothers so deeply, so alike in colouring and stature as they were, yet as sharply distant with each other as two siblings could be without openly declaring war.

‘No, what you are is a curmudgeon, Papa, so I can’t imagine why you’re worrying about reading a book you seem very familiar with when you have your brother nearby to argue with once more. I dare say if you start now you could have Uncle James simmering nicely by dinner and ready to call you out the moment Aunt Virginia’s funeral is over.’

‘Thank you, minx, the gossips have plenty to say already, without a brotherly feud or a family riot breaking out. I’m not sure I should have let you read Tom Jones after all, it seems to have given you some odd ideas.’

‘There’s a copy in the study, if you truly want to take up where you left off,’ Eve called after the sound of her father’s retreating footsteps and surely it was wrong of Chloe to wish he wouldn’t go at the same time as she longed to be up and away and pretend he hardly impinged on her thoughts, let alone her wildest dreams? ‘Virginia told me where all her warm novels were in the event of my ever having to be bored here in her absence. It’s all right, Papa, she told me anything she and Uncle Virgil locked away was far too warm for a young lady to read and I really can’t think why the tabbies make such a fuss about Mr Fielding’s splendid book.’

‘Don’t get caught with it, then, and it’s probably best if you don’t admit to reading it in polite company. I won’t have you labelled fast before you’re even out.’

‘Of course not and stop being such a worrywart, I’ll be so painfully good over the next few weeks you will hardly recognise me.’

The only reply Chloe heard was a distant masculine humph then Eve ordered her maid to shut the outer door before hastily pushing open the one to the bedroom where Chloe was sitting up in bed, feeling flustered and confused.

‘That was close,’ Eve confided with an impish smile.

‘We should have locked the door,’ Bran told them. ‘Imagine if his lordship had opened it and found you lying here asleep, Mrs Wheaton.’

‘Yes, only imagine,’ Chloe echoed hollowly and used her artistic shudder as an excuse to spring out of bed and start setting herself to rights.

‘I’ll help,’ Bran said as Chloe then tried to struggle into her gown and wrestle with her rebellious curls at the same time. ‘Button yourself up and I’ll comb out your hair and dress it for you, although it seems a crying shame to screw it into a knot and hide it under that thing when it’s so beautiful. There’s many a fine lady as would give her eye teeth for hair half as thick and full of life.’

‘It’s wild and unruly and people get entirely the wrong impression of me if I allow it to show. Anyway, I’m nearly thirty years of age and a respectable widow, not a dewy-eyed débutante.’

‘You don’t look much older than one right now,’ Bran observed as her eyes met Chloe’s in the square of mirror above the diminutive washstand.

‘I can’t afford dreams,’ Chloe murmured.

‘Neither of us can, but it don’t stop us ’avin’ ’em, do it?’

‘What do you dream of, Mrs Brown?’

‘A fine man for my girl; one who’ll love her as she is and not try to make her into a society missus without a good word to say to anyone but a lord.’

‘I can’t see him doing that, whoever he might be.’

‘Can’t you, ma’am? Then you’ve been a lucky woman up to now.’

‘Maybe I have at that,’ Chloe admitted and suppressed a shudder at the thought of all the ways in which a man might mould his wife.

‘His lordship now, he’s a man as would let a woman be herself and love her all the more for it, if you know what I mean?’ Bran said as she finished pinning Chloe’s wild mane back in place, then eyed the cap with disfavour before fitting it over her handiwork with a sigh.

‘He doesn’t strike me as a man on the lookout for love,’ Chloe argued.

‘Ah, well, there’s what a man says he wants then there’s what he really does want. They don’t always meet in the middle, until the right woman comes along and changes his mind.’

‘If I understood all that I might argue, but since I don’t and dinner will be served in a little over an hour, neither of us has enough time for riddles,’ Chloe said with a last glance in the mirror to make sure she was correct and subdued again.

‘Just as well, since we’ll never agree about his lordship.’

‘Maybe not,’ Chloe said distractedly and, picking up her keys, clipped them back on her belt and with a word of breathless thanks fled the room.

* * *

Luke stumped back downstairs to the study and cursed as rampant need roiled inside him. This wasn’t some unique enchantment; he was tired and it was too long since he’d visited his mistress. Forcing the pace on a long journey had left him weary and less in control of himself and his masculine appetites than usual. Combine tiredness and grief with Mrs Wheaton’s exhaustion and Eve’s kind heart and trouble looked inevitable with hindsight, but at least it hadn’t led to catastrophe.

He bit out another fearsome curse at his painful arousal over the mere thought of Chloe Wheaton sitting up in that neat little bed, looking at him as if every fantasy he’d ever had of her as his lover was about to come true, before she awoke fully and recalled who they were. Of course he’d wanted her since she was painfully young and hauntingly beautiful, with a tiny dependent child. He felt the familiar dragging heat of frustrated desire, as if his senses were soaked in need of the woman and refused to give her up, however hard he told them they must.

On some level he’d known she was there even when he saw the inner door slightly ajar and Eve’s baggage piled on the Aubusson carpet, as if the footmen had been told to leave it there and depart in order not to disturb Chloe Wheaton while Bran and Eve took a stroll about the Winter Garden. He wished they hadn’t done what he couldn’t and ordered the woman to bed for an hour or so.

Eve had a heart big enough to sacrifice her comfort for a woman she barely knew, because the housekeeper looked so breakable. How could he be anything but proud of such a daughter, even if he wished she’d left well alone? Eve had done the right thing, but now he wanted to run upstairs and throw the pig-headed Mrs Wheaton over his shoulders and tell the world to go hang and do the wrong one.

If he was not to avoid Farenze Lodge as if he hated it for another decade she had to leave , but he must find a place where her skills were valued and her fine figure and spellbinding violet eyes ignored. Did convents have housekeepers? Luke forced his hands to unclench at the idea of her being leered at by her employer’s husband, or some gangling oaf of a son, and decided to keep a stern eye on Mrs Wheaton’s next household from afar.

Yes, he should have trusted his instincts, but curiosity, or something even more dangerous, led him to open that door. Once he had, he could no more bow coolly and leave than stop breathing. Even now the scent of her seemed to linger in the air. It was only the lavender in the big bowls Virginia always insisted on having about to sweeten the air in winter-closed rooms.

He suspected Chloe had lavender water used on the last rinse of her linen and that was why he couldn’t seem to get her out of his head. The rest of that exotic scent he associated with her was probably lingering aroma of a spicy moth bag or two, deployed to stop the industrious creatures chewing through her mourning attire. So it was a mix of simple strewing herbs, cinnamon, orris and perhaps cloves, but the memory fogged his senses, reminding him how tempted he’d been to kiss the fine creamy skin at the base of her elegant throat and find out if she tasted as exotically artless as she smelt.

Confound it, he hadn’t kissed her and could still savour the taste of her on his tongue. He ran it over his lips and the memory of her doing the same took fire and wrenched a tortured groan from him. After a decade of avoidance and abstinence he still wanted her, wanted her more than at first sight and now they were both mature adults and better designed for mischief.

The waif was a woman and he’d been wrong about the figure under that deplorable gown—Chloe the woman was nothing like the skinny girl she’d once been. She was slender, yes, probably too much so after forgetting to eat for grief and worry. What there was of her was sweetly curved, though, and her skin looked so silken and perfect he could imagine the feel of those full high breasts of hers against his palms. He held up his hands as if convicting them of a heinous crime for flexing on thin air as if they knew what they wanted better than the rest of him did. His other senses were betraying him, so why shouldn’t touch join the turncoat army?

Because somehow he had to resist what he and Chloe Wheaton might be to each other, he supposed with a heavy sigh. For a decade he’d done his best to stay away; he’d seen the desperation in her eyes; the hunger for the love Virginia had to offer a pair of homeless waifs. So he’d taken her rebuff to heart.

Easy enough to make a holiday of visits to Brighton so Virginia and Eve could enjoy one another’s company. He had even endured a few weeks in London each spring so they could eat ices at Gunter’s and visit Astley’s Amphitheatre and there was no more noble fatherly sacrifice when Darkmere was the finest place to be in the spring.

He suspected Virginia knew why he avoided the Lodge, but she didn’t say a word because she knew as well as he did that it was as impossible for Lord Farenze to do aught but ruin a housekeeper. The polite world would laugh at him and sneer at her if he tried to make anything of Chloe Wheaton but his mistress.

‘There you are,’ Tom Banburgh remarked from the doorway and he welcomed the interruption, didn’t he?

‘There’s no fooling you, is there?’

‘I can go away again until you’re in a better humour if you like, but I thought misery might like some company.’

‘Devil take it, I’m not miserable.’

‘Face like thunder.’

Luke stopped himself pacing up and down like a general before a crucial battle and took the filled glass Tom was holding out to him for the second time today. He took a sip of the finest cognac Virginia always kept for a favoured few and felt a little better after all.

‘I miss her so much, Tom,’ he finally admitted the lesser of two evils.

‘How could you not? I expect Virginia saved you from the tender mercies of your family when she could. She certainly rescued me from my unloving guardian when I was a scrubby boy nobody else cared enough to worry about.’

‘True, and she was always taking in waifs and strays. Seems a shame she couldn’t give Virgil children when she was born to be a mother.’

‘And this remark is coming from a man who would be a mere mister today if she had? You’re either a saint or a liar, my friend.’

‘I’m neither and you know as well as I do a title can’t change the beat of a man’s heart or make him any happier.’

‘I really wouldn’t know,’ Tom said indifferently and Luke reminded himself his friend had been a marquis since he was five years old.

‘Well, I do,’ he argued, ‘and mine hasn’t bought me any great joy.’

‘That’s because you hadn’t much left in you when you acquired it, Luke,’ Tom said sagely.

Luke wondered if anyone else would get away with saying some of the things Mantaigne came out with so blithely without being called out. ‘And you have no memory of being without one, so are necessarily full of fun and laughter, I suppose?’

‘Going a bit far, but I never saw the point in being gloomy. I’ll go on trying to laugh at the world even now, because Virginia wouldn’t want long faces and a grand carry on over her departure from this vale of tears.’

‘True, and we both know she missed my great-uncle as if someone had lopped off an arm or a leg after Virgil died.’

‘Aye, and if there is a heaven at least they’re in it together again.’

‘Since it clearly wouldn’t be so for one without the other, you must be right.’

‘Makes you wonder though, don’t it?’ Tom said.

‘No, love is still a myth for the rest of us.’

Luke gave his friend a long hard look before deciding he was the one obsessed with love and lovers and in danger of tripping over his own tongue. Not that he felt anything like love for Chloe Wheaton.

‘Thing about myths is a lot of people believe them,’ Tom said with a long look at Luke that left him puzzled and fidgety.

Was he being warned not to lightly charm the object of his desires? He could imagine nobody less likely to fall in love with him than aloof and sceptical Mrs Chloe Wheaton. Then he recalled the sight of her disarmed by sleep and a hundred times more vulnerable and wondered all over again.

‘I don’t,’ he muttered half to himself.

‘You could have been cut straight out of the pages of a Gothic tale and pasted into a young girl’s scrapbook of fantasies you look so close to the little darlings’ ideal of a heroic villain.’

‘What nonsense have you been feeding yourself this afternoon, man—a three-decker novel from the yellow press, perhaps? Or are you already three parts cast away?’ Luke asked incredulously.

‘Neither, but you don’t have the faintest idea, do you?’

‘Faintest idea of what?’

‘That your long and dusky locks, brooding frowns and touch-me-not air are sure to drive the débutantes insane with longing at their first sight of you across a crowded ballroom. The moment you stand among a London rout glaring at any boy brave enough to dance with your Eve, the little darlings will start swooning by rote for the lack of space to do it all at once in comfort.’

Luke felt himself pale at the very idea, so no wonder Tom laughed. ‘Why?’ he asked hollowly. ‘I’ll be old enough to be their father.’

‘As are all those dark and brooding villains out of the Gothic novels they devour by the yard, I suppose. Who knows what flights of the imagination such silly chits are capable of dreaming up between them, but you’ll be a prime target for them and their ambitious mamas if you set foot in London without a viscountess at your side.’

‘I wasn’t going to worry about one of those until Eve is safely wed.’

‘Leave Eve to find her husband when she’s ready, man; you owe her that for enduring life with a hermit like you all these years.’

Luke shook his head, but was Mantaigne right? He couldn’t see much attraction in a beetle-browed countenance and raven’s wing black hair he only kept overlong because he had no patience with constant visits from a barber or his new valet’s fussing and primping. When it came to his features, he’d just been relieved Eve had escaped the Winterley Roman nose and put down the occasional appreciative feminine stare as a penchant for his acres and title. Marriage to Pamela Verdoyne had cured him of vanity and he wondered if she’d done him such a great favour if he was about to blunder into the ballrooms of the ton unprepared.

‘I won’t have Eve endure a stepmother like mine,’ he said with a shudder.

‘That’s in your hands,’ Tom said with a shrug.

‘What is this, some sort of conspiracy to marry me off?’

‘That takes more than one person, my lord, and I’m not a matchmaker.’

‘So Virginia, you and my own dear, sweet scheming Eve don’t make a set?’

‘Not through prior agreement, but all three of us can’t be wrong.’

‘Yes, you can—by Heaven you’re more wrong in triplicate than alone.’

Tom merely raised his eyebrows and looked sceptical before calmly helping himself to another glass of cognac.

‘Did Virginia put you up to this?’ Luke asked suspiciously.

‘Don’t you think I’ve a mind of my own and the sense to see what you won’t yourself? If she wasn’t dead, I could strangle that spoilt witch you wed so hastily, Luke; she married you for your expectations, then rejected you for so-called love, as if it was your fault she was born vain, empty-headed and contrary.’

‘I should never have agreed to marry her,’ Luke said with a shrug, recalling the long and bitter rows of his marriage with a shudder that sent him back to the brandy decanter for a second glass before he’d quite taken in the fact he’d drunk the first.

‘Your father and wicked stepmother should take the blame for pushing such a paltry marriage on an infatuated lad. You’re not a boy now, though, and you badly need a wife, my friend, at least you do if you’re to avoid being ruthlessly pursued through every ballroom in London by a pack of ninnies when Eve makes her début.’

‘Shouldn’t you be more concerned with securing your own succession, since you’re the last of the Banburghs and I have a younger brother?’

‘The Banburghs can go hang as far as I’m concerned, but it’s not good for James to be in limbo, never sure if he’s to be your heir or only the “what if tragedy struck?” spare Winterley male. He’s bored and restless and probably lonely and who knows what he gets up to when our backs are turned?’

‘You know very well he’d never confide in me,’ Luke said and let himself feel how much it hurt that his brother hated him, even if he had cause to hate him back.

‘Left to himself, he would have followed you about like a stray puppy when you were younger.’

Luke gave a snort of derision at the idea of elegant and sophisticated James Winterley following anyone slavishly, let alone his despised elder brother. ‘That particular apple never fell far from the tree,’ he said darkly, even as the laziness of the cliché made him wonder if he wasn’t guilty of prejudice himself.

‘And you think his lot so much better than your own?’ Tom persisted impatiently.

‘Whatever I think, let’s postpone feeling sorry for James because his mother loved him and hated me for another day, shall we?’

‘Don’t leave it too late to remedy,’ Tom warned with a steady look that made Luke wonder if he didn’t know more about James’s dark and tangled affairs than he was letting on. ‘I’m going off to bother my valet and idle away an hour until dinner. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a pleasant and peaceful evening against all the odds,’ his friend said before he sauntered from the room.

‘Slim enough chance of anything of the kind under this roof,’ Luke muttered grumpily and finished his brandy before going upstairs.

Chapter Five

The January twilight was already all but over when Luke stumped up the elegant staircase. He rang for the bath he needed as soon as he reached his bedchamber and heard hot water carried in within minutes, so there was no excuse to sack the housekeeper on the spot and end this torture. As he relaxed into the tub images of the dratted woman slid slyly into his head.

Why her? Why was it Chloe Wheaton he seemed doomed to want every time he set eyes on her? She was a fine-looking woman, despite the deplorable gowns and concealing cap, but he’d met other fine-looking women and some of them diamonds of the first water. No other woman on this fair earth could get him in a stew of frustrated yearning with one distrustful glance and how he wished it otherwise.

If only it was merely the thought of a fine female body in his bed that made him want her so badly. He ached with the frustration of not having her as his lover. There was something unique about her that even ten years of trying couldn’t expunge from his senses. He recalled a fateful day that summer when they first met; he’d come upon her playing with her little girl in the woods above the house and just stood and watched where neither could see him.

At last the heat of the day drained the child’s energy and Chloe had sung softly to calm her, then rocked little Verity to sleep in her arms. Luke recalled envy eating at him like acid as he wanted such love and tenderness for the babes they could bring into the world together, if only everything was different.

Instead it had been Wheaton who recklessly married a schoolgirl and got a baby on her, or so she had once told him. Luke felt his fists tighten at the thought of Wheaton exposing the woman he was supposed to love to such a hard, narrow life as she’d had to lead since.

He had been about to turn away when the June sunlight picked out the trail of tears on Chloe’s face as she gazed down at her sleeping babe. Even now he felt the jar of it as his heart thudded at the memory. Back then he had had to clamp down on the need to stride over to her and take her in his arms so hard he discovered afterwards he’d clenched his fists until the blood flowed.

He left the next day, all his wild schemes for somehow making it easier for her to be his mistress by getting her to act the quietly respectable wife, whose reclusive husband sailed the seven seas, then wanted no company but hers whenever he was home, shattered. He couldn’t do that to her, or little Verity or any other babies they might make between them. It was a half-life and he couldn’t offer her so little.

Curse it; he wouldn’t let passion waft him along as if he had no free will now either. Yet when he conjured a picture of his late wife ranting at him that he was a stern, unlovable stick to correct his obsession, the fantasy of his great-aunt’s housekeeper naked and eager in the great bed next door blotted her out. Luke felt heat roar through him at the very idea and the physical evidence of his arousal with nothing between him and civilisation made him a fool.

Chloe only had to be in the same county for him to want her and from the moment he saw her at Virginia’s window today he’d barely been able to conceal his ridiculous state from the world. Idiot body! Hadn’t marriage taught it anything at all?

His response to Pamela’s challenge to his manhood when she refused to let him bed her again after they returned from their bride trip slotted into his memory and reminded him how easy it was to need a woman without liking her. He relived his distaste at himself and his wife when she enjoyed his furious promise to seduce her into taking him until she screamed for more as she never had during his gentle lovemaking. The fulfilment of that vow excited her and left him at odds with himself.

Their marriage limped on for six months, Pamela blowing hot and cold as Luke grew sick of her and himself. How typical that she announced her pregnancy the day she finally left him. Her letter from her sister’s London address saying she’d been brought to bed of a daughter and he’d better come and get her arrived on his twentieth birthday. To this day Luke couldn’t recall the journey and it took Eve to blast through his rage as the real innocent in the whole wretched business.

‘You’re welcome to the squalling brat,’ his wife had shouted when he dodged past her to reach the attic where, the butler informed him, his daughter had been banished for crying a little too loudly. Pamela scurried after him; ‘Pushing it out nigh killed me and I never want to see it again.’

‘Don’t you feel the need to raise a heroine in your own tawdry image?’

‘Not one of your get, not that I’m sure she is yours. You’re not the only Winterley ready to rut like a hog,’ she said smugly.

His bellow of fury woke the baby and made her furious nurse run out of the bare attic bedroom he wouldn’t wish on a foundling to upbraid them.

‘If you two ’ave a mite of pity in your black hearts, you’ll be quiet,’ she barked in a hoarse voice that sounded as if its skinny owner spent most of her years on this earth bellowing to be heard and had worn it out in the process.

A smile replaced Luke’s frown as he recalled his shock at being addressed so sharply by a tiny female who looked as if she’d dashed in off the street to feed his child out of the kindness of her weary heart. She hardly reached his elbow and her face had the wizened yet somehow ageless look of one used to hardship since birth.

‘Whose get is she then?’ he’d asked his wife more quietly, as the furious girl-woman was still barring his way like a flea-bitten terrier confronting an angry bear.

‘Oh, she’s a Winterley all right; which is probably why I can’t endure to have her near me.’

‘Then she’s mine.’

‘There are other vultures crouched in the branches of your family tree, hoping their seed will carry off the family honours under your long nose, Luke Winterley.’

It wasn’t the unlikely idea of his already ailing father laying hands on his wife that made Luke feel as if the finest Toledo blade had sliced into his heart. A terrible possibility dawned as he stood there and mentally crossed all his male relatives off the list but one. His stepmother resented the fact he was heir to the Farenze titles and always had done her best to make the half-brothers hate each other. Luke thought a gruff affection bound him and James even so, until that moment.

Would even Pamela stoop to seduce a seventeen-year-old boy? Yes, he’d decided with bitter sickness threatening to choke him. To take a twisted revenge on Luke for marrying her without adoring her slavishly she would, and enjoy every moment of her betrayal. Young enough to hurt to his very soul, he felt as if sharing a city with her a moment longer would surely suffocate him.

‘Bring the child, we’re leaving,’ he’d snapped at the street urchin wet-nurse.

‘Not ’til I’m sure she’s better off with you than the ragman,’ she said, appearing at the nursery door with Eve wrapped in a worn shawl that had to be her own since Pamela wouldn’t even give it to her maid.

‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Pamela said spitefully.

‘How can you say such terrible things, dearest?’ her sister, Alexandra, Lady Derneley, protested faintly from behind her. ‘She’s your own dear baby.’

‘I’d prefer to house a ferret or a weasel than that squalling brat. Has James visited me once while I was fat and lumbering like a cow because of a girl they got on me between them? You know he hasn’t, Lexie; he promised undying devotion when he seduced me behind his brother’s back and look how long it lasted. I’d hate her for ruining my figure, then chasing dear Blasedon away with her wailing and whining, even if she wasn’t a Winterley. I’ll be happy never to set eyes on the whelp again as long as I live, she can go to hell along with him and the sooner the better.’

Lady Derneley turned chalk white as her little sister’s true nature hit home and fainted to avoid it.

‘To hell with you, you unnatural bitch,’ Luke roared.

‘To ’ell with both of you,’ the street urchin’s voice somehow rose above the uproar. ‘This poor babe ain’t ’ad time to do wrong, whatever the rest of you ’ave been up to and you be quiet,’ she ordered Pamela, who gaped at her open-mouthed. ‘If you’ve a spot of pity use it on an ’elpless mite who din’t ask to come into this world instead of yourself for once. Mister, you can take us both away from ’ere afore the poor little thing dies of cold and ’unger, or missus ’ere murders ’er while I’m asleep, never mind if you’re ’er pa or no.’

It was then Luke made the life-transforming error of looking at the tiny little being in the girl’s bony arms and realised she was right. Almost as frightened by the quiet as by the shouting, the baby screwed her tiny face up to wail her woes to the world. He put out a finger, more by instinct than in hope his touch would soothe her. Eve paused, opened her eyes wide and seemed to focus on him as if she’d been waiting for him to come since the day she was born. She made him her father, whatever the facts, by latching on to his finger and refusing to let go.

Somehow he managed to hide that fact while convincing Pamela he would stop her allowance and sue for divorce, instead of legal separation, if word got out Eve might not be his. The journey to Darkmere with Eve and Brandy Brown in tow was a nightmare he shuddered to think of now, but they all survived it somehow and Eve grew up free of a mother who hated her for being a Winterley.

Luke made himself ignore news of Pamela cavorting round any bits of the Continent free of revolutionary wars with a succession of lovers. He didn’t care if the generous allowance he paid her kept her and her latest love in luxury and when news of his wife’s death reached Darkmere three years later he hadn’t enough hypocrisy left to mourn.

Now Lord Farenze might seem harsh and indifferent as the moors in sight of his castle towards the wider world, but he truly loved his daughter. A sneaky voice whispered it was safe to love Eve. If remembering his wife kept Chloe Wheaton and the danger of feeling more than he ought to for her at arm’s length, then he would dwell on the last time he let a woman walk into his life and rearrange it for however long it took to put him off the idea.

Resolved to do so often over the next few days, he was dressed before he found out dinner had been put back an hour. Eve had been informed, however, and was discussing which black gown was better suited to the occasion with Chloe and Bran. He could see little difference and left the room as if the devil was on his tail as soon as he saw the housekeeper lurking in the darkest corner of the room. Feeling thoroughly out of sorts with the world, Luke went downstairs like a guest arriving too early for a party.

* * *

Chloe was consulting Cook about the number of entrées Mrs Winterley thought fashionable to serve at dinner and agreeing this wasn’t the time for excess, even if they could find half-a-dozen more dishes at the drop of a hat, when the sound of a late arrival surprised them all. The terse announcement she was needed outside made her scurry in the head groom’s wake to the stable yard.

‘Verity, oh, my love!’ she cried as she saw her daughter blink against the flare of the stable lads’ lanterns when she stepped down from the coach.

‘Oh, Mama, I’m so glad to see you,’ Verity said with a wobbly smile that made Chloe want to cry, instead she hugged her as if they’d been parted for months.

‘But how did this come about?’ Chloe asked as Lord Farenze’s coachman nodded tersely at her and she could only marvel at his endurance.

‘His lordship ordered it soon as he heard little miss here was waiting to come home,’ Birtkin said as if he drove all the way to Bath and back after enduring the long drive here from Northumberland at least once a week.

‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she replied with a warm smile of gratitude.

‘Not my doing, ma’am, you should thank his lordship,’ Birtkin mumbled as if trying to reclaim his dour reputation.

‘You and your men were the ones who drove through twilight, then darkness, on Verity’s behalf, so I’m grateful to you, whether you like it or not.’

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