can I let you take on a duty rightly belonging to me?’ he said clumsily.
‘Mere servant as I am?’ she bit out furiously.
Luke wondered if he’d imagined her burrowing so desperately into his arms when he came to this room to find out why she was shouting in her sleep and why his tongue always tied itself in knots when he was with her.
‘No, because you have done more for my great-aunt than anyone had a right to ask you; not that I’m suggesting you can’t withstand every tempest life throws at you, so don’t bite my nose off,’ he argued and wondered why his temper wasn’t rising to her barbed comments this time.
He was weary to his very bones, but he knew she was trying to get him out of here before heat and awareness flared back to life. In some ways he knew her so well it hurt, in others she felt as much of a mystery to him as she was the first day he laid eyes on his great-aunt’s new companion–housekeeper and felt his world tilt on its axis for a terrifying moment.
‘If you watch for an hour or so, I will lie on the bed in the Lord’s Chamber with the connecting door open. It’s been locked since Virgil died and nobody will recall it’s there at a time like this. That way you won’t be alone and I’ll feel more of a man.’
She looked unconvinced, but eventually nodded and seemed prepared to accept a compromise to end this uncomfortable intimacy. ‘I loved Lady Virginia too much in life to be frightened now she’s with her Virgil again at last. I’ll miss her all my days, but she wouldn’t want to live without him any longer than she had to. So please take yourself off whilst I dress, my lord.’
‘Very well, my lady,’ he said with a bow he might give to the equal in rank she suddenly sounded.
‘Exasperating man,’ she muttered as he left the room to wait in the cramped little corridor over the nobly proportioned room below.
Out in the dark, Luke fought a battle between physical tiredness and feelings he didn’t want to examine. He’d wanted to stay in that neglected room and feel her sleep in his arms. It shocked him to feel so much for the contrary mixture of a woman Chloe had grown into. He’d tried to convince himself for years only his daughter was allowed under his guard and into his heart, but right now it looked like a battle lost.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded in a fierce whisper as she came out of her room and nearly cannoned into him in the gloom.
‘Waiting for you,’ he managed suavely.
He saw something in the depths of her dark eyes when her candle wavered in her shaking hands that said he wasn’t the only one fighting his feelings tonight. He forced himself not to grin like a triumphant boy.
‘Well, don’t,’ she said crossly.
He raised his eyebrows and let some of the passion he felt for her show as their eyes met.
‘Verity is ten years old, my lord, and has a right to all I am. I won’t accept a lover when my daughter would be harmed by association, so waiting for me to do so will only waste your time and energy you need for the obligations ahead of you.’
‘I’m here to escort you to Virginia’s bedchamber.’
‘Where I don’t belong,’ she said to herself as much as him.
‘Where you will be doing me a favour I should not permit, considering you’re so tired yourself,’ he corrected.
‘I didn’t ride all the way from Northumberland in the depths of winter.’
‘And I wasn’t here to nurse Virginia through her last illness, but if we’re not to be caught in a tryst and forced into wedlock, Mrs Wheaton, it’s about time we quit this draughty corridor and got on with all that needs doing.’
Chloe sniffed a very expressive sniff of reproach, yet something else lurked behind her coolly composed look. The thought of what Virginia would make of them standing here like a pair of star-crossed lovers unwilling to say goodnight hung unspoken in the air between them and made him flinch.
His beloved but infuriating great-aunt would be planning their wedding before one more late and reluctant January dawn had passed. Virginia usually opposed misalliances and a viscount and a housekeeper were one of those many times over, but something told him she would have been delighted if they ever found the courage to defy convention and wed. So what did Virginia know about the woman he didn’t?
‘I am going to sit with my beloved late employer and friend and you are going to sleep, my lord, and that is all,’ Chloe said sternly and he let her lead the way while he struggled with puzzlement and weariness and did as he was bid for once in his life.
* * *
The next morning was bright and frosty with a sky as clear and delicate a blue as the flower of a mountain harebell. Chloe finished drying her hair by the fire Lord Farenze had ordered to be lit in her room and told herself she hadn’t really needed the bath he ordered after she spent half the night nodding in a comfortable chair in the late viscountess’s bedchamber. Even so, it felt good to be clean and new vitality sparked through her along with the crackle of electricity in her heavy auburn hair. She really ought to have it cut, but it had been easier and cheaper to let it grow so ridiculously long she could sit on it when it hung down her back.
It seemed wrong she should feel vital and alive, today of all days, and she looked at the frosty scene outside the window and let herself be sad Virginia wasn’t here to see the rolling hillsides wrapped in sparkling crystal, or the dark bare branches of the trees in the wood that couldn’t quite hide the brave snowdrops flowering in the sheltered hollows. She almost heard the words as if Virginia put them straight in her heart.
Don’t mourn me, Chloe; after sixteen years without my love we’ll never be apart again.
If she took that last piece of advice she could glory in the morning and forget the future until the funeral was over and the will read. Impatient of the last damp strand of hair, she wound it into the heavy knot she usually confined it to, but left out some of the pins that would have screwed it back from her face and made it possible to wear the all-enveloping housekeeper’s bonnet she’d bought herself behind Virginia’s back.
Today she’d restricted herself to the frivolous piece of lawn and lace her late mistress had reluctantly allowed became a companion and let herself be the girl who shared Virginia’s lonelier years again. She recalled her employer saying she wanted bright faces about her, not a death’s head got up to fright babies when Verity took one look at her mama in her first all-enveloping cap and burst into tears.
Mrs Winterley would send her a hard-eyed glare for being a housekeeper got up as a lady today, but Chloe owed Virginia one last glimpse of the light-hearted girl she would have had her be, if she could spoil her and Verity as she wanted. There would be little enough cause to be anyone but her mature and sensible self once she took a post in another household.
She tiptoed down the secondary staircase the architect ordered for less important visitors lodged in her corridor of this grand house and wondered who she was being quiet for. Lord Farenze was up and being his usual lordly self, Miss Eve Winterley was downstairs and Verity had begged to be allowed an early morning ride with the grooms, before anyone else was awake to forbid it on this solemn day.
‘Mr Filkin says horses need exercise whatever the day brings and I might as well help with the ponies as lie a-bed fretting,’ she reported when she came in to ask if she could go and change into her habit.
‘Be sure to come back by the nursery stairs though, love. I doubt his lordship’s stepmama would approve of you careering about the countryside today.’
‘She’s an old misery and his lordship won’t listen to her,’ Verity claimed confidently and Chloe wondered how Luke Winterley had made such a favourable impression on her daughter in such a short time.
She felt beleaguered; the indoor staff adored him; the stable boys and grooms were always full of tales about his horsemanship and now Verity appeared very ready to admire him