‘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