Needs she had fought for so long clamoured and fidgeted to let a decade of frustration and loneliness go. She swayed into his arms and opened her mouth even as sensible Chloe whispered she was a fool. Somehow the slight shake in his touch freed some last curb on her conscience and she felt him test her narrow waist, banding her closer to the difference and heat of him, narrow flanked and broad shouldered as he was against her curves and unable to conceal how badly he wanted, no, needed her.
Intrigued by such wild heat, despite the frigid January air and this saddest of days, she felt every pore and whisper come uniquely alive to him. Senses sharpened as if they’d slept since that last kiss so long ago. She wanted to strip off her tight tan gloves and feel this exceptional man under her naked touch. Doing her best to add the soft covering to her senses instead, she brushed a finger along his high cheekbone and wherever he felt the butterfly touch of fine leather on taut skin a flush of hard colour tracked her fingers. Shocked by her own boldness, she rose on tiptoe and rested her hands on his broad shoulders so she could watch him more closely, more intimately. For these few seconds outside time he was hers and she was his.
His coat was frost chilly where they’d had no contact, yet where their bodies strove to meld no cold could reach them. They had an antidote to winter and who would guess so much heat was pent up between gruff Lord Farenze and his coolly composed housekeeper?
He moved his hands up from her waist to cup a shamefully hot and responsive breast under her layers of winter disguise and the sweet novelty of his long-remembered touch, real again on her eager body, made her heart leap and her stomach fall into that familiar burning longing only he could stir in her. She gave a low moan as need ground at her insides like hot knives and heated her inner core with impossible promises.
Shocked by her own need of him, she pulled back far enough to watch him and hotly unanswerable questions flashed into his grey gaze and echoed her own. He’d focused too much formidable attention on her at last, given too much away to snatch it back and pretend they were nothing to each other, hadn’t he? This was the real Luke Winterley, the passionate man behind Lord Farenze’s cold exterior and reclusive reputation. She felt too much for that man and she was opening her mouth to ask questions neither of them wanted to know when the return of the riding party sounded on the clear air and let Chloe’s real life back in with a sickening thump and a deep breath of icy January air. She tugged free of Lord Farenze’s arms and faced him with all she shouldn’t feel in her eyes.
‘I can’t,’ she gasped. ‘Neither of us can,’ she told him sadly, then hurried off towards the stable yard and her beloved daughter before Luke could argue.
‘I quite agree, Mrs Wheaton,’ Luke muttered to the January air. ‘So what the devil have you done to me this time, my conundrum-in-petticoats?’
No point trying to sit and work on the letters of sympathy and solutions to estate matters now. All he’d see out of the window now was an image of himself, tangled so tight in kissing Virginia’s protégé he’d forgotten where, when and what they were. He couldn’t settle for the ordeal ahead and hardly knew how to live in his own skin without Chloe to remake him every time he set eyes on her.
The very thought of her as she was just now set his pulses jumping and his manhood rigid with need. Yet she was Virginia’s housekeeper-cum-companion; a lady already burned by the chilling harshness the world showed those who fell from grace; a woman who’d wed recklessly, then found herself alone with a babe to support when she should have been in the schoolroom herself.
Recalling her list of activities for crass males, Luke wished he could ask for a hack to be saddled and ride for hours to avoid longing for more unsuitable meetings with the Farenze Lodge housekeeper. No, there could be no more of those and it was high time he turned his mind to the sad and solemn occasion ahead of him.
If he’d had his way they would celebrate Virginia’s long life and the fact she was reunited with her beloved Virgil, instead of mourning the passing she had begun to long for of late. Instead, he was chief mourner at a solemn funeral and must hide his grief as best he could for the sake of those who looked to him as head of the family and master of the house and estate.
His great-uncle’s will left his wife only a lifetime tenure on the house they had built so lovingly between them with ultimate ownership going to Luke. He’d been too wound up in baby Eve and playing down the chaos Pamela had raised on the Continent when Virgil died to take much notice, but lately he’d tried to discuss the future of Farenze Lodge with Virginia and got nowhere even faster than usual.
‘Virgil left you this house and estate to save me having people constantly badgering me to leave it elsewhere,’ Virginia told him.
‘But why me?’ he asked. ‘James might change if he had an estate of his own. You have told me he needs to be his own man.’
‘Let me worry about James,’ she said mysteriously, ‘you’re the only man we wanted living here after us, Luke. You love and understand it as we did, so enjoy it as a holiday from that grim barrack you live in most of the year. You can retreat here when the rigours of Darkmere become too great for your wife.’
‘I don’t have a wife, nor shall I until Eve is wed,’ he replied, meeting her level gaze steadily to show her he meant it and there was no point scheming to pair him off with some hopeful young lady she might have handy before then.
‘One day you’ll have to take that armour off and learn to be happy,’ she had replied with a knowing smile he didn’t want to question, so he shrugged and accepted their decision, since he could hardly do otherwise now the deed was done.
And now the whole world seemed to be conspiring against his long-held plan to find a convenient wife once Eve was old enough to marry. Virginia, Eve and even Tom Banburgh seemed to think he ought to wed for something warmer than mere convenience and surely they were all wrong?
‘There you are, m’lord,’ Josiah Birtkin’s bass voice rumbled at him from the doorway leading from the gardens to the stableyard and Luke swore at himself for getting distracted from all he had to cope with today.
‘So it would seem,’ he replied mildly enough.
‘Thought you should know,’ Josiah went on as if words had a tax on them.
‘Know what?’
‘Cross said they was followed back from the gallops just now.’
‘Why on earth would anyone follow a schoolgirl?’ Luke mused.
‘Don’t know, m’lord.’
‘Have you any idea who it was?’
‘No, he stayed well back. Cross thought it was his fancy to start with.’
Luke frowned even more darkly at the thought of Chloe’s daughter as quarry. ‘It makes no sense,’ he muttered and Josiah shrugged as if nothing his fellow humans did made much of that. ‘Where is he now?’ Luke asked, resolving to confront the rogue and demand what he was about.
‘Rode off when they got back to the paddocks, and, since he managed to look as if he was on his way somewhere else, nobody thought to challenge him.’
‘And you saw him close up, I hope?’
‘No, he was some way off by the time Cross mentioned him and had his hat pulled down over his eyes and a scarf over his mouth.’
‘It’s a cold day and a traveller might cover up against it, I suppose.’
And why trail a schoolgirl back to Farenze Lodge when a few casual questions would reveal her mother was only housekeeper here? And why would Verity Wheaton’s location matter to anyone but her mother, after all the years when nobody outside the household took any notice of either of them?
‘His beast had some Arab in him though, m’lord, and if the man wasn’t dressed like a farmer I’d have to call him a gentleman.’
‘Keep a lookout for him and I’ll have the watch doubled at night. If Miss Wheaton or my daughter ride out again, please