‘Oh, heavens! I didn’t see you there, my lord, but why on earth are you sitting in the dark?’ she gasped now, shocked when he rose from the chair by the window where Virginia often sat to catch the best light for her book.
‘Because I enjoy sitting in the dark?’ he replied wryly, but she heard the flat weariness in his voice and somehow couldn’t make herself walk away.
‘I doubt it,’ she said as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and instinct warned her to plunk the vase down and leave.
‘You’re right,’ he said gruffly and she wondered if he didn’t want her to see tears in his supposedly steely gaze when he turned his head away.
‘How gratifying for me; good evening, my lord.’
‘No, stay,’ he asked, again in that rough voice as if he couldn’t find the energy to smooth it into any sort of gentlemanly restraint right now.
‘You know I can’t,’ she murmured as she sank on to the chair closest to his and folded her hands to stop them reaching to him as if by right.
‘Don’t speak of “can’t” today.’
‘I have to,’ she argued, gripping her fingers more tightly together to stop them soothing his lean cheek, or ruffling the stern discipline he’d imposed on his unruly raven locks in his great-aunt’s honour.
‘Virginia wasn’t a great one for rules and conventions,’ he replied with tension in his voice that said he wanted human contact, too, even if he hadn’t moved since she sat down.
‘I imagine she was as determined not to be confined by them as a young woman as she was when I knew her.’
‘She was a rogue, or so her sisters said before she outlived them all,’ he said with such pride and love for his late great-aunt by marriage in his voice Chloe felt herself melting from the inside out.
‘So many people loved her for it that it makes you wonder if being correct and ever ready to criticise, as I remember her sisters being when I first came here, is the way to live a good life after all. They used to visit and sniff and carp at her for simply having me and Verity in the house, let alone employing me as her companion-housekeeper.’
Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she recalled he’d been almost as critical once he found out about that act of kindness himself, but perhaps he’d decided this wasn’t the day to have too good a memory.
‘I think when she and Virgil wed, Virginia gave up scandalising society one way, so she was determined to find as many ways of confounding its prejudices in other ones as she could.’
‘You think of me as one of her rebellions, then?’
‘Perhaps at first—later even I could see that you and your daughter were more to her than a whim to infuriate her sisters and any stuffy neighbours she wanted to annoy. She needed you almost as much as you did her. She would have been an excellent mother and would have doted on any grandchildren who followed in her children’s footsteps.’
‘Instead she was a wonderful friend and mentor to me and so many others society would like to turn its collective nose up at and ignore.’
‘You were not a charity cases, but a good and dear friend to her; allow me that much insight today, even if we must pretend to be enemies again tomorrow.’
‘I know, I am sorry,’ she said softly.
He smiled at her unguarded apology and they sat in companionable silence for a few wonderful moments, as if they understood each other too well to need words.
‘Virginia was the product of another age,’ he finally said with a sigh, ‘but even she wouldn’t have been quite so eager to break the rules if she knew it would reflect back on her progeny.’
‘No, I suppose she didn’t have a daughter of her own to make those rules real for her. It colours everything when your own reputation affects another’s whole life so drastically,’ Chloe agreed with a hearty sigh of her own.
‘As those girls of ours both changed our lives?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sooner or later we must talk about it,’ he warned.
‘No, your daughter is your business; mine is hers and mine alone. We have nothing to discuss, my lord.’
‘Yet we must talk about it all the same,’ he said as implacably as he could, when he sounded as if grief and weariness were weighing him down too heavily to face a confrontation now.
‘Not if I can help it we won’t,’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her in the intimate gloom of the dark room. Only a glow from the banked-down fire was left to show them their thoughts and feelings now the light had faded, but when he wanted to he could read her like a book.
‘Do you remember the day we first met?’ he asked sneakily.
All of a sudden the gloom of a January dusk was gone and they were bathed in summer heat again, her most disreputable bonnet was hanging down her back and his bright, curious gaze sharpened on this new phenomenon tramping her way up his great-aunt’s drive.
She had just paid a visit to her little daughter at the wet-nurse’s neat cottage on the Farenze Lodge Estate and she was buoyed up by the hope Verity was finally going to be big enough to come home with her next week. The world seemed a light and happy place that fateful summer day, then she had looked up and met a pair of complicated masculine grey eyes and a fluttery feeling of excitement joined the hope that was rekindling in her after a long winter.
‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ he’d asked as lightly as if he hadn’t a care in the world, for once in his too-responsible life, either.
‘I’m off to London to see the Queen,’ she’d said, suddenly as giddy as a girl as she tossed her fiery gold curls out of her eyes and refused to regret they were wild and tumbling down her back for once.
‘Can I come?’ he’d said and that was it, her heart had opened to him. Dark-haired, smiling Viscount Farenze’s eyes promised her impossible things as they met as the equals they should have been and were no more.
‘Too well,’ she admitted sombrely now, the memory of all they should have been to each other in her eyes as she stared into the fire to avoid his.
There were no pictures of unattainable castles in Spain hidden in the complex depths of it. She’d spent ten years convincing that hopeful girl there could be nothing between Viscount Farenze and Verity Wheaton’s mother, so how could there be?
‘If only things had been different for us, then and now,’ she added regretfully and thought she heard a gruff groan, hastily suppressed, at the thought of what could have been, without their daughters and their duty to make it impossible.
‘It’s time we stopped pretending we’re nothing to each other, Mrs Wheaton.’
‘No, it’s our best protection. My Verity and your Eve will always make it impossible for us to be other than master and servant and you know it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day and you must be weary and eager to have it over and done with,’ she said with a would-be humble nod.
She could only just see his shadowed face and his white shirt and collar and stark black necktie through the deepening darkness. A lot of her longed for the right to move closer; feel cool linen and hot man under her spread palms; offer him comfort nobody else could give on this sorry day and take some in return. It was a right she’d relinquished the day Verity was born, so she hid her hands in her midnight skirts and waited for the words of dismissal that would set them free of this fiery frustration, for now.