Chloe would have argued, but he shook his head.
‘No, don’t insist on reeling off a list of your father’s and now your brothers’ sins to blight both your lives with. Yours is still an old and loyal name and the title was won by better men than the current holder or your father. Thessaly women have defended castles and led soldiers in their husbands’ absence; tramped across battlefields to find loved ones and guarded fortunes so their sons wouldn’t have to go to the devil in their father’s footsteps. Stay in hiding and you will oblige your brothers even more than you have already by staying away, as well as robbing your Verity of her heritage and all the fierce warrior ladies she has a right to know about.’
‘No,’ she denied. ‘How can you sit there and condemn me for doing what was right? Are you accusing me of being less than all those rash and outrageous Thessaly women, because I ran instead of letting them put Verity out to freeze to death in the depths of winter?’
‘I don’t need to, you’ve done it to yourself,’ he said so quietly she stopped in mid-rage and stared up at him with her mouth open. ‘And now you’re doing it to me and both our daughters as well,’ he added ruthlessly.
‘No, whatever happens they will be safe from harm.’
‘That’s not true, Chloe. Unjust as it may be, they could still suffer for the sins of their fathers,’ he said bleakly and how could he call himself a sinner when he had been so desperately young when he became a father himself?
A boy of twenty seemed unlikely to have a pocketful of sins to carry around, let alone the vast burden he looked as if he had on his shoulders as he said it with a heavy sigh that spoke of mysteries and secrets she wasn’t sure she even wanted to think about right now.
‘And their mothers?’ she said, thinking of Daphne dying in agony as she strove desperately to give her child life. ‘Birthing them ought to wipe out all of them in one blow,’ she said with a shudder.
‘Would that it did,’ he rasped as memory seemed to suck him back into the past as well. ‘Not that your sister had time to bank many sins in her short life,’ he added, as if forcing himself to slam the door on whatever his wife had done before she met her end in a carriage accident in a far-off country, too many miles and years away from her husband and daughter to matter in their lives any more by then.
‘No, and I refuse to believe Daphne died as a punishment for what she did to bring Verity into the world. I can’t pretend many wouldn’t say that was so, then go on to blame Verity for being born the wrong side of the blanket. We must think of her, Luke. I might not like it, but there’s no point pretending the world won’t point the finger and speculate endlessly who her father is if the truth comes out,’ she said gently, his name openly on her lips for the first time and would it wasn’t to find another way of saying no to him. How she wished for the right to squirm back into his arms and forget the past in loving him now.
‘Aye,’ he said with a heavy sigh, ‘so it might, but if we have each other it won’t touch us. That’s what I’ve learnt from being Eve’s father and you need to learn it as well. As long as there is love and strength inside our home the evil and pettiness outside can only touch us if we let it.’
‘You can’t stay shut away in that bleak castle of yours for ever though, my lord,’ she half-teased and half-warned him, wondering how he would cope with the fuss and attention of Eve’s début in a couple of years’ time, if he had a stepdaughter with no apparent father and a wife who had sensationally returned from the dead with an orphaned niece at her side to make them all a seven-day wonder.
‘It’s not enough any more, thanks to you,’ he said dourly.
‘There’s no need to sound quite so cross about it.’
‘Why not? I was almost happy living with what I could have if I didn’t think too hard about what I truly wanted, until I learnt to hope. You’re the one who taught me, Chloe, so do you really think you have any right to take it away from us now I’ve learnt the trick of it at last?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Then be sure, be so certain you could carve it into rock and display it in the Strand, Lady Chloe Thessaly, because until you can, I won’t give up.’
‘Can you imagine it in the announcement, my lord? Lady Chloe Thessaly, whom the world thought dead a decade ago, is to marry Viscount Farenze, who deserves our profound sympathy.’
‘And can you imagine what the world had to say about me and mine when my wife dragged my name through every muddy puddle she could find and the odd boggy swamp or two along the way? I don’t care what they say; the people who matter to me will know the truth and those who don’t can do as they please. It’s of no consequence to me what the wider world thinks.’
‘But it is to me.’
‘That is your cross to bear, don’t make it mine as well.’
She met the challenge in his straight gaze once again and nodded to admit it was a problem she must worry at until she knew if she could accept such notoriety for them all or not. Wasn’t it asking too much of any man to take her and Verity on, but could she and Luke endure not to take that risk? Could she live without him; wait every day to read of his marriage to another woman; the birth of his children and not hers? Wouldn’t it drive her mad to stay in her narrow little existence as housekeeper in some house she didn’t want to learn like she knew this one and long uselessly and bitterly for my Lord Farenze for the rest of her life?
‘I have a set of tasks to carry out, whatever you and I could be, Lord Farenze,’ she reminded him and rose to her feet.
‘So Lady Chloe Thessaly puts her disguise back on to be Mrs Wheaton again. I’d be more impressed by that if you didn’t look so thoroughly kissed and rumpled, madam. I suggest you rearrange the housekeeper if you want her to be taken seriously,’ he said with a look that admitted he was being harsh. ‘Go on then, leave me with Virginia’s missive to soothe my pride. Rebuild your defences for me to knock down again, because I will find the weak points in them and tear them away.’
Not sure if it was a threat or a promise, she shook her head and felt the unfamiliar weight of her hair about her shoulders with a distracted frown. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said numbly then gathered up her scattered hairpins and discarded cap. The words I love you almost got on to her tongue and into the evening air, but it would be unfair to say it and walk away, so she bit her lip and went.
* * *
‘Read your letter,’ she’d said. Luke opened his last missive from Virginia with less reverence than he would have half an hour ago, then held it unseeingly instead of reading.
How could he take in Virginia’s words as if nothing much had happened? Impossible to let her words glide into meaning now, instead of dancing across the page as if written in code. All he could think of was her—Lady Chloe Thessaly; Mrs Wheaton; the woman who kissed him like a heated dream. The dream he’d refused to have for so long.
He wondered what life would be like if he wasn’t a coward. Pamela had treated him like a wooden effigy without feelings, but why had he let her spoil so much that could be good and right about his life once she was no more than a bitter memory? If he’d forced his way through Chloe’s barriers when she was young and wild and daring, they could have been happy together for years.
Instead of seizing the happiness he could have, he’d clung to his wrongs. Pamela said he was a cold-hearted martinet, so he’d become one—not with his daughter, but to the world outside the castle walls. He was nineteen when he made that disastrous marriage, twenty when Pamela taunted him with what she’d done and walked away. His hands fisted involuntarily, but he made himself open them, then laid Virginia’s precious last letter aside until he was fit to read it again.
It had come to him when he kissed