‘Daphne was desperate to escape marriage to that dreadful old reprobate, but she had always dreamt of a gallant hero who would come and rescue her from the lonely lives we lived at Carraway Court. I wouldn›t be surprised if she took any lover happy to have a sixteen-year-old girl in his bed in a desperate attempt to get herself with child and escape marriage to such a man.’
‘She was no older than my Eve when your father tried to sell his own child to the highest bidder, then? What sort of a father would consign his own child to a life of such misery and frustration?’
‘The Thessaly sort,’ Chloe said sadly, regretting the gaps in hers and Daphne’s lives and contrasting them with my Lord Farenze’s fierce love for his only child. ‘He was no sort of father at all and only wed my mother because she was heiress to the Carraway fortune. I don’t suppose he was faithful to her, or even particularly kind. Such a hard-hearted man can do a fearsome amount of damage to his children, so Daphne and I ought to have been grateful he favoured our brothers and despised us as mere girls, I suppose.’
‘He was your father and ought to have been proud of his spirited and beautiful daughters. But why did he send her to Scotland with his sister and not you?’
‘Because I was openly rebellious and Daphne always chose the course of least resistance, then did as she wanted to as soon as his back was turned. He thought she was meek and tractable and would do as he told her, in so far as he thought of either of us as beings and not his chattels to be disposed of as he chose.’
‘Miserable old fool.’
Somehow his round condemnation of her late father made her smile, even if it wobbled and flattened at the thought of all that cold idiocy had cost the Thessaly twins.
‘He was, but you can see why Daphne longed so desperately for a lover when she had so little affection from anyone other than me in her life, can you not?’
It came out more as a plea than a demand he understood her twin and she was grateful for the warmth of his hands as he folded her cold ones in his and watched her with a mix of admiration and exasperation in his intent gaze.
‘And what of Lady Chloe Thessaly? Was she supposed to stand alone and become the prop for her weaker sister whenever a lover let her down? You must have felt so alone, my love, so forsaken, when your sister and companion was bundled away like that.’
‘I always knew that one day we would be parted. Daphne needed to be loved and supported and I had to hope she would meet a man strong enough to do both, until Papa came up with his plan to wed her to a monster. Every day we were apart I was scared she’d do something dreadful to evade what he had in mind for her.’
There, she had almost admitted it for the first time in her life. She had been terrified her sister would find the prospect of that marriage so impossible to endure she would choose death over it.
‘It was almost a relief to me when she returned to Carraway Court unwed and with child by a lover she refused to identify even to me,’ she added, because he might as well know all her secrets now the worst one was out in the open.
‘Oh, my love,’ he said, everything she longed for and couldn’t have in his dear eyes as he watched her without condemnation. ‘What a heavy burden your wretched family made you carry when you were too young to bear even half of it.’
‘I grew up very quickly,’ she said with a would-be careless shrug, but he drew her closer instead of letting her stand further off and clasped their hands between them as if he never intended letting her go for very long.
‘No wonder you thought me such a paltry creature when I made you that dishonourable proposition ten years ago,’ he almost managed to joke, despite the pain of that driven declaration spiky between them even now.
‘I didn’t, Luke, I thought you were the only man I might ever love enough to accept it. Then I thought of Verity and had to say no for all of us.’
‘Aye, and you were right to do so, but if only I’d let myself delve deeper then, looked a little harder at Mrs Chloe Wheaton and all the witchy secrets you didn’t know and I thought you did.’
‘I wouldn’t have told you anything back then.’
‘Probably not, but it would be good to remember that I tried.’
‘I think you did,’ she almost whispered and somehow it sounded so loud on the freezing air she looked about and wondered how they must look to a casual observer, this potent lord and his encroaching housekeeper.
‘Whereas I think I was a fool until very recently. Now stop distracting me with might have been and let me get this confounded quest over and done with, before I decide to consign it to the devil and stay here and lay siege to you until you finally agree to wed me after all, my Chloe.’
‘None of it will go away,’ she warned.
‘Maybe not, but life and hope must win out over history and gossip. I have to believe it and so ought you, my darling. Coming to terms with our future will keep you out of mischief while I am away.’
‘As if I need any sort of occupation with your house to spring clean and put back in order for you,’ she said brusquely, but suddenly all the barely hidden energy of nature in January felt as alive in her as it was in the bulbs pushing through the cold earth even here, in the frozen realm of Winter.
‘I’ll return to you,’ he promised, all that life and promise in his dear eyes as he held their clasped hands up to show her they were pledged on a level even she couldn’t deny,
‘To us?’ she offered as a sort of compromise, since they agreed Eve should stay here while he was away and Verity would become a weekly boarder for now and it felt as if a family was forming between them whether she wanted it to or not. ‘Will that do?’
‘For now, and that brings me back to my quest—what sort of lover would your sister have favoured?’
‘A young Adonis, such as my Lord Mantaigne might have been ten years ago, if he was less cynical, which I doubt,’ she said after thinking clearly about that lover for the first time since she realised her twin was with child by him.
‘He was never so and had better keep away from this Thessaly twin if he wants to keep a whole skin,’ Luke said crossly and she smiled.
‘I prefer dark and brooding Border raiders.’
‘Stop trying to hold me here with half-promises, woman. I’m off to find this idol of your sister’s with his feet of clay. After I confront him and beat him to a pulp, I shall be able to come back and wed you at long last.’
‘As if that will solve anything. I said no and I’ve got work to do,’ she told him huffily and pulled out of his arms to walk away with the sound of his surprised laughter echoing in her ears.
‘Insufferable, stubborn, impossible man,’ she muttered as she marched inside, then darted into the flower room when she thought she heard someone coming downstairs.
Chloe splashed frigid water from a jug waiting to warm up enough to be used to refresh the few vases of flowers available at this time of year and gasped in a deep breath. The impossibility of it all threatened to suck the elation and hope out of her, but this time it wouldn’t go. That had been her last no and they both knew it. He was a risk she had to take when he got back from Scotland, whatever the result of his quest might be. She was going to take that risk on love Daphne warned her against with her dying breath. Risk or not, she was going to have to jump right into it and trust him not to let them both drown.
* * *
She felt a little less convinced he’d manage it when she came down the elegant front stairs of Farenze Lodge on a fine spring morning six weeks later, ready to begin the grand clear out of hatchments, black veiling and all the other trappings of mourning Virginia had ordered must take place as soon as possible after her death. Chloe knew she should be as happy as she ever could be here without her