‘Faintest idea of what?’
‘That your long and dusky locks, brooding frowns and touch-me-not air are sure to drive the débutantes insane with longing at their first sight of you across a crowded ballroom. The moment you stand among a London rout glaring at any boy brave enough to dance with your Eve, the little darlings will start swooning by rote for the lack of space to do it all at once in comfort.’
Luke felt himself pale at the very idea, so no wonder Tom laughed. ‘Why?’ he asked hollowly. ‘I’ll be old enough to be their father.’
‘As are all those dark and brooding villains out of the Gothic novels they devour by the yard, I suppose. Who knows what flights of the imagination such silly chits are capable of dreaming up between them, but you’ll be a prime target for them and their ambitious mamas if you set foot in London without a viscountess at your side.’
‘I wasn’t going to worry about one of those until Eve is safely wed.’
‘Leave Eve to find her husband when she’s ready, man; you owe her that for enduring life with a hermit like you all these years.’
Luke shook his head, but was Mantaigne right? He couldn’t see much attraction in a beetle-browed countenance and raven’s wing black hair he only kept overlong because he had no patience with constant visits from a barber or his new valet’s fussing and primping. When it came to his features, he’d just been relieved Eve had escaped the Winterley Roman nose and put down the occasional appreciative feminine stare as a penchant for his acres and title. Marriage to Pamela Verdoyne had cured him of vanity and he wondered if she’d done him such a great favour if he was about to blunder into the ballrooms of the ton unprepared.
‘I won’t have Eve endure a stepmother like mine,’ he said with a shudder.
‘That’s in your hands,’ Tom said with a shrug.
‘What is this, some sort of conspiracy to marry me off?’
‘That takes more than one person, my lord, and I’m not a matchmaker.’
‘So Virginia, you and my own dear, sweet scheming Eve don’t make a set?’
‘Not through prior agreement, but all three of us can’t be wrong.’
‘Yes, you can—by Heaven you’re more wrong in triplicate than alone.’
Tom merely raised his eyebrows and looked sceptical before calmly helping himself to another glass of cognac.
‘Did Virginia put you up to this?’ Luke asked suspiciously.
‘Don’t you think I’ve a mind of my own and the sense to see what you won’t yourself? If she wasn’t dead, I could strangle that spoilt witch you wed so hastily, Luke; she married you for your expectations, then rejected you for so-called love, as if it was your fault she was born vain, empty-headed and contrary.’
‘I should never have agreed to marry her,’ Luke said with a shrug, recalling the long and bitter rows of his marriage with a shudder that sent him back to the brandy decanter for a second glass before he’d quite taken in the fact he’d drunk the first.
‘Your father and wicked stepmother should take the blame for pushing such a paltry marriage on an infatuated lad. You’re not a boy now, though, and you badly need a wife, my friend, at least you do if you’re to avoid being ruthlessly pursued through every ballroom in London by a pack of ninnies when Eve makes her début.’
‘Shouldn’t you be more concerned with securing your own succession, since you’re the last of the Banburghs and I have a younger brother?’
‘The Banburghs can go hang as far as I’m concerned, but it’s not good for James to be in limbo, never sure if he’s to be your heir or only the “what if tragedy struck?” spare Winterley male. He’s bored and restless and probably lonely and who knows what he gets up to when our backs are turned?’
‘You know very well he’d never confide in me,’ Luke said and let himself feel how much it hurt that his brother hated him, even if he had cause to hate him back.
‘Left to himself, he would have followed you about like a stray puppy when you were younger.’
Luke gave a snort of derision at the idea of elegant and sophisticated James Winterley following anyone slavishly, let alone his despised elder brother. ‘That particular apple never fell far from the tree,’ he said darkly, even as the laziness of the cliché made him wonder if he wasn’t guilty of prejudice himself.
‘And you think his lot so much better than your own?’ Tom persisted impatiently.
‘Whatever I think, let’s postpone feeling sorry for James because his mother loved him and hated me for another day, shall we?’
‘Don’t leave it too late to remedy,’ Tom warned with a steady look that made Luke wonder if he didn’t know more about James’s dark and tangled affairs than he was letting on. ‘I’m going off to bother my valet and idle away an hour until dinner. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a pleasant and peaceful evening against all the odds,’ his friend said before he sauntered from the room.
‘Slim enough chance of anything of the kind under this roof,’ Luke muttered grumpily and finished his brandy before going upstairs.
The January twilight was already all but over when Luke stumped up the elegant staircase. He rang for the bath he needed as soon as he reached his bedchamber and heard hot water carried in within minutes, so there was no excuse to sack the housekeeper on the spot and end this torture. As he relaxed into the tub images of the dratted woman slid slyly into his head.
Why her? Why was it Chloe Wheaton he seemed doomed to want every time he set eyes on her? She was a fine-looking woman, despite the deplorable gowns and concealing cap, but he’d met other fine-looking women and some of them diamonds of the first water. No other woman on this fair earth could get him in a stew of frustrated yearning with one distrustful glance and how he wished it otherwise.
If only it was merely the thought of a fine female body in his bed that made him want her so badly. He ached with the frustration of not having her as his lover. There was something unique about her that even ten years of trying couldn’t expunge from his senses. He recalled a fateful day that summer when they first met; he’d come upon her playing with her little girl in the woods above the house and just stood and watched where neither could see him.
At last the heat of the day drained the child’s energy and Chloe had sung softly to calm her, then rocked little Verity to sleep in her arms. Luke recalled envy eating at him like acid as he wanted such love and tenderness for the babes they could bring into the world together, if only everything was different.
Instead it had been Wheaton who recklessly married a schoolgirl and got a baby on her, or so she had once told him. Luke felt his fists tighten at the thought of Wheaton exposing the woman he was supposed to love to such a hard, narrow life as she’d had to lead since.
He had been about to turn away when the June sunlight picked out the trail of tears on Chloe’s face as she gazed down at her sleeping babe. Even now he felt the jar of it as his heart thudded at the memory. Back then he had had to clamp down on the need to stride over to her and take her in his arms so hard he discovered afterwards he’d clenched his fists until the blood flowed.
He left the next day, all his wild schemes for somehow making it easier for her to be his mistress by getting her to act the quietly respectable wife, whose reclusive husband sailed the seven seas, then wanted no company but hers whenever he was home, shattered. He couldn’t do that to her, or little Verity or any other babies they might make between them. It was a half-life and he couldn’t offer her so little.
Curse it; he wouldn’t let passion waft him along as if he had no free will now either. Yet when he conjured