Elizabeth Beacon - The Regency Season - Scandalous Awakening

‘I’m not so sure you’re as hard-headed as you think, Papa, but this is a fine house and it certainly feels as if it’s been done with love.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Luke said with a brooding glance at the lovely place.

Unlike his predecessor, he loved Darkmere Castle and the stark beauty of its airy, windswept setting, but could see the attraction of having a smaller, more modern dwelling to retreat to on an ice-cold January afternoon like this one. He would need to spend part of the year here if he was to make sure it remained the gracious and elegant home Virgil and Virginia had always intended it to be. He cast a brooding glance at the lush parkland and rolling hills around him and decided most men would think him a fool or a liar if he said it was a mixed blessing. Yes, Mrs Chloe Wheaton would have to leave if he was to live here for very long, for both their sakes.

Even as he reaffirmed the rightness of his decision he saw a slender feminine figure come to stand below one of the half-lowered blinds at the long window of Virginia’s bedchamber to see who had arrived. Luke felt his heart jar, then race on at the double when the youthful housekeeper of Farenze Lodge visibly flinched under his fierce scrutiny. She met it with a proud lift of her chin and an icy composure he could only envy.

He couldn’t swear under his breath with Eve standing so close she could hear every syllable, yet a clutch of unwanted need tightened its hot claw in his gut while he gazed back with furious hunger. It seemed my Lord Farenze wanted the dratted woman as hotly as ever and he still couldn’t have her.

* * *

He’s here, whispered the siren voice of unreason as Chloe glared at her bugbear and did her best to ignore it. He’s come back to you at last, it whispered yearningly and she wished she could silence it for ever. It sprang back to life like some annoying spectre, refusing to be banished to outer darkness whenever she tried to pretend Lord Farenze was a gruff and disagreeable gentleman she could forget when she left for good. Since Virginia became so ill they lost hope of her survival, the thought of the viscount’s arrival to mourn his beloved great-aunt only added to her desolation.

Yet she still felt a charge crackle in the air when he set foot on the straw-muffled gravel. Chloe knew who the latest arrival at Farenze Lodge was by some misplaced instinct, so why was she standing here staring at him like an idiot? Lord Farenze quirked a haughty eyebrow as if to ask why she had the right to stare? He was master of Farenze Lodge and so much more and she was only the housekeeper. Her inner fool was so hungry it kept her gazing at him even after she’d made it clear she wasn’t going to shrink and tremble at the sight of him.

‘Imbecile,’ she muttered to herself.

He looked dominant, vigorous and cross-grained as ever. She could see that his crow-black hair was untouched by silver and too long for fashion when he mockingly swept off his hat and gave her an almost bow; dark brows drawn sharply above eyes she knew were nothing like the simple grey they looked from here. Close up they were complex as he was; silver grey and would-be icy, but with hints of well-hidden poetry and passion in the rays of gold and green at the centre of his clear irises. She wondered if such feelings would die if a man refused to admit he had them long enough.

Recalling a time when he’d almost swept them both to disaster on a raging tide of wanting and needing, she did her best to pretend her shiver was for the cold day and this dark time in both their lives, not the memory of a Luke Winterley nobody else at Farenze Lodge would recognise in the chilly lord on the gravel sweep below. The besotted, angry girl of a decade ago longed for him like a lost puppy, but mature Mrs Wheaton shuddered at the idea of succumbing to the fire and false promise of a younger, more vulnerable Lord Farenze and knew she had been right to say no to him.

‘Who is it, my dear?’ Culdrose, her late mistress’s elderly dresser, asked from her seat by the vast and luxurious bed.

‘Lord Farenze, Cully,’ Chloe said with an unwary sigh and almost felt the older woman’s gaze focusing on her back.

‘And very good time he’s made then, but why call him “imbecile” when he got here as fast as he could?’

‘You have sharp ears, Cully. I wasn’t talking about Lord Farenze,’ Chloe said and promised herself she’d break free of his compelling gaze any moment now.

‘I may have white hair, but my wits haven’t gone a-begging. His lordship is a fine man, as any woman with two good eyes in her head can see. You’ll only be a fool if you lose your wits over him.’

‘I shall not,’ Chloe murmured and turned away with a dignified nod she hoped told him: I have seen you, my lord. I will avoid you like the plague from now on, so kindly return the compliment.

* * *

What was so special about the woman his toes tingled and his innards burned at even the sight of her from afar? Luke told himself to be relieved when she broke that long gaze into each other’s eyes across yards of icy January air. He didn’t want more reminders of how close to disaster he once walked with her. Feeling ruffled and torn by feelings he didn’t want to think about right now, he did his best to let the frigid breeze cool his inner beast and shivered at the idea of how cold it would be to ruin a good woman’s reputation and mire her little girl’s prospects with scandal.

He was six and thirty, not a green boy with every second thought of the female sex and an incessant urge to mate. If she could turn away with such cool disdain, he would get through this without begging for her glorious body in his bed. She was an upper servant; he recalled the fate of such women whose lovers wanted them so badly that they married beneath them out of desperation and shuddered. He might not like her much just now, but he couldn’t wish such a fate on a woman he respected for her strength of character, even if it got confoundedly in the way of the pleasure they could have had in each other if she wasn’t so sternly armoured against it.

‘I wonder how it feels to love someone as deeply as Virginia did,’ Eve mused and jarred Luke back to here and now. His heartbeat leapt into a panicky race at the idea his daughter had inherited her mother’s ridiculous romantic notions.

‘Painful and dangerous, I should imagine,’ he replied brusquely.

‘Now I think it could be wondrous and exhilarating to love the right person and have them love you back, Papa.’

‘Your mother would have agreed with you, time after time,’ he cautioned and shuddered at the memory of his wife falling in ‘love’ again and again as soon as she decided her young husband wasn’t her ideal after all.

Sometimes traces of Pamela’s pettish outbursts shook him if Eve pouted mulishly, or flounced out of the room in a headlong temper, but his Eve was too kind-hearted to treat a man as if he had no more feelings than a block of wood. He often wondered how such a loving child came from such an ill-starred marriage.

‘Please choose someone worthy of you when you marry, Eve,’ he cautioned. ‘Don’t accept the first beau to say he loves you one day and someone else the next.’

‘I’m not an idiot, Papa, and you’ll end up a lonely old cynic when I do find a fine man to spend my life with if you’re not careful.’

‘I want you settled before I find a suitable wife.’

Eve grimaced and rolled her eyes. ‘Suitable?’ she echoed dubiously. ‘Aunt Virginia would hate to hear you speak so. It sounds as if you’re expecting to choose a wife from an emporium and have her delivered to the church on an appropriate day for a wedding, complete with her bridal attire and a suite of attendants.’