Elizabeth Beacon - Regency Rogues - A Winter's Night - The Winterley Scandal / The Governess Heiress

So many ifs made a fantasy, but if there was some trace of his mother’s diamonds, Uncle Horace might help him find them. Colm knew his uncle and aunt felt they had let his little brother’s children down by staying away when their father died. Now they were back in England the duchy wasn’t the rich inheritance it was before the last Duke and Colm’s grandfather spent money like water. The current Duke couldn’t afford to dower his niece and establish his nephew as the gentleman his birth argued, because Uncle Maurice would be watching his future inheritance like a hawk. The new Duchess was unlikely to produce a child after a quarter of a century of marriage, so Lord Maurice would insist on an allowance as his brother’s heir before Lord Chris’s children got a penny of Hancourt money beyond the twenty pounds a year already settled on them by the last Duke. Those diamonds might be a false hope, Colm mused as he made his way down the back steps of Derneley house, but sometimes it was better to have one of those than none at all.

The work of getting the Derneley Collection listed and packed up ready for its new home, so he could get out of this house, felt more urgent today. As Colm went about it he couldn’t stop thinking of his latest meeting with Miss Winterley. He didn’t number many fine ladies among his acquaintance, but something told him she was an unusual one. This morning she seemed as relaxed as if he was a fashionable gentleman in Hyde Park at the fashionable hour, instead of an almost servant in Green Park at some unlikely hour of the morning for a lady who had been at a party late into the night. He let his hands slow for a moment as he thought of her in the clear light of a fine autumn morning. Her skin was flawless, he recalled, and she was still young enough for a late night and early morning not to be written under her eyes. Her bonnet was modest by the standards of the current fashion for vast pokes that hid the wearer from view if there was any danger of shadows. So now he knew that her eyes truly were a rare shade of blue-green and could haunt a man to his grave if he wasn’t careful. Add a slender but womanly figure and the smile that made her unique and he had best think about diamonds again and forget Miss Winterley as best he could.

Anything more than a stiff acquaintance between that lady and Mr Carter was clearly impossible, so he thought about that passage he had copied out last night in his room and with the door safely shut behind him. He took out the paper he kept in his jacket pocket lest some servant find it and scanned Pamela’s words for anything that passed him by last night. He was bone weary at the time and his head so full of Eve Winterley and her icy father he couldn’t think straight. There might be a stray word he’d missed the sense of as he wrote it down. The last page of her diary seemed to sum the woman up perfectly.

Knowing the full power of my own beauty at last and feeling men lust for me so deeply they can’t fight it is wonderful, but jewels never fade. I don’t intend to be deprived of a single stone, and they will never make me feel less than beautiful, however old I get.

So had written the woman who would never get much older than she had been when she’d made that last entry in the diary.

Colm’s mouth twisted in distaste as he re-read her self-centred ramblings, but he felt a spark of regret for a vivid life cut short all the same. He was sorry Lord Farenze would have to read his late wife’s words and wonder what made her as she was. Colm had no idea how it felt to walk in the Viscount’s expensive shoes, but he didn’t envy him the memory of a wife no one man could satisfy. Her words told him enough about Pamela to know she would have left Colm’s father for another lover, however deeply Lord Chris adored her. Colm was almost glad Lord Chris hadn’t lived to watch the woman who cost him so dearly walk away without a backward look.

Emotions he didn’t want to imagine underlay the dark fascination of a duke’s youngest son and the runaway wife of a very young peer. If he let himself dwell on such wild passions he might feel an echo of them for some unsuspecting female. A picture of Miss Winterley looking horrified as he poured out his insatiable desire for her made him flinch, then smile at the next image of her speechless with shocked surprise that he could feel anything at all, let alone that. She was so unlike her dam, Colm felt guilty for misjudging her last night and uneasy about the thunder of passionate need in his own veins as he watched her ghost into his temporary lair breathless and far too desirable for her own good before they had even spoken to each other.

Eve had given her father time to read all Pamela’s letters and diaries before confronting him the day after she met Mr Carter in Green Park. It must make painful reading for him and she doubted her mother’s self-centred outpourings shone much light on what had made her long for a succession of ever wilder lovers.

‘You really won’t let me read a word of my mother’s papers, will you?’ Eve challenged as she followed him into his study after breakfast.

‘I wish I could burn the lot right now, so there would be no risk of you or anyone else ever reading a word of her selfish drivel,’ her father said with a preoccupied frown at the locked drawer of his desk where she guessed the diaries were sitting like a row of fat little grenades that could be so destructive in the wrong hands she shuddered at the thought of it.

‘Then why don’t you?’ she asked with a nod at the fire burning steadily in the grate on this fine but chilly morning.

‘Because it isn’t right to deprive that boy of a chance,’ he murmured as if he was fighting the urge to do it anyway.

‘What boy? Oh, you mean Lord Christopher Hancourt’s son, I suppose. I thought he was dead; nobody has heard of him for years and his family never talk about him or the little girl I remember someone mentioning once.’

‘Their father spent the lad’s rightful inheritance on your mother and I can’t believe that fool was besotted enough to simply hand over all those jewels to her. She knew the Lambury Jewels weren’t even his to give, but she seduced and sulked as only she knew how until she got them out of him. There isn’t a single word of remorse about the boy and his sister in the books and papers Carter handed over.’

‘It would be beneath him to hold back a single letter of hers once he made you that promise,’ Eve argued against Mr Carter holding something over them. Her father’s acute gaze focused on her as if he was trying to read her thoughts and feelings about a man she didn’t even like. Of course she didn’t feel anything for the stiff-necked idiot, how could she? She still felt the need to affirm his honesty for some reason. ‘He wouldn’t keep anything that didn’t belong to him,’ she added.

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ her father murmured so low she wondered if she was mistaken. ‘Nothing Pamela did should shame you, love,’ he said out loud and with such sadness and concern in his eyes Eve felt guilty about reminding him of those dark days in both their lives, not that she could remember them.

‘Nor you, Papa,’ she said. ‘She did enough damage when she was alive. Please don’t agonise over her sins now she’s dead. The memory of them kept you and darling Chloe apart for years, so don’t fret about things she never felt a second’s worth of unease about now.’

‘Yet if I burn these books I might deprive that boy of the better life and we Winterleys have done enough damage in that quarter already. If there’s any chance those jewels she writes about so gleefully can be found and I destroy a clue to where they are, then I shall be the one in need of a few scruples and not Pamela.’