The Lady Who Loved Him

by Christi Caldwell

  Wastes the short Summer of delicious days,

  And from the tranquil path of wisdom strays,

  In passion’s thorny wild, forlorn to dwell.”

  While he recited the words, he stroked the pad of his thumb along the puff of her sleeve, grazing her skin, eliciting faint but audible inhalations.

  Yes, his wife might laud herself on being practical and logical and turn her nose up at romance and passion, but she was born to both.

  “…Where holy Innocence resides enshrin’d;

  Who fear not sorrow, and who know not guile,

  Each thought compos’d, and ev’ry wish resign’d;

  Tempt not the path where pleasure’s flow’ry wile

  In sweet, but pois’nous fetters, holds the mind…”

  As he finished, he lowered the book, facedown, on his lap.

  “I… I had not read that one yet,” she whispered.

  Leo caressed his thumb along her slightly fuller lip. “There is much you have not done yet.” He lowered his voice. “Many things I want to show you.” His gaze fell to her mouth. A bolt of lust shot through him. I want to kiss her… I want to lay myself between her welcoming thighs…

  And just like that, the tables were flipped and the world turned upside down as the seducer became the seduced.

  “Are people watching?” she whispered.

  Hyde Park had slipped away except for them… with her query pulling him back to the moment… and reality. He snapped his head up and looked around.

  Lords riding by, young women off with their maids, gentlemen strolling with ladies all watched on. As they’d intended.

  Because it was all for show, on this, Leo’s quest to be a proper gentleman.

  Only, somewhere between pretend and a poem, the purpose of their being here, his assignment, all of it had become muddled.

  Chloe stared quizzically. “Leo?”

  “They are staring sufficiently,” he answered belatedly. He lay the book beside them. “So tell me, Lady Chloe Dunlop, how is it a lady comes to be reading Mary Darby Robinson?” he asked, a question that benefitted the Brethren not at all and had nothing to do with his assignment or the quest to reshape himself in Society’s eyes. But it was one he wanted an answer to anyway.

  Chloe turned her head on his lap and looked up at him. “My parents insisted Philippa and I only read proper, ladylike texts, books on deportment and decorum.”

  He imagined the clever imp of a child she would have been. Such texts could have never satisfied her curiosity, even then. “Interesting stuff.”

  She laughed. “Precisely.”

  He tweaked her nose. “And here I’d imagine you would spirit away some forbidden texts tucked away on your family’s shelves.”

  Her expression darkened, ushering in a solemnity that made him yearn for the bell-like mirth that had spilled past her lips. He ached to call back what he’d meant as teasing.

  “Our mother read romantic novels,” she shared in quiet tones. “Philippa and I would sneak them into our chambers. Until…” A shadow fell across her eyes, ushering in a cold that touched Leo to his core.

  “Until?” he urged gruffly.

  His wife snapped upright. “I don’t… we just stopped… reading them, that is. Philippa didn’t. Or rather, she reads them now.” Chloe dug her fingertips into her temple. “I don’t. Sometimes I do. But not…” Chloe caught his gaze on her hands. She swiftly dropped them to her lap. Her ramblings drew to a cessation.

  Leo examined the brittle, white lines at the corners of his wife’s mouth and the thin thread she clung to. What secrets did Chloe hold? And why did he, who didn’t give a horse’s arse about anything or anyone, want to know them? “Where did you discover your love for Mrs. Mary Darby Robinson?” he asked gently.

  His wife drew her legs close and looped her arms loosely around them. “Jane arrived a few years ago as my companion. She introduced me to Mary Wollstonecraft and the other great philosophers.”

  The puzzle piece slid into place. “And their views on marriage.” It’s why she’d wished to retain a desperate grab on her freedom.

  His wife stretched her palm to the grass and dusted her fingertips over the blades, setting them into a back-and-forth sway. “My mind was set against marriage long before Jane arrived with her Mrs. Wollstonecraft,” she said cryptically and then went silent.

  Leo stared at her bent head as she attended her own distracted movements.

  Someone had broken her heart. Her sudden somberness was proof of her pain.

  He frowned, and a need filled him to bloody senseless the blighter who’d hurt her, to drive back Chloe’s melancholy and restore her to her usual cheer. Incapable of the former, he settled for the latter.

  It was foreign to Leo, this need to see another person happy. And yet, there it was.

  A gust of wind tore through the park, rippling the waters. That same heavy breeze tossed several golden curls across Chloe’s eyes.

  Catching the silken strands between his fingertips, Leo gently tucked them behind the delicate shell of her ear. “Where were we, Lady Tennyson?” he asked, startling a laugh from her, and the sheer sound of it filled his chest with a lightness.

  Chloe arched her neck back, finding his gaze with her own. “I never took us for the couple who would refer to one another by our titles.”

  He tweaked her nose… and lied through his teeth. “There is the whole respectability thing to consider,” he said, even as a question surfaced. What kind of couple had she taken them for, then? The immediate answer was… none, as their time together was limited, and their futures never meant to truly be tangled as one. The teasing in her voice, however, had contradicted the practical and put forward an enticing vision. Unnerved, he grabbed the book and quickly turned the pages before settling on a sonnet.

  “Is it to love, to fix the tender gaze,

  To hide the timid blush, and steal away;

  To shun the busy world, and waste the day

  In some rude mountain’s solitary maze?”

  As he quietly spoke, Chloe’s eyes slid closed. Unable to shift his gaze from the image she presented, resplendent in her ease and calm, he continued the recitation.

  “Is it to chant one name in ceaseless lays,

  To hear no words that other tongues can say,

  To watch the pale moon’s melancholy ray,

  To chide in fondness, and in folly praise?”

  A wistful smile danced on her perfect bow lips. Desire rippled through him. An aching to lower his head and take her mouth under his, to taste her, overwhelmed him. “I haven’t read either of those yet.” She slowly opened her eyes. A contemplative glitter sparkled in their cerulean-blue depths. “I never took Mrs. Robinson as a romantic. She lived apart from her husband and wrote about the rights of women and—”

  “And she also saw that advancing rights of one did not preclude her from abandoning her passions.” Leo rubbed the pad of his thumb along the seam of her plump lips. “There is no shame in exploring the pleasures our bodies should derive, Chloe.”

  Her cheeks turned several shades of red, the color reaching the roots of her hair.

  Since he’d turned his back and soul on good, he’d sneered at virtuous ladies such as his wife. Now, he saw that innocence in a new light, tempting and enthralling, like Eve in the garden of sin. And he sat before her, hungering for that fruit.

  He leaned down to take that which he craved. A breeze gusted across the Serpentine, whipping Chloe’s bonnet up and hurling it toward the shore.

  His wife pinched his thigh.

  “Bloody hell,” he groused, rubbing the wounded flesh.

  “This is where a respectable gentleman rescues the bonnet.”

  “I was going to kiss you,” he said bluntly.

  Her shoulders shook with a laugh. “I know,” Chloe confessed on a whisper. She plucked the book from his hands. “The bonnet better serves your purposes than a public kiss.”

  In this instance, he didn’t give
a jot about his reputation. The need to have her in his arms superseded all.

  Blanching, Leo surged to his feet. My God, what am I thinking? “The bonnet it is,” he croaked, jabbing a finger in the air.

  Chloe grinned that impish, blindingly bright expression of mirth that sucked the breath from his lungs.

  What madness had befallen him? It is merely that she is an innocent. Rakes were enticed by innocence. Except, he hadn’t been. After he’d broken one lady’s heart, he’d despised any hint of it. “My bonnet, dear sir,” Chloe said in modulating tones suited to an aging matron. The teasing repartee slashed across his panicky musings.

  He sprang into movement. “My lady.” Leo took off after the straw bonnet as it hopped along the shore. The article came to a gradual rest and then took off tumbling again. Grateful for the distance, he struggled to resurrect long-built walls.

  All these years, he’d prided himself on being fearless. He’d faced head on the threat of death, danger, and dying with equable measure. Only to find himself racing away from a spirited minx with mischievous eyes and a too-clever mind.

  Not for the first time since he’d married, Leo acknowledged the dangers posed by being married to Chloe.

  *

  As Leo tripped over himself in his haste to retrieve her bonnet, laughter spilled from Chloe’s lips, free and honest and so very wonderful.

  If she hadn’t signed an agreement with the gentleman outlining the business terms of their union, she might, in fact, see more in their afternoon outing.

  And if she didn’t know Leo was one of Society’s most outrageous rakes, Chloe could almost believe he was a tenderhearted gentleman. One who doled out fencing lessons to small girls and who’d gallantly carried Chloe through the streets of London to spare her ankle further injury. And one who asked her what she read and why, and who in turn recited romantic poetry—and recited it as though the verses meant something to him.

  But she did know precisely what had sent him sneaking into her family’s home to offer her a marriage of convenience.

  Regret struck unexpectedly at her breast.

  Chloe clenched the book in her fingers tightly, leaving crescent marks upon the pages.

  For she knew, ultimately, Leo was a rake solely bent on a path of respectability to please his uncle and settle his debts.

  She ripped her gaze from the man responsible for her suddenly unsettled world and absently glanced at the poem he’d read.

  “Ah! wherefore by the Church-yard side,

  Poor little LORN ONE, dost thou stray?”

  Chloe stared at the page. Puzzling her brow, she skimmed the verses. “Thy wavy locks but thinly hide. The tears that dim thy blue-eye’s ray…”

  Nay, those unfamiliar verses.

  “What?” she whispered, trying to make sense of it.

  Mayhap he’d simply handed the book over at a different place from where he’d read. Of course. That was no doubt what he’d done. Frantic, Chloe flipped to the front of the book, searching the titles, searching, searching…

  It is not here.

  Which meant… he’d recited the poem from memory. Two of them. Nay, not by just any poet, but the English Sappho, who’d crafted feminist treatises and championed the rights of women.

  And Leo had read her.

  Her mind raced with everything he’d revealed in his questioning of her, his familiarity with Mrs. Robinson’s works and past and life—

  “What’s that, love?”

  Chloe jerked her head up with such alacrity the muscles along the back of her neck screamed in protest. “I didn’t say anything,” she blurted.

  Leo arched a golden eyebrow.

  Heart hammering, Chloe scrambled to her feet. “Nothing,” she squeaked. All the while, her mind raced. “It is nothing.” But why did it feel very much… like something?

  Or did she, in her need to want him to be more, simply make castles out of sand?

  That dangerous half-grin still affixed to his firm lips, he moved his eyes over her face like one who searched for secrets and who’d ultimately find them.

  “I said we should go,” she lied, snapping the book closed. Chloe cradled it close to her chest. “I… trust we’ve spent sufficient time here.”

  Did she imagine the flash of disappointment in his blue eyes? “Of course.” He sprang into action, gathering up the blanket and basket with such speed that it slayed any such silly ponderings.

  A short while later, after the short trek to his curricle, Chloe and Leo sat in a stilted silence for the slow journey back to their townhouse.

  Seated on the bench beside him, Chloe examined the small tome, flipping past poem after poem, searching in vain for a sonnet that was not contained within the leather bindings.

  Nothing.

  Chloe snapped it closed. As Leo expertly guided the conveyance along Oxford Street, Chloe absently surveyed the passing West London scene and tried to make sense of Leo’s recitation of Mary Darby Robinson’s sonnet.

  The easiest explanation that slid the puzzle piece that was Leo Dunlop into place was that rakes and rogues and scoundrels alike all used poetry as a tool of seduction.

  But what of the other pieces that did not make sense where her husband was concerned? She ran through every encounter, every exchange they’d had, looking at them through new lenses: his memorization of the ten detailed terms she’d brought to him, the list of rules for reform he’d glanced briefly at and acknowledged.

  Leo Dunlop, the Marquess of Tennyson, might have rightly earned his reputation as a rake, but he was keenly intelligent. Nor were the two traits mutually exclusive. So why did it feel as though there was more at play here, after all?

  In the end, her attempts at restraint were in vain.

  “You knew the poem,” she charged.

  Leo clenched his fingers around the reins and then relaxed those digits. “Is that a question?”

  Ignoring the droll edge, she lifted the book. “You read poetry.” Nay, not just any poetry. “Poems written by female poets and philosophers.”

  She searched for some hint of response. His face was a careful study in stone that even a marble sculpture would struggle to emulate.

  “I don’t read poetry,” he finally said emphatically, guiding the pair of whites around a corner.

  “You’ve read it, then,” she surmised. It was all that made sense in a world that was suddenly without stabilizing clarity. Except… “That is a question about your past, though, isn’t it?” One of the secret parts of himself he’d demanded complete control of.

  “What does it matter my familiarity with a bloody poem?” he groused. “I’m a rake. One of those gents who uses glib words, hooded stares, and,” he lowered his voice to a husky purr, “scandalous touches to seduce.” Shifting the reins to one hand, he slid his other palm along the side of her hip.

  “Stop.” Chloe shoved his hand back. “You’re attempting to distract me,” she noted. A dull flush stained his cheeks, but he did not deny it. “You would have me believe that of all the romantic verses and poems you might have used to seduce a lady, your choice was that of Mary Darby Robinson?” Chloe turned on the bench and looked squarely at him. “Most women prefer Lord Byron,” she said, tossing back the observation he’d made in Hyde Park. “You said it yourself.”

  “I know what I said,” he clipped out, his gaze trained directly forward. “Do you want to know the truth?” he snapped. “Do you want me to tell you how my father ridiculed and mocked me for reading feminine works? How he burned those volumes as a punishment for my not being the son he truly wished for?”

  “Oh, Leo,” she whispered. Her heart buckled under the power of the revelation. For the suffering he’d known. All along, she’d seen them as two very different people, surely incapable of having anything in common. They had both suffered at the hands of a cruel sire. Chloe covered her husband’s hand with her own. He stiffened, but did not pull away.

  His Adam’s apple worked.

  Silently, Chloe w
illed her husband to look at her. To tear his focus from the crowded streets that slowed their progress through London and see that they were the unlikeliest pair of like souls. Selfishly, she longed for him to let her in, while she herself was unable to share the ugliest horrors of her past.

  “My father hated me,” he said softly, a man who’d forgotten anyone else was near. In this moment, Chloe could have owned the admission made by her husband. His lips parted on a laugh filled with self-loathing. “I was a bastard, and he hated me for it.”

  She made a sound of protest. “Your father was the bastard.” The exclamation was ripped from her, from a place of knowing.

  Leo chuckled, the sound devoid of mirth. “You misunderstand me, Wife. I was a bastard child sired by another man. A babe that didn’t have the decency to join its mother in death and, instead, lived on to forever remind the marquess of his wife’s infidelity. When his real son, my brother who wouldn’t even acknowledge me, kicked up his heels.”

  Chloe gripped the bench to keep steady as the enormity of what he revealed robbed her of breath. What a horrid existence it must have been for him, a motherless babe surrounded by hatred and loathing.

  Oh, Leo.

  How she despised the passersby and carriages clogging the roads. She yearned to be alone with Leo and this revelation so she could fold him close and weep for what he, too, had lost.

  Tension crackled between them, and she weighed her next words. “Your birth, your mother’s death, her infidelity, none of that was your fault, Leo,” she said quietly.

  Leo expertly handled the reins, guiding the carriage down the busy thoroughfare. They might as well have been any of the other lords and ladies in passing conveyances. Except, the gravity of the secrets they shared set them in an altogether different hemisphere. Chloe roved her gaze over Leo’s face, the chiseled planes carved in stone. “The only one to blame for wrongdoing was the man who treated you with such cruelty for actions that belonged to others and who was too cruel to give love to a babe.” Who desperately needed it.

  “Pfft. He knew what I was.”

  And, at last, it made sense. The truth came to her with a staggering clarity. Leo had spent his life fulfilling every low expectation the late marquess had of him. Chloe had long ago come to peace with the fact that she hadn’t been responsible for her father’s sins… but Leo had never come to that realization. If the late Lord Tennyson were alive, she’d gladly plunge a stake through his black heart. “Leo?”