by Jane Feather
“Nothing really.” She stood, frowning down at the threadbare carpet. Hugo’s renovations had been strictly limited to the public rooms of his house, and his household staff was at the barest socially acceptable minimum.
“Out with it, lass.”
“You find Lady Carrington attractive, don’t you?”
Hugo leaned back against the carved headboard, a slight frown in his eyes now. “What makes you say that?”
“I can tell from the way you look at her when you’re talking to her,” she replied. “She is very beautiful and very witty. And you seem to like talking to her.”
“I do enjoy talking to her.”
“And she flirts,” Chloe said, raising her eyes from the carpet. “Doesn’t she?”
Hugo smiled. “Yes, she does. Women in her position often do. It’s a game.”
“A game you like to play.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “A game I enjoy playing with Lady Carrington.”
“Mmmm. Would you like to make love to her?”
Hugo pulled at his chin, trying to work out what was going on. “Judith Devlin is a married woman, lass. And from what I can see, a very happily married woman.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s so. But it doesn’t answer my question. Would you like to make love to her?” She was standing at the end of his bed, holding on to one of the posts, now completely oblivious of her nakedness.
He debated and decided on an honest response. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I could imagine making love to Lady Carrington with a great deal of pleasure.”
“I thought so. I expect she would know much more about it than I do.”
“You learn very fast, lass,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “Come here.” He stretched out a hand in invitation.
Chloe remained where she was. “But I’m not worldly or … or up to snuff, like Lady Carrington.”
“Come here.” Hugo leaned forward, caught her around the waist, and toppled her onto the bed beside him. “No, you are not worldly, and it would be quite wrong for you to be so. Why on earth are you comparing yourself with a woman some ten years older than you? If you must make comparisons, then do so with other debutantes.”
“But you’re not interested in debutantes,” she said, lying rather stiffly against him. “And I’m comparing myself with women you are interested in.”
“Ahhh.” He sat up. It seemed a moment for plain speaking. “I think we’d better clarify a few things, Chloe. This London scheme was of your devising, as I recall. You wish to acquire an accommodating husband so that you may have control of your fortune and thus the ordering of your own life. Isn’t that so?”
He looked down at her as she lay still on the bed. Her eyes were tightly closed. “Chloe, open your eyes and sit up.”
When she didn’t immediately comply, he pulled her into a sitting position. She opened her eyes, since keeping them shut while sitting up seemed absurd.
“Isn’t that so?” he repeated.
“It was,” she said. “But why can’t you marry me and then—”
“Of all the absurdities!” Hugo interrupted. “I’ve never heard such moon-mad nonsense. I am thirty-four, my dear child, and thirty-four makes a poor husband for seventeen—even if I wanted such a thing.”
“You wouldn’t want to marry me?” It was a soft question, but her eyes had darkened with the expectation of hurt.
“I have no intention of marrying anyone,” he stated. “As I’ve told you before. We are here because you wished it—and because it keeps you out of your brother’s orbit. You will enjoy your come-out like any other seventeen-year-old in her first Season, and if your reception tonight was anything to go by, you will have more offers of marriage than you can handle. We’ll both have our work cut out making the right choice for you.”
“But what about us?”
“What about us?” he demanded with sudden harshness, realizing the slipperiness of this slope. “I am breaking every honorable rule of conduct in the book, Chloe. I was weak enough to allow you to engineer this, but I have sworn you will not be harmed by it. You will marry and put this behind you, hopefully as an interlude that brings you only pleasant memories. You will tell no one about it, ever.”
“But I don’t want it to stop.” She looked at him with painful candor and put a hand on his thigh. “Please, Hugo, why must it ever stop? I’ll try very hard to be a good wife, and I can learn how to be like Lady Carrington—”
“For God’s sake, Chloe, stop it! I don’t want you to be like Lady Carrington. I do not want a wife, do you understand?” He put his hands on the slender shoulders and gave her a little shake. “I am not getting any deeper into this mess than I am already. The sooner you find yourself a husband and start leading an appropriate life, the happier I will be. Do you understand that?”
“You would be rid of me?”
“You are twisting my words.”
“I don’t think I am.” She slid away from his hands and stood up. “You said it was a mess.” She bent to pick up her nightgown.
Hugo sighed, passing a hand over his eyes. “And so it is. Can’t you see, little simpleton, how grossly improper this is? There are those who would say I have debauched my ward, and many would agree with them.”
“But you don’t believe that?” Her head appeared from the folds of the nightgown and her eyes fixed on his face.
“It is the bald truth,” he said flatly. “But bald truths are not always the whole story.”
“Why don’t you wish to marry anyone?”
“This catechism grows tedious.” He sounded suddenly bored.
“But I want to know,” she declared, coming over to the bed. “I think I’m entitled to know.”
“Oh, do you now?” He was genuinely annoyed, as much by her truculence as by the unwelcome persistence in an area he preferred to keep dark even from himself. “And just where, my impertinent brat, does this entitlement lie? Are you assuming that your presence in my bed gives you the right to poke and pry in whatever private thoughts and feelings I might have?”
Chloe flushed scarlet. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She had meant exactly that, but it sounded dreadful when put in those bluntly contemptuous terms. Feeling like the brat he had called her, firmly put in her place, she turned to the door with a mumbled “Good night.”
Hugo made no attempt to stop her. He swore under his breath, a short barnyard oath, wondering why he hadn’t foreseen such a damnable complication in an already impossibly convoluted situation.
He had convinced himself she was simply trying her sexual wings and he was giving her the opportunity to do so safely. His own feelings were kept rigorously battened down. But if Chloe was beginning to envisage some kind of future to their liaison, then he’d have to take serious measures to disabuse her.
She had put the method into his hands, he realized. If she saw him engaging in light flirtation with the sophisticated worldly women who would seem so much more in his social sphere than herself, she might take the point more effectively than with simple words. It would lessen the intensity of their relationship and would certainly help him to conceal from his willful ward the passionate, tormenting, obsessive nature of his desire for her.
How could he tell her that the bars to their marriage were manifold? He was her father’s killer; he had loved her mother, who had trusted him with her daughter’s future, and anything but the destiny to which her beauty and fortune entitled her would be a gross betrayal of that trust; he was twice her age and a poor man; he was her guardian and by any ethical rule therefore banned from taking advantage of that relationship to improve his own circumstances.
He had done many despicable things in his life, but tying an eager, passionate innocent to a man twice her age, a man who had played in the crypt and had killed her father, stuck even in his craw.
He leaned over to blow out the candle and lay back in the dark, waiting t
o see if sleep would be kind to him. After a while he relit the candle, hitched himself up against the pillows, and resignedly picked up his discarded book. Within a few minutes, his door opened.
“Do you want to play backgammon?”
Chloe stood in the door, a diffident little smile on her lips that was impossible to resist. He’d employed enough severity for one night.
“Bad one,” he scolded. “Why aren’t you asleep?”
“I can’t.” Taking his tone as invitation, she closed the door and came farther into the room. “I was unhappy. I didn’t mean to be impertinent and poke and pry.”
He put his book aside. “Come here.”
She sat on the bed beside him, still with that diffident air and an aching question in her eyes. “Are you still angry?”
“No, but I want you to listen to me very carefully. That kind of talk is utter foolishness. If you mention such a thing again, then the only contact you and I will ever have afterward will be purely as guardian and ward. Is that clear?”
Chloe nodded.
“From now on I want you to enjoy everything London and the Season have to offer,” he continued, slipping an arm around her. Immediately she cuddled into his embrace with a little sigh of relief. “I want you to make lots of friends, to flirt, to dance, to go to picnics and parties; to surround yourself with admirers, to become surfeited with all the amusements available. All right?” He flicked her cheek teasingly with a lock of guinea-gold hair,
“All right,” she said, delicately brushing his nipples with a fingertip. “If I must.”
Hugo laughed. “I have just given you permission for unbridled pleasure and that’s all you can say: if I must.”
She bent her head and touched her tongue to his nipples. “So long as I have permission to do this.” She turned her head on his chest to look up at him, and he read only sensual mischief now in the eyes previously so full of hurt. “Or would you prefer to play backgammon?”
When she regained her own bed some considerable time later, Chloe lay sleepless, watching the dawn through her uncurtained window. She had decided that she was going to marry Hugo Lattimer, The only question was how to arrange it.
She had decided they would become lovers and had managed to arrange that in the teeth of his vigorous opposition, so she couldn’t see any reason why this next step shouldn’t be similarly accomplished.
But she would have to lull him into a false sense of security, as she had done over the other issue. She would obey his orders to the letter, fling herself into whatever pleasures and adventures might come her way, encourage suitors, and be as careless of convention as she chose. Hugo would soon relax again and forget she’d ever brought up the subject of marriage.
She would drive him to distraction with deviltry. He would never know what she was about to do next, and the last thing on his mind would be worrying about whether she still cherished the notion of their marriage. And then, at the right moment …
With a leisurely stretch Chloe yawned and snuggled down under the quilt. At the right moment she would spring it upon him and carry the day. Hugo didn’t know what was best for both of them, so she’d just have to prove it to him.
Chapter 19
“WE HAVE HAD the most satisfying shopping expedition.” Chloe burst into the library, her nose just visible over the armful of bandboxes. “Shall I show you what we bought? … Oh, I do beg your pardon.” Quietly, she placed her packages on the sofa and sat down to listen as Hugo finished the Haydn sonata.
“I am so sorry,” she said when the last notes had died. “I didn’t hear as I came in and—”
“No matter,” he said, turning on the bench. “But on that subject, I haven’t heard you playing for a day or two.”
“I’ve been very busy,” Chloe offered in lame excuse. “The knocker is always sounding, and there was the balloon ascension, and all this shopping.”
“Perhaps this afternoon?”
“Yes, this afternoon … only—”
“Only?” he prompted with a quizzical raise of his eyebrows.
“Only I had promised to go riding in Hyde Park with Robert and Miles and Gerald.”
“And your chaperone, of course?”
Chloe went into a peal of laughter at the thought of Lady Smallwood’s wobbling rear on horseback. “No, but Robert’s sister is coming, so it will be quite unexceptionable.”
“I am relieved.”
Chloe grimaced at the dry tone. “Are you cross about the music?”
“Disappointed, rather,” he said, shrugging. “But I told you the decision would always be yours.”
“Oh, now I feel horribly guilty.” She looked so stricken, he couldn’t help laughing.
“That was my intention, lass.”
She threw a cushion at him just as Lady Smallwood rolled into the room. “Child!” she exclaimed. “Hugo, you really shouldn’t permit—”
“I don’t, ma’am,” he interjected, bending to pick up the cushion. “But my permission wasn’t asked.” He threw the cushion back at Chloe. “My ward’s a shameless, lazy, self-indulgent, hot-tempered chit.”
Lady Smallwood sank into a chair with earpieces and fanned herself vigorously with her hand. “You may laugh, but it’s no way to go on in Society … throwing cushions at people. Whatever next?”
“Oh, I do beg your pardon, ma’am.” Chloe leapt up and kissed her chaperone with the genuine affection that never failed to disarm her most crusty critics. “Hugo was taking me to task for not practicing my music.”
“Well, goodness me, that’s no reason to throw cushions,” her ladyship said, shaking her head. “Either of you!”
“How right you are, Dolly.” Hugo rose from the piano bench. “Let me pour you a glass of ratafia. I’m sure you need it if you’ve been shopping with Chloe. Lass, you may have sherry if you wish.”
He filled two glasses and then sat down again. “So, let me see the fruits of your expedition.”
Lady Smallwood’s intake of breath was portentous. His heart sank. “Ma’am?”
“I have to say, Hugo, that I approve of nothing … nothing that Chloe has bought. I was unable to influence her to the least degree.” She took a sip of her ratafia and dabbed at her lips with her handkerchief.
“Oh, pah,” Chloe said with her customary lamentable lack of ceremony. “I have bought the most beautiful spencer and a net purse, and a spray of artificial flowers. Oh, and a bonnet, and an evening gown—you wouldn’t believe how elegant it is, Hugo.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” he muttered gloomily, but Chloe was rushing on.
“Unfortunately it had to be altered, so I couldn’t bring it home, but the modiste promised I should have it by tomorrow afternoon, so that I may wear it at the Bellamys’ soiree.”
A faint groan emerged from Lady Smallwood, and Hugo reckoned with increasing gloom that it was probably even worse than his imaginings. He prepared himself for battle.
“Show me what’s in the boxes.”
“This is the bonnet.” Chloe lifted the lid of a hat box and drew out an enormous confection of ruched and padded scarlet and black silk. She set it on her head and tied the black silk ribbons with a flourish. “Isn’t that fine? And the spencer goes with it.” The spencer was of black striped satin with scarlet piping to the sleeves.
Hugo stared at the black and scarlet vision before him. While there was nothing vulgar about the hat or the spencer—only, he suspected, because in the establishments patronized by Lady Smallwood vulgarity wouldn’t show its face—they utterly drowned Chloe’s exquisite fresh beauty.
“Black is not a debutante’s color,” he said finally.
“Oh, pah,” Chloe declared again. “It’s sophisticated. I don’t care for all the niminy-piminy à la jeune fille colors. These are the flowers. I thought they’d go well with the spencer.” She held an elaborate spray of gilded orchids to her bosom. They completely obscured the soft, perfect swell of her breasts.
Hugo said carefully, “Descri
be this evening dress if you will, Dolly.”
“Oh, it’s lovely—”
“I didn’t ask you, Chloe.” He cut her off smartly. “I’m sure you consider it to be lovely. Now, ma’am … ? As accurate as you can make it.”
Lady Smallwood shuddered. “It’s purple and turquoise stripes embroidered with jet beads … and I believe there’s a braided fringe at the hem and a matching fringe at the neckline … falling over the shoulders in place of sleeves. I could imagine it would look most striking on some women, but not on Chloe, and it’s quite unsuitable for a debutante.”
“It’s dashing,” Chloe said. “I wish to look dashing.”
“Not while you’re in my wardship,” Hugo stated flatly, getting to his feet. “We are now going to return the spencer and the bonnet and the flowers, and we are going to visit the modiste and cancel the evening dress. You may choose something more suitable under my guidance, since you reject that of your chaperone.”
“No!” his ward exclaimed, fired to more than usual vehemence. “I won’t take them back. Why should you know better than I do, Hugo?”
“I wish I knew,” he said, sighing. He addressed his cousin. “Ma’am, I should beat a retreat if I were you; I have a feeling this is about to become ugly.”
Lady Smallwood looked from Chloe’s set face and indignant eyes to Hugo’s calm but determined features and took the advice. She had found Chloe’s will impossible to bend and her views utterly resistant to guidance. So it was with relief that she handed the matter over to the clearly stronger hands of the girl’s guardian.
“Hugo, why must you be so stuffy?” Chloe broke out as soon as the door closed on her chaperone. “Why can’t I wear what I wish to wear?”
“Because what you wish to wear, lass, is completely unsuitable,” he said. “I do not understand why you should have been born without the first inkling either of what suits you or is socially appropriate, but sadly it seems to be the case. Therefore you must learn to accept the judgment of those who know better.”
“I don’t,” Chloe said mutinously, stroking the silk sleeves of the spencer. “I think I look very sophisticated in this … and I will not cancel the evening dress and buy some wishy-washy pastel thing, whatever you say.”
