Her brother had returned more quickly than she’d expected.
As soon as Leo’s butler drew the door shut behind Gabriel, he spoke on a rush. “My God, Chloe. What have you done?”
She opened her mouth.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said hoarsely as he strode over. He grabbed her by the arms and did a methodic search.
She grunted. “Gabriel, I am fine,” she said gently, stepping out of his reach. “I wrote you because—”
“You asked for help.” He brandished the note she’d penned. “I’m here now. I’ll fix this. I’ll—”
“I’d like our family to smooth Leo’s entry into Polite Society,” she interrupted, bringing his words to an abrupt halt.
He cocked his head. “What?” he blurted.
Chloe motioned to the letter he held. “As you are probably aware,” she went on with a little flounce of her curls, “Society’s opinion of Leo is not the most favorable.”
A growl worked its way up Gabriel’s throat.
She forced a smile, refusing to give in to the unease stirring in her belly. “Oh, very well,” she said with a beleaguered sigh. “Their opinion is not at all favorable. But we, the Edgertons, that is, and the Brookfields can help with that.”
“What?” Gabriel bellowed.
She jumped. And for Chloe’s incorrect estimate on the time of her brother’s return, she had proven wholly correct in one estimation—his fury.
To hide the slight tremble to her fingertips, she smoothed them over the front of her skirts. She forced her most winning smile. “You’re taking this a good deal better than I expected,” she drawled.
“This is not a matter to jest about, Chloe Edgerton,” he exploded. “You marry a bloody blackguard like… like…” Oh, dear, things were dire if Gabriel was cursing and losing control of his temper. “Like…”
“The Marquess of Tennyson,” she supplied calmly, refusing to be cowed. “And he has expressed a desire to reform.” Which wasn’t altogether untrue. She, however, took care to leave out the self-serving goals that motivated the gentleman. “As such, I’d like to solicit your help.”
Gabriel resumed his tirade. “You sneak off, marry in my absence, and summon me to… to… help that bastard? That is the reason for your note?”
She mustered a smile. “Given I married the gentleman, I summoned you to help us.” Not to save her like some wilting damsel.
Her brother froze and then slammed his fist onto the rosewood sofa table. “You are bloody mad. Mad, Chloe.”
Heart pounding, Chloe fisted her hands.
This is Gabriel. Not your mercurial dead sire who’d smile one instant and clout you in the temple the next.
Except, this was Gabriel as she’d never seen him: in rumpled garments, smelling of horses and sweat, his face unshaven, his eyes bloodshot.
Her teeth chattered in the silence, and she immediately clamped them tight. The day she’d thrown dirt upon her father’s casket as it was lowered into the ground, taking him on the path to hell, she’d made a vow to herself. She would allow no man to so terrorize her. Not again. Not her brother. No man.
“Dunlop,” she said quietly, her earlier bid at humor gone. She edged her chin up, meeting her brother’s gaze unflinchingly. “My name is now Chloe Dunlop.”
Crimson splotches stained his cheeks. He said nothing for an interminable moment.
It is coming… just as all explosions of fury invariably did.
Gabriel thundered, “What have you done?” He proceeded to pace, his movements frenetic, jerky.
Even as she’d been expecting it, terror lanced through her.
“He is a rake.”
“He is my husband.”
“That doesn’t change what he is, Chloe,” he shouted, his anger echoing from the walls. “You know nothing of him.”
No… and yet. “I know he agreed to a legal contract allowing me to retain possession of my dowry. He agreed to let my family’s solicitor oversee the documents when you yourself orchestrated your own wife’s future.”
Gabriel stumbled and quickly righted himself. “Are you saying Tennyson is more honorable than me?” he choked out, shocked hurt dripping from that query. “That dastard? That… drunk?” With every allegation, fury grew in his tone. “A despoiler of innocents?”
She flinched. “You can’t know that. You’re basing that opinion on rumors.”
Her brother scraped a hand over his face, muttering words that might or might not have continued to call into question her sanity.
Chloe frowned. Surely her husband wasn’t… that manner of rake. What other types are there? They took their pleasures when and where they would. And your rake of a husband has been gone for more than ten hours now.
As if he’d followed the unwelcome path her thoughts had traversed, Gabriel dropped his arms to his sides. “Very well. This,” he sneered, “gentleman wishes to reform his rakish ways and set himself on a path of respectability? Where is he now? At his club? Drinking? Wh—” He stopped, pressing his lips into a hard line.
The rub of it was, she and Leo had struck an agreement that was to be mutually beneficial. Why then did her insides twist in vicious knots at the likely possibilities dangled by her brother? “Enough,” she said, as much for herself as for Gabriel. Shoving aside the unpleasant question about her husband’s whereabouts, she nodded. “You will focus on the ugliest rumors you’ve heard about him. I’ll, instead, focus on ways in which he’s proven honorable.” She stared at her always proper sibling who’d made it his life’s mission to coordinate other people’s lives based on what he thought was best for them. “Leo,” her brother blanched, “allowed me to dictate the terms of our marriage. I am the one in control of my future, and he accepts that.” How many other gentlemen would have so willingly ceded those controls? Certainly not her own brothers.
Gabriel gave his head a pitying shake. “If you believe that, you are a bloody fool,” he said quietly. The calm to that pronouncement cut sharper than any charge he’d shouted.
The thin thread of her patience snapped. “How dare you?” Grabbing her cane, she propelled herself into a stand. “First, you’d dictate to Philippa whom she should wed. And even though she found herself in a miserable marriage to a man who didn’t appreciate her or her children, you continued to play the role of one who knows what it is best for all your female siblings.” The color leached from his skin, leaving it an ashen shade of gray. Fueled by her indignation, she took a step closer.
“Then you attempted the same for Jane. Lying to her… you lied to her, Gabriel, about her inheritance in order to protect her.” She gave her head a hard shake. “That was not your choice to make, nor is it your role to save me from my own actions.” Rather, she’d wanted Gabriel, her mother, all her siblings, to see her as her own individual deserving of her own decisions.
His throat worked. “I only sought to help.”
He still couldn’t understand. How could she make him see? “I know that, and I appreciate it, Gabriel. This, however, was my decision.” Her marriage to Leo had been a well-thought-out grasp at a future she wished for, for herself.
Sadness filled her brother’s eyes. “And it is one you’ll live with forever,” he said with an air of ominousness that raised the gooseflesh on her arms. “For there can be no undoing this.” Hope blazed in his eyes. “Unless an annulment is immediately obtained.”
Even meaning well, as he did, he could not relinquish his role as head of the family. “There are no grounds for an annulment,” she lied, determined to quash his relentless attempts to maneuver her future.
Gabriel’s cheeks went red. “Oh, God.” He sank onto the edge of a nearby needlework side chair. The colorful tableau of doting mother and father beside two small children stood in mocking irony to the cold agreement she’d struck with Leo. “This is my fault,” Gabriel whispered. “I should have never left. I was so concerned with fetching mother.”
Their mother.
Chloe gripped the head of her cane. For, in the whirlwind of these past days, she’d not truly allowed herself to consider the moment her mother discovered that, in her absence, Chloe had wed the most scandalous of gentlemen. “How is Mother?” She forced the question out.
Her eldest sibling raised distressed eyes to hers. “How do you think she is, Chloe? When I handed her up into the carriage, she believed she would be dealing with a daughter who’d landed herself in a scandal because of that bastard, not one who’d gone and married him in haste.”
She brought her shoulders back. Rumors be damned, she… and her Edgerton siblings were, if nothing, loyal. As such, she’d not tolerate her brother disparaging Leo. “That bastard,’ as you refer to him, is now my husband,” Chloe said coolly.
He groaned. “When our mother arrives home…” His gaze did a search of the room before settling on the enamel table clock beside him. He paled all the more. “Which will be any moment. And when she finds you’re gone and married to…” Gabriel buried his head in his hands.
Chloe’s attention, however, remained fixed not on him… but upon the intricate, repetitive pattern engraved upon the clock beside Gabriel. Pieced together in gold and silvers, the odd piece stood out as the only non-furniture item within the drawing room. She drifted closer, running her fingers over it. Yet another piece, foreign and unlike the usual adornments in English drawing rooms, and he’d not sold this one. Why? She searched her mind, desperately trying to reconcile that incongruity with the wastrel in debt and in need of his uncle’s intervention to keep from floundering.
“This is my fault,” Gabriel repeated on a tortured whisper. “I’m responsible for this.”
He still didn’t understand. “You’d take ownership even in this?” she challenged.
Gabriel might have always meant well, but that did not excuse high-handed behaviors that assumed he alone knew what was best for her or her sister simply because he’d been born a male and heir.
“What about your secrets? Have you shared them with the man… your… husband?”
She went silent. Her insides twisted.
“You didn’t?” her brother rightly predicted, standing up.
Unable to meet his eyes, Chloe looked away.
“Did you think it did not matter?” her brother entreated. “Did you allow yourself to forget?”
“Of course, I didn’t!” she exploded. Chloe stole a glance about, more than half fearing the man whose worth they debated lurked in the shadows. She dropped her voice to a hushed whisper. “One does not forget one’s megrims.” The debilitating headaches forced her into darkened rooms, away from anyone and anything—people, noise—where even the rasp of her pained breathing proved torturous.
“How can you not see?” Her brother took her by the shoulders. “A man like Tennyson would commit you faster than you could say ‘dun territory,’ Chloe,” he whispered, “and then those terms would be moot, your dowry becoming his, and—”
“Stop it,” she cried, spinning out of his reach. “Just… stop,” she repeated, her voice a broken whisper. “You don’t know that about him. You don’t know—”
“Can you say with absolute confidence that he wouldn’t, just to rid himself of you?”
Nausea roiled in her belly. Turning away from Gabriel’s sad gaze, she pressed her fingertips into her temples, rubbing.
And just like that, the great terror she’d long carried assaulted her. As a girl, it had been the fear that her father would wash his proverbial hands of her by throwing her into a hospital. After his passing, as a young woman who entered Polite Society, she’d feared the very threat her brother now dangled.
The arrangement Leo had proposed, one that was mutually beneficial, had represented the greatest hope of her freedom and control… and through that, security. Naïvely, she’d allowed herself to forget the dangers of trusting a husband—Leo or anyone else—with her headaches.
Did you forget? Or did you force the thoughts from your head? Did you only see that which you most craved and deliberately omit the demons that will forever control you?
Chloe sucked in a slow, uneven breath.
For the truth remained: She could not predict what Leo would do if… nay, when her megrims struck.
“Come home with me,” Gabriel cajoled.
Did he sense her faltering?
“I will hire the best solicitors, and we will find a way to free you from this mistake,” her brother said quietly. “He is not to be trusted.”
Mayhap it was fatigue after the upheaval of the past three days, or mayhap it was her need to ease the worries raised by her brother. But she could not reconcile the ruthless man her brother spoke of, a debaucher of innocents, as he’d claimed, with one who’d cared for her ankle, even as the risks of discovery would have been, and had proven, calamitous for him.
Staring into the small fire burning in the hearth, Chloe worried at her lower lip.
Who was the Marquess of Tennyson? And why did she suspect there were many layers and secrets to the man she’d married?
After a three-hour journey back to his Mayfair residence, Leo desired a drink, a bath, and his bed—in that precise order.
And cowardly though it was, he was grateful to arrive in the dead of night when his wife would be abed and—
“There is a visitor.” Tomlinson spoke as he drew the door open, admitting Leo.
Alas, peace and solitude were not to be. Leo let fly a black curse. “Who in the blazes is here to see me at this hour?” Leo snapped. Aside from the like rakes within the organization, members of the Brethren, as a rule, generally avoided meetings at his townhouse. Connections between the lords and ladies who served had to be carefully orchestrated.
He made to unfasten his cloak.
Tomlinson’s next words stayed his movements.
“You misunderstood.” His butler cleared his throat. “Her ladyship has a visitor.”
He removed his cloak and handed it off. “The brother?”
Tomlinson gave a jerky nod. “He arrived almost an hour ago. They’ve been meeting in the Silver Parlor.”
Bollocks. He glanced in the direction of the hall leading to that room. Leo had miscalculated the speed with which Waverly would return and seek out Chloe. No doubt to try to end the brand-new marriage. “I trust you’ve listened in?”
“Of course,” Tomlinson said, as if it were the most common thing in the world for an employer to expect his servants to eavesdrop on private discussions. “The gentleman has spent the better part of his visit disparaging you,” he shared in his clipped and proper tones.
“That is hardly surprising.” Leo had come to expect nothing less. His butler had always been too loyal.
The older servant inclined his head. “Her ladyship has launched an admirable defense.”
“A defense?” He cocked his head. “Of who?”
Tomlinson’s lips twitched in the faintest whisper of amusement. “Of you, my lord.”
That, however, was surprising. His bride was loyal. She was also naïve, placing trust where it wasn’t deserved.
He again briefly contemplated the path leading to his wife and new brother-in-law. The lady had been clear that morning when she’d stated her desire to speak with her family alone. “That will be all.” He dismissed the servant, starting up the stairway.
His butler cleared his throat.
Leo froze midstep. “What is it?” he asked impatiently.
“I should also mention, Lord Rowley arrived this morn when her ladyship was out at Hyde Park.” Tomlinson dropped his voice to a low whisper. “Very early, my lord. Considerably earlier than could ever be fashionable.”
And his wife had been out at Hyde Park… alone. Leo’s hackles went up. “What in the hell did Rowley want?”
Tomlinson shrugged. “He insisted on waiting until her ladyship returned. I showed him to the Silver Parlor, but after an hour, he abruptly showed himself off.”
Leo frowned and mentally stored away that peculiar detail about his superior. What reason would he have to come here? Nor did Leo believe for one bloody moment it had been to pay a visit to Chloe. No, his superior would have known she wasn’t at home… just as he’d known Leo wasn’t. He’d wanted inside Leo’s household. “Thank you, Tomlinson,” he said distractedly. “That will be all.”
His butler shot a hand up. “That is not all. The other matter of importance pertains to the Marquess of Waverly.”
“Oh, hell, what now?” he snapped, wanting his brother-in-law gone. Wanting his own bed. Wanting the peace and predictability of his rakish existence of just days ago.
“It is just, my lord, I should also make mention that the gentleman is angry.”
Leo stiffened, rejoining his servant. “What was that?” he asked in measured tones. He tugged free his gloves and handed them off to a footman hovering in the shadows.
“He’s been shouting intermittently at her lady—”
“And you’re only just telling me this now?” he barked. His superior’s odd call forgotten, Leo stalked off. With each step, fury built inside of him. How dare Waverly? The bloody pompous bastard would enter Leo’s home and berate his wife?
This need to protect was new, in ways that it hadn’t been since…
He growled, increasing the length of his strides.
As he turned the corner, only silence reigned in the corridors, bringing Leo to an abrupt halt. He stared at the doorway to the Silver Parlor and the path he’d just traveled when the nearly inaudible exchange from within the room reached his ears.
“He is not a good man, Chloe…” The statements to follow were too muffled to make out. “…deserve better.”
Well, Waverly was right on both those scores. Clever, spirited, and courageous, the lady certainly deserved better than a bounder such as Leo. Why did the idea of some stuffy prig like Waterson as her husband rouse a primitive masculine fury? Because the lady is your wife… whether either of you wished it or not…
Of course, that hadn’t stopped him from bedding other men’s wives. As such, that loyalty ran counter to all Leo was and believed.
Uneasy with the warring sentiments, he gave thanks for Chloe’s restrained response, which interrupted his musings. He strained to catch a glimpse of his wife through the minute crack they’d left in the door. “I’ll not continue to debate you. He is my husband, your brother-in-law. Whatever he was before, you have no right entering our home and disparaging him.”
He stared at the oak panel. She defended him to her brother?
“You’d defend him?” Waverly demanded in an echo of Leo’s thoughts.
“I would,” she said emphatically.
He drew back. When was the last time anyone had defended him? And with good reason. His own uncle and aunt, the only people in his life who’d cared for him in any way, readily acknowledged precisely what Leo was. As such, he didn’t know what to do with his wife going toe-to-toe with her brother on his behalf.
“Think, Chloe, think!” Waverly’s furious whisper reached him. “Can you truly trust that he won’t send you on to Bedlam the first chance he has at his freedom?”
Leo’s muscles went taut, and his entire body strained under the weight of his fury. Call Leo a rake and blackguard and scoundrel, as he was. But he wasn’t so unprincipled that he’d commit a wife—unwanted though she might be—simply to rid himself of her.
The parade of silence that descended stood out starkly in the night quiet, a testament to his wife’s reservations.
“Come with me,” Waverly cajoled. “We will sort this out.” The protective brother sought to spring Chloe free. And if Leo himself had had a sister and she’d married a miserable blackguard like him, he’d either end the man at dawn or spirit her away as Waverly was attempting. “I’ll pay him off so that you can travel or live in the country. With his debt, he’d leap at the opportunity.”
Leo curled his hands tight.
He braced for the lady to leave with her brother. And the only reason he would give a damn was because of what it would mean for his role with the Brethren.
Wasn’t it?
“You are doing it again, Gabriel,” his wife finally said, sadness laced in that rebuttal. “You are trying to orchestrate my life.”
Leo released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Because you’ve gone and made a bloody mess of your life,” the other man thundered. It was an explosive display for the proper marquess.
Energy thrumming in his veins, Leo shoved the door open, admitting himself. “Tsk, tsk. Hardly gentlemanly entering a man’s home and shouting at the lady of the house.”
Chloe gasped as she and her brother looked over to the doorway. “Leo.”
He tried to gather information from those two syllables, but came up empty.
Instead, Leo took in the other man’s hands gripping Chloe’s shoulders, and primal bloodlust surged through him. He offered a cold, hardened grin. “Waverly, if you know what is wise, you’ll take your hands from my wife before I separate them from your person.”
Waverly followed the pointed stare leveled at his hold on Chloe. His new brother-in-law paled and swiftly jerked the offending hands back. “I wouldn’t… My God, for you to even suggest…”
“Suggest that you’ve lost control of your temper?” He quirked an eyebrow. “Generally, berating a young lady and grabbing her is the mark of one who has already lost control.” Leo leveled a glare at him.
Waverly stumbled back and swung his gaze to his sister. “I wouldn’t… Chloe, you know I wouldn’t…”
“I know, Gabriel,” Chloe assured her brother softly.
Except, it didn’t escape Leo’s notice that she took several steps closer to him.
With falsely calm strides, he joined his wife and her brother. “I trust you’ve not come to offer your warmest felicitations, then?”
His wife shot him a dark, sideways glance.
Waverly’s face crumpled. “Go to hell, Tennyson.”
What the other man couldn’t realize was that Leo had been there and survived, as only Satan’s spawn could.
“Enough.” Chloe turned a warning governess glare on both of them. “Gabriel, Leo is my husband.”
Her brother recoiled.
Was it the use of Leo’s Christian name or her marital state that horrified the man more?
Chloe smoothed her skirts. “I would have us present a united front, and help… launch Leo back into Society as a respectable gentleman.”
Lord Waverly snorted.
She continued over her brother’s derision. “I expect you to support us.” Brother and sister were locked in a silent battle. Those were the terms Leo had secured from her, and she’d presented them to her family on his behalf?
The marquess slid his eyes closed. “Chloe,” he implored. “Is there nothing I can say?”
The lady settled her hands on her hips.
The marquess slid his gaze away, landing it on Leo. “This is your fault.” So much hatred poured from the other man’s eyes, it would have burned a lesser man. One who was unaccustomed to such disdain. That antipathy, however, had greeted Leo the moment he’d slid into the world, a squalling babe who’d killed his mother in the process.
Chloe took a slightly labored step closer to Leo in an unexpected show of solidarity. “It is as much mine as it is Leo’s, Gabriel.”
At last, Lord Waverly turned his stare back to Chloe. “I will advise Mother that you will come tomorrow.” A muscle ticked at the corner of his lip as he glanced briefly once more at Leo. “Both of you.”
With another hate-filled glower, the gentleman took his leave.
Giving his lapels a tug, Leo rocked on his heels. How was a man to be with a respectable lady out and about? One who’d undeservedly defended him. It had been more than ten years since either had happened.
In the end, it was his fearless bride who broke the silence. “Well, he handled that a great deal better than I thought he would,” she said, the strain at the corners of her mouth belying her droll response. Any other lady would have dissolved into a flood of tears at having earned the stinging disapproval handed down by her family.
“He’s a pompous bastard,” he returned, eyeing the sideboard and then recalling her challenge of earlier that morn. Had it truly been just fourteen hours since she’d invaded his home, accepted his offer, and then married him? He strode to the hearth and stretched his hands, still chilled from the long ride back, toward the fire. “He always was.”
“You knew him?” she asked, surprise in her tone.
“There was a short while where we both attended Oxford at the same time.” He rubbed his palms together. “He was bookish, devoted to his studies.” With those once-shared interests, back then Leo would have welcomed a friendship with Waverly.
“And you were wild and outrageous?” she ventured.
He shrugged, allowing her the erroneous opinion. For he’d eventually become precisely that.
His wife perched on the ribbed back of a nearby sofa. “Thank you.”
He eyed her warily. “For what?”
“For coming to my defense.”
Leo waved his hand dismissively. “You didn’t require any intervention from me in handling Waverly. I’d wager no one, not me, not your prig of a brother, nor the king himself, could orchestrate your life.” In fact, she commanded with an ease that would have seen bloody conflicts ended or averted.
Her eyes softened. “Oh,” she said breathlessly.
Terror clawed at his chest. He scoffed, the sound harsh to his own ears. “You make more of my response than there is.”
“Perhaps.” Chloe ran a finger back and forth along the carved wood. “Perhaps not.” She ceased the distracted movement. “He called you a debaucher of innocents.”
At that abrupt shift, he stiffened. “And?”
“Are you?” Chloe held his stare. “Do you seduce innocent young women?”
I’ve never tupped a cripple before…
Leo’s hands curled into reflexive fists. The hateful words he’d uttered blared through his mind, conjuring the memory of another woman.
He shuttered his expression, eager to disabuse her of the dangerously enchanted glitter in her revealing gaze. “I have.”
Her stricken eyes rounded, and he braced for her inevitable contempt. Welcomed it. “Oh,” she said, the utterance nearly soundless. Who knew one syllable, barely a word, could contain so much emotion? Disappointment. Disgust. Regret. All sentiments that were so very familiar. Those words had followed him since his birth. So why did his gut clench?
His wife reached for her cane—and then stopped.
“I have,” she blurted, the way agents who’d stumbled upon the clue to a complex case.
He shook his head tiredly. “You have what?”
“Not me. You.” She slowly straightened. “You didn’t say you do debauch innocents. You said, ‘I have,’ which implies you no longer dally with virtuous ladies.”
His body jerked ramrod straight. By God, the chit saw everything. He recalled all over again the perils in having married her.
“You do not dispute it,” she observed, moving closer with her slightly unsteady gait.
His palms moistened, and he dragged forth a lifetime of experience within the Brethren.
“Do you want the truth about the man you married?” He wrapped the query in a jeering whisper that managed to halt his wife’s movements. “Your brother was correct. In everything he said.”
Her mouth formed a small moue. “You were listening at the door.”
“That is the least of my crimes, Chloe,” he mocked. “You’d be wise to recognize the truth in your brother’s accusations and not attempt to ever make anything more about me or the decisions I make. I’ve never proclaimed to be anything other than a black-hearted scoundrel, because I’m not.” Leo spread his arms wide. “What you see is precisely what I am, madam. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be. We’re playing the part of respectable couple. I’d advise you not to lose focus of that arrangement.”
All warmth faded from her eyes, leaving him peculiarly chilled inside. “Very well.”
Good. The walls between them were safer than any warmth or pathetic softening on the lady’s part toward him. Except, as he stormed off, quitting the rooms and his new wife, why did it feel like a lie he told himself in the hopes he might believe it?