The following morning, arms linked, Leo and Chloe made their way, of all places, through Hyde Park. With a maid trailing behind them, no less.
Leo gave his head a wry shake. He’d gone from bedding widows on empty paths to respectable walks with an unwanted servant underfoot.
“This is your strategy to make me respectable?”
Leo grunted as Chloe jammed her elbow into his ribs. “You needn’t sound so skeptical.”
He rubbed the wounded area.
“And unless you want all of Polite Society to know this,” she discreetly motioned between them, “is a ruse, then I’d suggest you have a care with your words.”
Being called out by a lady… With a sea of lords and ladies in the crowded Hyde Park looking unabashedly on. And yet, blast if the lady wasn’t right. Carelessness wasn’t a sin that had belonged to him.
Still…
“I still do not see how this will help with anything,” he gritted through a forced smile. What he required was entry to polite events hosted by Waterson’s circle and other stodgy members of the Whigs.
“It will. Trust me.” As they continued down a graveled path, he resisted the urge to point out that he, as a rule, trusted no one, and to encourage her to use the same discretion.
The lady would eventually have her eyes opened to the reality that was life. They all did, inevitably.
“I must confess,” she began almost hesitantly, bringing his gaze briefly over. “I’m surprised that you are not more… upset by my failure to fulfill my portion of the agreement.”
Given the access to Waterson he’d hoped to have, and invites to like respectable households, he should have been filled with a teeth-gnashing rage. He’d traded his freedom on the hope that it would benefit his career and the Crown. So where, as she’d aptly pointed out, were those sentiments on his part? Disquiet swept through him, and Leo trained his attention on the path ahead. “I trusted you’d crafted another scheme that would prove equally beneficial,” he countered, needing to shut her questions down, because they only stirred unwelcome ones in his own mind. Ones he didn’t have answers to. “Are you now doubting your abilities?”
Chloe bristled. “Undoubtedly not.” She stopped at the shore of the Serpentine, forcing Leo to a halt. Loosening her bonnet strings, she tugged the straw article from her head. “If doors aren’t opened by my family, we’ll simply see them opened ourselves.”
“You’re an optimist,” he murmured. Had he ever been so naïve?
Yes, yes, I was. I once smiled and read and fashioned a future for myself different than what my life was and then what it became…
Smiling, Chloe lifted that silly bonnet and shook it at him, killing his melancholic reverie. “I am determined.”
And as he was the wagering sort, by the glint in her eyes, he’d place bets on her ultimate success. Which would only mean his triumph, as well.
Marriage to her would still allow Leo to reshape his image and appease the discontented leadership within the Brethren.
Why did it feel that the silent assurance was more an afterthought and nothing else?
“Leo?” A question colored Chloe’s tone.
Removing the blanket tucked under his arm, Leo snapped the fabric open. It caught an errant early afternoon breeze, the edges of the gingham cloth fluttering and then settling into place as he lowered it.
A maid came rushing over with a small basket and turned it over to Chloe.
Accepting it with a word of thanks, Chloe set it on the right corner of the blanket, anchoring the cloth in place. She tossed her bonnet to the ground next.
“Now, we sit.” She settled herself onto the blanket. Singing The Rakes of Mallow quietly under her breath, she proceeded to fish around in her basket. She withdrew a book, followed by another and then another.
What in the blazes?
Chloe paused. She tipped her head back, staring expectantly at him. “Well? Do you intend to stand there all day?”
“You are mad,” he muttered, dropping to the ground.
“Am I?” His wife discreetly motioned to the crowd of onlookers gaping at them from a nearby walking path. “They are no doubt saying, ‘Lord Tennyson… he is not at his clubs or foxed or… or conducting some scandalous activity. He’s simply in the park. Reading.’ Nothing says respectability quite like reading.” Beaming, Chloe jammed a small, leather tome into his hands. “So read.”
Leo glanced at the book, then back to Chloe, and once more to the title. “What is this?”
“Well, generally what one reads… a book.”
“I can see it’s a book, madam. I mean what do you have me reading?”
His wife pursed her mouth. “Mary Darby Robinson.”
Ahh… he fanned the pages. The verses paraded quickly before his gaze, a kaleidoscope of words, as a hated voice rose from the grave at the back of Leo’s mind where it forever dwelled.
You pathetic excuse of a man… reading women’s works? It’s not natural… You are no son of mine… but then, we’ve always known that… You are nothing, Leo… nothing. A bastard undeserving of the name Dunlop…
Chloe tipped her chin up in silent challenge. “Do you have nothing to say?”
The memory of the late marquess vanished under his wife’s lilting voice, a welcome lifeline back from the past that he clung to. “Do you think I take umbrage with your selection? Madam, I’m a hedonist. I live for my own pleasures. I engage in wicked delights and forbidden acts that would set you into a perpetual blush.” Her cheeks pinkened, a pretty, innocent stain of color that he should have shuddered at. But he found it oddly right on this woman, and not unappealing. “As such, I’m not one who’d begrudge anyone taking one’s pleasures where they would.” With every word uttered, her eyes softened and her thick, golden lashes swept lower. “Though, there are far headier pleasures I could show you.” He lowered his mouth close to hers, reveling in the quick intake of her breath and the flush of desire on her skin. “Would show you. If you’ll but let me.” And she would. In time, he’d join his body to hers and awaken her to the passion that thrummed within her.
Chloe wet her lips. “Y-you will cause a scandal. We are striving to shape you into a respectable gentleman.”
Were those reminders for the lady? Or for him? “If we’re to be the madly in love pair who set off a scandal throughout London, we must play the part. Place your head on my lap, madam.”
She hesitated, and then, to his surprise, she complied.
“Your Mary Darby Robinson, then.” He snapped the book open and skimmed poem after poem, words that portrayed the harsh reality that was London life and marriage. This was what Chloe should read. “Most ladies are fans of Lord Byron.”
“If one prefers the wild, reckless, womanizing sort.”
Leo didn’t blink for several moments. By God, had she just insulted him? He glanced down.
His wife stared innocently back.
“Minx,” he muttered, even as a grin pulled at his lips. A gust of wind played with the open page, and he smoothed his palm over it.
“O! How can LOVE exulting Reason queil!
How fades each nobler passion from his gaze!
E’en Fame, that cherishes the Poet’s lays,
That fame, ill-fated Sappho lov’d so well.”
All teasing faded in Chloe’s eyes. Her bow-shaped lips parted with each verse.
“Lost is the wretch, who in his fatal spell
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, beside them.
“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 cleared his throat. “So tell me, Lady Chloe Tennyson, 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, and the maid in her own carriage, 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 willed 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 conveyance 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?”
With a stiff, reluctant turn of his head, he faced her.
“He was the monster. You never were,” she said, willing him to see.
He sneered. “You know nothing about monsters, madam.”
“I know more than you think.” She, however, was unwilling to shift their discussion to her own suffering. Leo would only slam shut the small window he’d opened into his mysterious life. “He’s gone, and you are free of him. You don’t have to hide your true intellect from the world, Leo.” He never had. “And you don’t need to present yourself as a coldhearted rake.”
He laughed. To her ears, the sound was brittle and forced. “My true intellect, madam?” Leo scoffed. “Present myself as a coldhearted rake? That is rich.” Her husband jerked on the reins, and she registered belatedly that they’d arrived.
A servant came rushing forward, but Leo held up a staying hand, and the man immediately made himself scarce.
Leo leaned close, shrinking away all the space between them. He angled his body in a way that cut the world out and conveyed intimacy, a stolen moment between lovers.
Chloe shivered. The display of warmth was belied by the icy glint in his eyes and the hardness of his lips. It was a coldness she was all too familiar with. She knew how simmering rage so easily became blinding violence. “I want to go inside,” she stated with a calm she desperately hoped to feel.
“You are free to leave any time… as soon as the terms of our arrangement are met, my lady.”
Chloe flinched. The casual willingness to set her free shouldn’t cut, and yet, it did.
“But before you do,” Leo said as he captured her chin in a grip that was both unrelenting and gentle. It was a bewildering contradiction. “Let us be clear. Perhaps you wish to convince yourself that the man you’ve bound yourself to until death do we part is more. Mayhap it will help you slumber more peacefully to see a poor, snot-nosed babe crying for a father’s affection, who learned to conceal his love of poetry, and not a man who took a virgin against a library wall in Lord Ackerland’s precious library in the middle of a bloody ball.”
Her stomach pitched, and she shrank away from his touch. For having him say it in those plain terms was a confirmation that the allegations made against him were, in fact, sins upon his soul. It ripped a hole somewhere inside Chloe. “Stop it,” she ordered quietly. Was it him she commanded to stop? Or herself? “You are just trying to push me away. You became who he professed you were, but you don’t have to be that person any longer. You—”
Leo shook his head. “You’ll hear this first. That rake… the one that has your mother weeping and your brother ready to duel me at dawn? That is precisely the man I am. So do not make me out to be more.”
Leo swung his leg over and leaped down.
He could have stormed off in the rage that now gripped him and left her to the waiting servant. Instead, her husband reached up and scooped her around the waist like she was the most delicate of treasures and set her down.
They started for the steps.
“Leo?” she put forward as the butler swept the doors open.
Her husband cast her a glance.
“The lord doth protest too much, methinks.” She lifted her palms. “There is always more… to all of us. It’s just oft times easier to look upon the surface and accept that which is so obviously displayed.”
His golden brows stitched into a single line.
“Ahem,” Tomlinson interrupted.
“What is it?” Leo snapped.
“Her ladyship has guests. I informed them you were out, and they insisted they would wait.” They? “Until you returned.” Tomlinson presented a silver tray, and Chloe collected the card. “I showed them to the Ivory Parlor.”
“My sister and sister-in-law,” she said, lifting her head. No doubt, after her flight last evening, they sought to make peace.
“And this arrived for you, my lord.” Tomlinson handed over a small, folded scrap.
In his peculiarly speedy manner, Leo glanced at the page, folded it, and tucked it in his pocket faster than it would have taken most men to read a single sentence.
Leo sketched a bow. “I will leave you to your visit, then.” And just like that, Chloe had been summarily forgotten. He called for his horse.
He is leaving…
Questions swirled. And ugly, unwelcome possibilities about the author of that note slipped forward. He’d pushed her away. She’d asked too many questions, and he’d shared too much of his past, and now he’d turned from her.
“My lady?” Tomlinson ventured.
“Yes, thank you.” Forcing her legs into motion, she hurried to greet the two ladies who awaited her. Given the gulf that had developed between Chloe and her family since she’d married, she should be grateful at their arrival. And yet, she wanted them gone. Wanted to plant her feet and demand Leo hear her, and more… keep him with her so he couldn’t fill his days and nights with a woman who wanted nothing more from him than a brief diversion from her own miseries and tedium.
Chloe reached the parlor.
She found Jane and Philippa, backs to her, at the hearth, examining the same piece that had so riveted Chloe days ago. Had it truly been mere days since she’d wed Leo? Surely a lifetime had passed.
“Hullo,” she called out from the doorway, drawing the door shut behind her.
Both women spun to face her.
“Chloe,” they both exclaimed, perfect ducks in tandem from each step and movement.
They stood, a strained silence between them. One that had never been there before. It was ultimately Jane who took control. “We came to speak with you. May we sit?”
“Of course,” she said stiffly. Chloe settled herself on the edge of a King Louis XIV chair directly facing the Edgerton women. If Philippa and Jane had come to lecture and admonish her over her decision, she’d ask them to leave. There was no undoing what had been done. Nor would their misery or anger do anything but hurt.
“He knows Beethoven,” Philippa blurted.
Chloe slowly raised her brows. What was she on about?
“Your husband, Lord Tennyson, that is,” her elder sister went on to clarify. “He knows both of him… and knows him personally.”
Chloe widened her eyes. Of anything and everything she’d expected Philippa or Jane to say, that had decidedly not been it. “I don’t understand,” she said, trying to make sense of her sister’s revelation.
Philippa spoke in a rush, gesticulating wildly as she spoke. “He shared with Faith that Mr. Beethoven has lost most of his hearing. That he’s, in fact, been without full use of his ears for a number of years and composed music anyway and…” She stopped abruptly and pressed a hand to her mouth. From over her gloved fingertips, tears welled in her eyes.
“And this… upsets you?” she asked, confused, desperately attempting to follow along.
Philippa recoiled. “Of course not.” Reaching across the table, she gathered Chloe’s hands and squeezed. “Chloe, he was reassuring her. About her hearing.”
Warmth spread throughout Chloe’s chest. Her husband had been threatened and ridiculed by his host, and where had he gone? What had he done? He had joined two little girls, sharing the accomplishments of one who was hard of hearing with a girl whose greatest insecurity was her partial hearing loss. Chloe bit her lip. The man he’d proven himself to be was again inconsistent with the angry figure who’d stormed off.
One who was even now likely at one of his scandalous clubs.
From where they sat, Jane and Philippa exchanged a look. Her sister-in-law stood and joined Chloe. “I’ll not make excuses for Gabriel. He was wrong. He is worried about you,” she added. “But that does not give him leave to treat either of you as he’s done.” Calm, rational, and in possession of one of the purest hearts—there was so much to love about her sister-in-law. “Unless we’re given evidence that you are… unhappy, I explained to Gabriel how it is to be.” With each statement, she stuck a finger up. “You’re both to be met with warmth and kindness when you are in our home. We will provide a united front to Polite Society.”
Philippa nodded. “We will help you gain access to societal functions, as we can.” Her sister peered at her. “Which is odd, as you’ve never before expressed an interest in societal acceptance. But if that is what you wish?”
They stared at her, matching questions in their eyes.
“Yes,” she said hoarsely. Emotion clogged Chloe’s throat. It was not what she or Leo wished, but what they required. And now her family, as devoted as they’d always been, had responded with that usual Edgerton support.
Jane nodded. “Very well.” Fishing inside a pocket along the front of her gown, she withdrew a small, leather notebook and pencil. “We’ll begin with Philippa’s unveiling at the Ladies of Hope.”
Philippa nodded. “In two days, there will be a gathering of the benefactors and benefactresses. You and Lord Tennyson will attend.”
“Mother?”
Her sister looked away, but not before Chloe caught the flash of regret in her eyes.
“She returned this morn to Imogen’s side. In time, she will come ’round,” Jane promised. She locked a stare on Chloe. “As long as she is able to see that you were right about Lord Tennyson. That he is worthy of you. That he is loyal and eventually, in time, loving.”
And while her sister and sister-in-law proceeded to plot, Chloe stared absently off at the peculiar piece atop the mantel.
She wondered which wicked haunt her husband had gone off to… and why, in a marriage of convenience, should it matter so very much?