Only a Promise (13 page)

No, she
did
know what she wanted. She wanted hair as dark as Lucy’s and her mother’s and Graham’s and her fath—

Which
father?

She hated more than anything else these moments when such doubts got past her guard. Papa was her father.

Papa was her father.

Oh, her hair was to blame for
everything
.

And finally she decided.

She had nothing very large in the room with her. The best she could come up with was her sewing scissors, whose blades were not very long. But they were long enough. And they were sharp enough. She had sharpened them herself just before coming to Manville Court.

She cut off her hair to the bottom of her ears. She considered cutting it even shorter, hacking it off all over her head, but by that time her breathing was ragged with panic, and her hands were shaking and tingling with pins and needles. She turned on the stool and looked at the hair scattered along its length and heaped on the floor all about her. There was far more of it than she had expected. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach. She dared not lift her hands to feel the remaining hair. But she did not need hands. She could
feel
its absence. There was a lightness about her head, and the air felt cool on the back of her neck.

She was sitting facing out to the room, surrounded by hair, her scissors still dangling from the fingers of one hand, when a light tap on the door heralded the appearance of Ralph.

*   *   *

Good God!

Ralph came to an abrupt stop inside the door, looked at Chloe, looked at her scattered hair, and shut the door softly behind his back.

“Chloe?” he said.

She burst into noisy, gulping tears.

“I am not sorry,” she gasped out. “I hated it. I
hated
it. I am not sorry.”

All that glorious hair.

Gone.

He could do nothing but stare blankly for a few moments and gaze upon his wife’s distress with incomprehension.

He had almost not come tonight—because he had been thinking of this moment all day. Despite all that had been going on, despite his genuine grief over seeing his grandfather finally carried out of the house, making the end of an era final, and despite the necessity of holding together his dignity in the face of all those who had come to pay their respects to one dead duke and to look with critical curiosity upon the successor, despite his concern for his grandmother and, to a lesser degree, for his sisters, despite his realization that this was a difficult day for his wife—despite everything, he had wanted only for the night to fall so that he could come to her again, bed her again, be with her again.

And his very longing for the night, for her body, for
her,
had almost kept him away. For frankly he was a bit bewildered and more than a bit alarmed by his eagerness. He had to tell himself sternly that it was all because of the turmoil the death of his grandfather had caused in the past week, that soon now they would be able to settle into the routine of the marriage they had both bargained for.

More than anything else he wanted himself back to himself. He would share himself in marriage for all the essentials—the creation of children, the joint running of a home, though that would not be difficult since presumably she would run the house and he would run the estate. He did not want to share anything else of himself. Or of her. Such was not part of their bargain.

They must share a social life, of course.

He hated this confusion of mind, and the sooner he shook it off, the better he would like it. He had convinced himself finally that he was coming tonight because he had missed bedding her this morning and hoped very much to have her pregnant before her next courses were due. And, no, he had not asked her when that was.

And now this.

He had walked in on a crisis of monumental proportions. He understood that after those first few seconds. This was no simple matter with a simple explanation. And this was not the sensible, disciplined, dispassionate wife he had married.

What the devil?
he thought. But even in those first moments he knew that thundering at her would achieve nothing. Neither would standing here and murmuring her name. It occurred to him briefly that he was in no
way equipped to deal with female hysterics, but the thing was that she was not just any female. She was his wife.

She was Chloe.

Her hands had gone up to cover her face. She was still wailing. Her hair stuck out on either side of her head, coming to an abrupt end just above the tips of her earlobes. She was surrounded by a sea of red. A small pair of scissors had just clattered to the floor.

“Come, come, this will not do,” he said, striding toward her, grasping her by both elbows, and lifting her onto her feet and clear of the hair before he wrapped one arm about her waist and held her face to his shoulder with the other hand spread over the back of her head. He crooned something unintelligible even to himself against her ear and rocked her, rather as if she were a child who had fallen and scraped her knee.

“I . . . hated . . . it,” she said once more, gulping and gasping between words.

Presumably she was talking about her hair.

“Then you did the sensible thing,” he told her. Though she might have waited until an accredited hairdresser could do the job for her.

“I l-look a f-fright,” she gasped.

She probably did. He had not had a chance to properly assess the damages.

“Probably,” he agreed.

The hysteria stopped, rather as if he had tipped a bucket of icy water over her. She drew back her head and looked up at him with her wet, reddened face, her shorn hair standing out to the sides, the right side slightly shorter than the left.

“Oh,” she said, “there is no
probably
about it.”

“No,” he agreed. “I can see that.”

Her teeth sank into her lower lip.

“I cannot stick it back on,” she said.

“No,” he agreed again, “you cannot. And I will not even add a
probably
this time.”

And what now? He could hardly just take her to bed and extinguish the candles and proceed to business.

“We will go to my bedchamber,” he said. “Come.”

And he set an arm about her shoulders and led her there. Fortunately, they did not meet anyone on the way. He pulled on the bell rope in his room and went to the doorway of his dressing room when he heard his valet enter.

“Have someone sent up to clean Her Grace’s room, Burroughs,” he said. “She has been cutting her hair. And refrain from entering my bedchamber in the morning. I will summon you when I am ready to dress and be shaved.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The valet disappeared.

“It is dreadfully late,” Chloe said. “The cleanup could have waited until the morning.”

He raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “It could not.”

She had given herself surely the worst haircut in the history of haircuts. She looked younger. She looked vulnerable.

She stood at the foot of the wide steps leading up to his canopied bed, dwarfed by the grandeur of it. It had always rather amused him to be given this room, originally designed for the duke with an equally ostentatious room for the duchess—it was now Chloe’s room—on the far side of the dressing room. His grandfather had
refused to move into the apartments when he had succeeded to the title after his father’s passing. They had been kept for the convenience, or inconvenience, of the heir when he visited.

What had happened in Chloe’s room had been a calamity of monumental proportions, he had thought when he walked in upon her. It was tempting now to ignore it, to forget it with the sweeping up of her hair, to deal with the mess of the haircut itself tomorrow, to go to bed now and make love to her before falling asleep. He was weary to the bone, God knew, and so must she be.

But . . . Well,
I hated it
was not really good enough as a reason for doing such a thing, was it? But did he really want to know more? To probe deeper?

There was no fire burning in the grate. It was not a cold night, but there was a bit of a chill in the air. He looked at the two leather armchairs that flanked the fireplace. He had never used either. There was a folded plaid wool blanket over the back of one of them. He had never used that either. Indeed, he did not recall ever having noticed it before now.

“Come,” he said, striding toward that particular chair and shaking out the blanket.

When she came he wrapped it about her and looked into her eyes. It had been his intention to seat her on the chair, wrapped warmly, while he took the one opposite. But she looked like a little bundle of misery in the blanket. He quelled a twinge of irritation and sat on the chair himself before drawing her down onto his lap, guiding her head to one shoulder and setting both arms about her. She did not resist.

“It must have been called your crowning glory more
times than you could count,” he said. “Why did you hate it?”

“The color stood out like a sore thumb,” she said. “I heard my mother say just that to our housekeeper one day. She—my mother—used to dampen it down to darken the shade, and she used to braid it so tightly that my head hurt and my eyes slanted. She used to dress Lucy’s hair in soft curls and ringlets.”

He thought she was finished, but she drew breath, hesitated, shook her head, and continued.

“As a girl I looked like a freak,” she said. “My second teeth grew in before my face grew to fit them, and my freckles were as big as pennies and covered my nose and my cheeks. A few of the other children in the neighborhood used to call me carrot top. When I was thirteen and painfully in love with the physician’s boy, who was sixteen and wondrously handsome, he dashed my regard for him by telling me I looked like the rabbit and the carrot all in one package. But this talk is abject foolishness, and I would not indulge in it if the hour was not late and I was not tired and you had not asked.”

Her mother must have been both horrified and embarrassed when her first child was born within nine months of her marriage with such undeniably red hair.

“Plain or even ugly children often grow into beautiful adults,” he said. “It certainly seems to have been true of you.”

“If it is true,” she said, sounding cross rather than reassured, “then it is the wrong sort of beauty. When I went to London for my come-out Season, I had to stop looking at men. So many of them were looking back at me with—”

“Admiration?” he suggested. Had it been such an unwelcome surprise? Surely she had left behind her likeness to a rabbit years before then?

“With
lust,
” she said. “Though I hardly knew the meaning of the word then. There was no respect in those looks. It was not the admiring, even worshipful way they looked at the delicate, accredited beauties. One older lady, who had a great deal of influence in the
ton,
once told me there was a certain vulgarity about hair of so decided a red. As though I had chosen the shade. As though my hair defined my character.”

A more confident young beauty would simply have smiled at such spite, knowing that she could take the
ton
by storm with such startling good looks if she chose—as Lady Angela Allandale had done last year.

“Lust is often a form of admiration,” he told her. “Coupled with good manners it could be seen as flattering.”

“Not when one is told that one could be the most expensive, sought-after courtesan in London if one wished to be,” she said.

“If someone actually said that to you,” he said, “I hope you slapped him very hard across the face.”

“He apologized,” she said, “when he saw that he had distressed me.”

He felt a sudden suspicion.

“Was this the man who was paying court to you before your sister ran off with Nelson?” he asked her.

“It does not matter.” She sighed, her breath warm against his neck. “I had a fortunate escape from him. Sometimes it takes time and a bit of maturity to realize that.”

She still had not named the man. Perhaps it was just as well. He realized he’d reached a point where he would want to do a great deal more than just slap the man’s face.

“And then there was last year,” she said. “If only I had been born with my mother’s dark hair, none of that would have happened. No one would have thought of spreading such vicious gossip. And that was all it was—gossip. I am so sorry. I hate habitual complainers. They are a dead bore.”

Yes. He should be bored. But in listing her complaints about her hair, she had told him a great deal about herself. He had not wanted to know. He still did not. It would be altogether more comfortable living through the marriage to which they had agreed if he knew her only by her day-to-day behavior. But he was beginning to realize that it had been naïve of him to expect such a shallow relationship.

Something occurred to him.

“Why tonight?” he asked her. “If you have hated your hair all your life, why was tonight the crisis point? Did something happen today? Did someone say something?”

“No.” She sighed and did not continue. She was not relaxed, though. He could feel tension in her body, warm though it had become inside the blanket. He waited. “It was because of this morning.”

“This morning?” He frowned.

“Last night you unbraided my hair,” she said against his neck. “You spoke of the glory of it and of your desire for me. This morning you looked at me with distaste and left to go riding. And I knew that something in our marriage had been spoiled and that my hair was to blame.
Always my hair. Tonight I thought you probably would not come at all.”

Good God!

He set his head against the high back of the chair and closed his eyes. He had not bargained for
this
. Why the devil had he taken off her nightcap last night? It had been a bit like opening Pandora’s box.

How was he to explain to her?

“Chloe,” he said, “I cannot love you. I cannot love.”

“I have not asked it of you,” she said. “I
do
not ask it. Did you think last night and this morning that I was—”

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “I know—I knew that you were not trying to
lure
me, to use your own word from last night. Also, last night we agreed that desire is not a bad thing in a marriage such as ours, but I would not take advantage of your acquiescence. This morning I was afraid of taking advantage.”