Only a Promise (14 page)

“So you went away out of
respect
?” she asked him, sitting up on his lap and frowning at him.

“It was most certainly not out of revulsion,” he said. “Or out of any feeling that you were behaving like a . . . courtesan. The very idea is absurd, Chloe.
You?
So why the deuce did you cut your hair?”

She was still frowning. And then she was not. Her eyes smiled first, and then her mouth curved upward at the corners. Her hair, just as red as ever, stood around her face like a blunt-edged, flat-topped halo.

He heard himself laughing then and stopped abruptly.

But she was laughing too.

“Does it look quite appalling?” she asked him.

“The truth?” Good God, had he actually laughed? Again?

“Does it?”

“It does,” he said.

And she laughed once more and then bit her lower lip.

“I shall have to hide away until it grows back,” she said.

“Or have it cut by someone who knows what she or he is doing,” he suggested.

“Even shorter?”

“Well, it cannot be cut longer, can it?” he said. “I’ll tell you something, though, Chloe. You are still beautiful. And I still desire you—with respect for our bargain.”

Her laughter stopped, but she continued to gaze at him.

No, he could not love her. Not in
that
way. But perhaps he could come to love her as he loved his mother and sisters and grandmother. She was family, after all. She was his wife. She would be—he hoped—the mother of his children. He could love her in those capacities.

Perhaps there could be more for them than just what they had agreed upon. Perhaps there could be . . . friendship, affection.

Except that he did not want even that much, did he?

Perhaps he would have been better off after all choosing someone from the ballrooms of London. He was afraid that with Chloe he might come alive, and there was too much pain awaiting him if he was not very careful.

Without ever meaning to, he kissed her. And prolonged the kiss, drawing her down against him again, cupping her jaw with his free hand. He parted his lips, licked at hers, pressed a little way through to the warm
flesh within. And, alarmingly, he felt as though he might weep.

He drew back his head and gazed into her face.

“You must be almost collapsing with exhaustion,” he said.

“And you.”

“We had better get to bed.”

“Yes.”

But something had changed between them. It had started last night and continued tonight. He was too tired to ponder what exactly it was, and what it would mean for him. For her. For them.

He was just too damned tired.

“I
t is high time you had a maid of your own, Chloe,” Ralph said. “I know you have never had one and say you would not know what to do with one if you did. But you
do
need one, and this is a case in point. Besides, you are the Duchess of Worthingham now, and the servants will soon be muttering with disapproval if you do not behave like one. It is never wise to get on the wrong side of one’s servants.”

He was fully dressed and looked elegant and rather formidable in black. He also looked irritated. He was standing at the foot of the steps leading up to his bed, his feet slightly apart, his hands clasped at his back. In Chloe’s estimation he looked every inch the aristocrat he was, and she marveled anew at how he could be two different men—the duke she saw now and the man who had held her on his lap last night and then taken her to bed and made love to her despite their exhaustion.

Secretly, that was what she called it now, since
having marital relations
sounded far too stilted, even in her own mind. Though
making love
was not at all accurate, of course.

He had even kissed her last night while they were still seated on the chair. Really kissed her this time. Her first real kiss. Why had it seemed just as intimate as what had happened in his bed later, perhaps even more so? There were different types of intimacy, she supposed.

Chloe was not fully clothed. She was sitting bolt upright in the middle of the bed, covered to the waist with the blankets, wondering if there was anyone in the house from whom she could borrow a cap, since the only one she possessed was a nightcap and hardly suitable to wear down to breakfast or anywhere else beyond the confines of the bedchamber. She did not want to bother the dowager duchess with such a request.

“Am I to make your excuses to my grandmother and our guests?” Ralph asked her. “Tell everyone that you have the migraines and are likely to be incapacitated for the next . . . How long will it take for your hair to grow back?”

She glared at him with something bordering upon dislike. “I am not going to grow it back,” she told him.

“Ah.” He sawed the air with one hand. “Forever, then. I shall inform everyone that becoming a duchess has turned you into an eccentric recluse and that you intend to spend the rest of your natural life secluded in your own apartments, or rather”—he looked pointedly around—“mine.”

She threw a pillow at him, and he caught it in one hand and set it on the bottom step.

“Chloe,” he said, “I am not the one who cut your hair.”

“Do you think you could have done a better job?” she asked him.

Surprisingly—very surprisingly—his lips twitched, though he did not actually smile. Or tell her that he could hardly have done worse.

She threw another pillow at him anyway.

“Let me go and fetch Bunker,” he suggested. “She has been with Grandmama for at least a century and will undoubtedly be able to suggest something to help you avoid the fate of having to spend the rest of your life in my bed. Though, put that way, the prospect does have a certain appeal.”

Had he
made a joke
? At such a time?

“Very well, then,” she said. It would be horribly humiliating, though. Miss Bunker was a very superior person and sometimes made Chloe quail with a sense of inferiority. Chloe did not doubt that her hair looked even worse this morning after she had slept on it. But it suddenly occurred to her that
all
the servants must know already. Someone had been sent to her room last night to clean up the mess. That someone would certainly not have kept her mouth shut.

Even as she thought it there was a light knock on the door. Ralph strode over to it and opened it halfway while Chloe raised the bedcovers to her chin—though much good they did stopping there.

“Chloe is not in her room or anywhere downstairs, Ralph.” It was Sarah, Mrs. Toucher’s, voice. “Is she in here, by any chance?”

“Of course she is in here,” he said. “She is my
wife
.”

“Yes, we all know that,” Sarah said. “You married her without any fuss or bluster, which, in my wayward opinion, was very sensible of you. Large weddings are an abomination. Is she . . .
all right
?”

“And why would she not be?” he asked. “I am not a monster. I have not been beating her.”

“He is being deliberately obtuse, Sarah.” Oh, goodness, Great-Aunt Mary was out there too. “Did she cut it off herself, Ralph? Made a mess of it, did she, and is ashamed to show her face—or, rather, her head? Oh, let us in, boy. That pirate’s face of yours does not make
me
quake in my slippers.”

“How did you know?” he asked, holding his ground while Chloe prepared to dive beneath the bedcovers.

“How did we
know
?” his great-aunt asked rhetorically. “I daresay the whole
world
knows. Who sent for a servant at close to midnight to sweep up the hair? If it was you, my boy, and you wished to keep the matter a secret, then you made a great tactical blunder. It is a good thing you were never promoted to general.”

“Besides, Ralph,” another voice said—the
dowager duchess’s
—“it cannot be kept secret for long, can it?
Is
dear Chloe all right?”

Chloe flung back the covers, got out of bed, and stalked down the steps and over to the door, which she pulled from Ralph’s hand and flung wide.

“I look a fright,” she said.

And, oh dear, there were
six
of them outside the door. Lady Trentham and Lady Ponsonby were there too. So was a wide-eyed Lucy. And Great-Aunt Mary already had her lorgnette to her eyes.

“I cannot in all good conscience contradict you on that, girl,” she said.

“Chlow, how
could
you!” Lucy cried. “All my life I would have given
anything
to have your hair instead of my own.”

“Come, Chloe,” the dowager said kindly, “we will take you to your own room and ring for Bunker. She will help you dress and make you feel a great deal better than you are feeling now. And we will discuss what is to be done about your hair. Seven of us plus Bunker will surely be able to solve one little problem.”

Little.

“Run along, Ralph,” Great-Aunt Mary said, waving her lorgnette dismissively in his direction. “You are not needed. Men rarely are when there are important matters under consideration.”

And he ran along, or at least he did not argue or try to follow as Chloe was borne off on a tide of ladies.

At least they did not ask her why she had done it. They kept their minds upon finding a practical solution to the world’s worst haircut. Miss Bunker was not much help except as a calming influence. She looked upon Chloe as though there were nothing different or unusual about her as she helped her into one of her black dresses and brushed what little hair she had left. She made no suggestions about repairing the damage, but that was hardly surprising since everyone else was making them instead.

Lady Trentham ended the discussion by offering up her own maid.

“I have a very good hairdresser in London,” she explained, “but it would take several days to summon him here. When I am not in town, my maid trims my hair and really does just as good a job of it as Mr. Welland though she does not have his prestige. Will you trust your hair to her, Duchess?”

“Oh, call me Chloe, please,” Chloe said. “I keep looking at Grandmama when I am addressed as
duchess
.”

“Then you must call me Gwen,” Lady Trentham said. “I will summon my maid, shall I?”

Gwen had short blond hair, very prettily curled. Chloe nodded.

“Please,” she said.

“You are fortunate enough to have thick hair, Chloe,” Viscountess Ponsonby observed. “And it has a natural wave. I believe it will look very becoming when it has been properly styled. And please call me Agnes.”

“But it was so beautiful as it was, Chlow,” Lucy said mournfully. “I can remember how all the gentlemen used to follow you with their eyes the few times I walked with you in Hyde Park during that Season when I was seventeen and Mama would not let me make my come-out with you. I was mortally jealous. Until I met Freddie, that is.”

She said no more. Great-Aunt Mary had swung her lorgnette her way.

Gwen, Sarah, and Agnes remained with Chloe while the repairs were being made. Miss Bunker had left earlier, and the older ladies went down for their breakfast, taking Lucy with them. She actually looked rather gratified when Great-Aunt Mary took her arm and informed her that since she was young and strong she might as well make herself useful.

Gwen’s maid looked critically at Chloe’s hair and ran her fingers through it after she had been told that she had carte blanche to do with it what she thought best, provided it ended up looking better than it did now. Not that
that
would be a difficult task. Then she set to work with her scissors while the other ladies watched.

“Lady Darleigh has red hair too,” Agnes said, “though
not as red as yours, Chloe. Hers is more auburn. She cut it off too, long ago when she was a girl. She has grown it back since she married Lord Darleigh last year. She was a thin, shorn little waif when I first met her shortly after their wedding. She is pretty and dainty now. They are very happy, I believe. No—I
know
.”

“She has a new baby?” Chloe said.

“Thomas,” Gwen said. “The first Survivor baby. I think mine will be the second.” Her cheeks turned suddenly rosy as both Chloe and Sarah looked involuntarily in the direction of her stomach and Agnes smiled at her.

“How lovely for you!” Sarah said.

“Hugo did not want me to come here with him,” Gwen said. “I have only just stopped feeling horribly bilious in the mornings. But I hate being apart from him, even for a few days, and I know he hates being away from me. I lost a child to a miscarriage once, a long time ago, during my first marriage. I am . . . ecstatic to be given another chance. And terrified. But not as frightened as Hugo is, poor thing.”

“I am very happy for you, Gwen.” Chloe smiled at her. “You do not resent them? The Survivors?”

“Resent them?” Gwen tipped her head to one side and looked rather curiously at her. “I met them all at once. I had trespassed unknowingly upon Penderris property. I was walking on the beach below the house and tried to climb to the top over a steep fall of loose stones. I slipped and sprained my bad ankle and Hugo found me and carried me up to the house. Meeting them all was a bit daunting, I must confess, especially as local gossip would have it that the Duke of Stanbrook had pushed his wife over a cliff, when in reality she jumped
to her death. But they were all very kind to me and very courteous. I had to stay there for a few days until my brother came to fetch me. No, I do not resent them.”

“They share an extraordinary bond with one another,” Agnes added. “But they live their own separate lives too. And love is not a finite thing. They love one another, but they have plenty of love left over for their wives and families—or for a husband in Imogen’s case, if she ever remarries. Did you know that one of the Survivors is a woman?”

Chloe nodded and then remembered that she must keep her head still.

“My mother and sisters,” Sarah said, “have always been of the opinion that the three years Ralph spent in Cornwall did him more harm than good.”

“The Duke of Worthingham,” Gwen said, “was very badly hurt physically, but his wounds went far deeper than the worst of the saber cuts. And sometimes, Hugo has told me, the invisible wounds of war are far more deadly than the visible ones. Indeed, Hugo was not physically wounded at all. There is not a scratch upon his person. Yet he was brought home from the Peninsula in a straitjacket and spent three years in Cornwall with the others. He still suffers occasionally.”

“I remember Ralph as he used to be,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Perhaps he will be himself again now that he has married you, Chloe. Though that is an absurd thing to say. He will never be the same. None of us can be the same as we once were. Our lives and our very selves constantly change. But perhaps he will be happy again. Oh,
yes
!”

That final exclamation was for Chloe’s hair. Gwen’s maid had finished cutting and crimping it and had stood
back so that everyone could view the finished effect. She handed Chloe a round mirror with a handle so that she could see too.

“Brilliant!” Sarah exclaimed, and she came hurrying across the room to hug her sister-in-law. “It looks
lovely
. It looks . . . dashing.
You
look lovely and dashing. Oh, you will be all the rage, Chloe. Wait and see.”

Chloe looked critically at her image. Her hair had been cut in short layers. It hugged her head in shiny, bouncy waves and made her face look heart shaped and her eyes look bigger. She scarcely recognized herself.

“It is very often assumed,” Gwen said, “that all women look best with long hair. It is not so. I had mine cut many years ago and have never regretted it. You look more striking with short hair, Chloe. I would not have believed it, however, if I had not seen you both ways. And now you will surely have the courage to venture beyond your own room.”

Chloe laughed and turned to thank the maid and commend her on her skill. She found her purse and pressed a generous vail into her hand.

“It is breakfast time,” Sarah said. “Indeed, it is well past time, and I am ravenous even if no one else is.”

“You do look pretty, Chloe,” Agnes assured her, and she linked her arm through Chloe’s as they all left the room.

*   *   *

“A minor crisis,” Ralph explained to his mother and two of his sisters at breakfast. “Chloe decided to cut her hair last night and did not like the results. The matter has been taken to committee and will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, I have no doubt.”

He found himself having to repress a grin. It was not amusing for poor Chloe, especially when one considered
why
she had done it. But the memory of the rather large female delegation outside his bedchamber door and of Chloe inside it, her chopped hair standing out from the sides of her face and the back of her head, the cross look on her face turned to one of dismay, was worthy of any farce. He could not remember a time when he had been better entertained.