by Mary Balogh
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.”
“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.
12
“It 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 hai
r 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.”