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.”