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.