“I saw Max Courtney’s young sister a few times after I left Penderris,” he said, reaching a hand beyond her shoulder to close the curtains as the flaming torch of the night watchman came bobbing into view in the square below. “And she wrote to me. She saw me as a final link to the brother she had adored and lost. She fancied herself, I believe, in love with me. I did all in my power to avoid her without being openly cruel. I even offered to fetch her a glass of lemonade at one ball but left the house instead and then London itself the next morning. She was the only one I saw, though. Her mother died a couple of years after Max did, and it was her aunt who was bringing her out into society. She—Miss Courtney—wrote to me earlier this spring when I was staying at Vince’s home to inform me she was about to marry a clergyman. I let her down. I had a chance to comfort someone, for the pain I had caused, but I did not do it.”
Miss Courtney, it seemed, had not blamed him for her brother’s death. Had he realized that? But something else occurred to Chloe.
“Was she at the theater tonight?” she asked.
“Miss Courtney?” he said. “No. But Viscount Harding and his wife were. Tom’s parents. He was their only son, their only child. They doted on him.”
His muscles had tightened again. Chloe set her hands on his shoulders and tipped back her head to look up at him. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and she could see the hard, bleak emptiness of his expression as he gazed back.
“They begged and pleaded with him not to go,” he said. “The viscountess, his mother, even wrote to me to beg me to use my influence with him. And I did.”
Chloe tipped her head to one side. “And afterward?” she asked him.
He stared back. “There was no afterward.”
“You did not hear from them?” she asked. “Or write to them?”
“No.”
“Did they see you tonight?”
“Our eyes did not actually meet,” he said. “But, yes, I believe they might have seen me.”
Without stopping to think what she was doing, Chloe cupped his face between her hands.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“Do?” He frowned. “Nothing. What is there for me to do? If they recognized me, I ruined their evening. I know I have ruined their lives. I owe it to them to stay out of their way. If they do not leave London, then I may have to—we may have to. That ought to please you.”
He curled his fingers around hers and removed her hands from his face. He held them clasped between their bodies, and the blanket slithered off his shoulders to the floor.
“We will run away?” she asked. “Because you saw the parents of one of your friends and I saw Lady Angela Allandale?”
“Run away.” He laughed softly, but there was no amusement in the sound. “Did you not know, Chloe, that that is an impossibility? You ought to know. You have tried it a few times. The trouble with running away is that you must always take yourself with you.”
“You must face them, then,” she said. “You must call on them. Perhaps, as with Miss Courtney, they will see you as a link with their son and be delighted to see you.”
He dropped her hands in order to brush her hair back from her face, to cup her cheeks as she had done his, to tip her face closer to his own.
“No,” he said softly.
“You are content, then,” she said, “to live out the rest of your life in hell?”
She had not planned those exact words. She heard their echo as though someone else had spoken them. His eyes looked like large pools of darkness.
“Content?” He laughed again. “It is as good a word as any, I suppose. A wife is a troublesome thing to have, Chloe.”
“An interfering baggage, do you mean?”
“As I recall saying once before quite recently,” he said, “if the glove fits . . .” But he did not speak with irritation this time.
“I cannot help caring just a little bit, you know,” she told him. “I care that you are unhappy.”
“And you?” He moved his head a little closer. “How could I not have known Lady Angela Allandale was at the theater? You are sure it was she?”
“Yes,” she said. “And even if I could not be sure, the reaction of the audience would have told me I had not mistaken.”
“And I missed it all,” he said, “selfish brute that I am. I am sorry, Chloe.”
“It does not matter,” she said. “We bear a coincidental likeness to each other. People will soon grow tired of remarking upon it.”
“Yes. They will.” He closed the distance between their mouths and kissed her.
It was not a sexual kiss. Or, rather, it was, but it was more than just that. There was warmth in it and something else. Need, perhaps. Yearning, perhaps. Or perhaps something that went deeper than feelings and therefore deeper than words.
Her arms went about him and his came about her, and the kiss deepened as his tongue sought the inside of her mouth and she felt his hardening erection against her abdomen.
Even when he took her back to bed and stripped off her nightgown and laid her down and came directly on top of her and into her—even then, as he moved in her and she twined her legs about his and moved with him, it was not really a sexual coupling. Or not just, or not primarily. Nor was it only about the begetting of a child.
It was . . .
Ah, no. There were no words.
But he needed her. He did not just want her. He needed her. As she needed him. She had been more upset by the events of the evening than she had realized at the time.