"I do enjoy talking to her."
"And she flirts," Chloe said, raising her eyes from the carpet. "Doesn't she?"
Hugo smiled. "Yes, she does. Women in her position often do. It's a game."
"A game you like to play."
"Yes," he agreed. "A game I enjoy playing with Lady Carrington."
"Mmmm. Would you like to make love to her?"
Hugo pulled at his chin, trying to work out what was going on. "Judith Devlin is a married woman, lass. And from what I can see, a very happily married woman."
"Yes, I'm sure that's so. But it doesn't answer my question. Would you like to make love to her?" She was standing at the end of his bed, holding on to one of the posts, now completely oblivious of her nakedness.
He debated and decided on an honest response. "Yes," he said evenly. "I could imagine making love to Lady Carrington with a great deal of pleasure."
"I thought so. I expect she would know much more about it than I do."
"You learn very fast, lass," he said, trying to lighten the mood. "Come here." He stretched out a hand in invitation.
Chloe remained where she was. "But I'm not worldly or… or up to snuff, like Lady Carrington."
"Come here." Hugo leaned forward, caught her around the waist, and toppled her onto the bed beside him. "No, you are not worldly, and it would be quite wrong for you to be so. Why on earth are you comparing yourself with a woman some ten years older than you? If you must make comparisons, then do so with other debutantes."
"But you're not interested in debutantes," she said, lying rather stiffly against him. "And I'm comparing myself with women you are interested in."
"Ahhh." He sat up. It seemed a moment for plain speaking. "I think we'd better clarify a few things, Chloe. This London scheme was of your devising, as I
recall. You wish to acquire an accommodating husband so that you may have control of your fortune and thus the ordering of your own life. Isn't that so?"
He looked down at her as she lay still on the bed. Her eyes were tightly closed. "Chloe, open your eyes and sit up."
When she didn't immediately comply, he pulled her into a sitting position. She opened her eyes, since keeping them shut while sitting up seemed absurd.
"Isn't that so?" he repeated.
"It was," she said. "But why can't you many me and then-"
"Of all the absurdities!" Hugo interrupted. "I've never heard such moon-mad nonsense. I am thirty-four, my dear child, and thirty-four makes a poor husband for seventeen-even if I wanted such a thing."
"You wouldn't want to marry me?" It was a soft question, but her eyes had darkened with the expectation of hurt.
"I have no intention of marrying anyone," he stated. "As I've told you before. We are here because you wished it-and because it keeps you out of your brother's orbit. You will enjoy your come-out like any other seventeen-year-old in her first Season, and if your reception tonight was anything to go by, you will have more offers of marriage than you can handle. We'll both have our work cut out making the right choice for you."
"But what about us?"
"What about us?" he demanded with sudden harshness, realizing the slipperiness of this slope. "I am breaking every honorable rule of conduct in the book, Chloe. I was weak enough to allow you to engineer this, but I have sworn you will not be harmed by it. You will many and put this behind you, hopefully as an interlude that brings you only pleasant memories. You will tell no one about it, ever."
"But I don't want it to stop." She looked at him with painful candor and put a hand on his thigh. "Please, Hugo, why must it ever stop? I'll try very hard to be a good wife, and I can learn how to be like Lady Car-rington-"
"For God's sake, Chloe, stop it11 don't want you to be like Lady Carrington. I do not want a wife, do you understand?" He put his hands on the slender shoulders and gave her a little shake. "I am not getting any deeper into this mess than I am already. The sooner you find yourself a husband and start leading an appropriate life, the happier I will be. Do you understand that?"
"You would be rid of me?"
"You are twisting my words."
"I don't think I am." She slid away from his hands and stood up. "You said it was a mess." She bent to pick up her nightgown.
Hugo sighed, passing a hand over his eyes. "And so it is. Can't you see, little simpleton, how grossly improper this is? There are those who would say I have debauched my ward, and many would agree with them."
"But you don't believe that''" Her head appeared from the folds of the nightgown and her eyes fixed on his face.
"It is the bald truth," he said flatly. "But bald truths are not always the whole story."
"Why don't you wish to marry anyone?"
"This catechism grows tedious." He sounded suddenly bored.
"But I want to know," she declared, coming over to the bed. "I think I'm entitled to know."
"Oh, do you now?" He was genuinely annoyed, as much by her truculence as by the unwelcome persistence in an area he preferred to keep dark even from himself. "And just where, my impertinent brat, does this entitlement lie? Are you assuming that your presence in
my bed gives you the right to poke and pry in whatever private thoughts and feelings I might have?"
Chloe flushed scarlet. "I didn't mean that."
"Then what did you mean?"
"I don't know," she said. She had meant exactly that, but it sounded dreadful when put in those bluntly contemptuous terms. Feeling like the brat he had called her, firmly put in her place, she turned to the door with a mumbled "Good night."
Hugo made no attempt to stop her. He swore under his breath, a short barnyard oath, wondering why he hadn't foreseen such a damnable complication in an already impossibly convoluted situation.
He had convinced himself she was simply trying her sexual wings and he was giving her the opportunity to do so safely. His own feelings were kept rigorously battened down. But if Chloe was beginning to envisage some kind of future to their liaison, then he'd have to take serious measures to disabuse her.
She had put the method into his hands, he realized. If she saw him engaging in light flirtation with the sophisticated worldly women who would seem so much more in his social sphere than herself, she might take the point more effectively than with simple words. It would lessen the intensity of their relationship and would certainly help him to conceal from his willful ward the passionate, tormenting, obsessive nature of his desire for her.
How could he tell her that the bars to their marriage were manifold? He was her father's killer, he had loved her mother, who had trusted him with her daughter's future, and anything but the destiny to which her beauty and fortune entitled her would be a gross betrayal of that trust; he was twice her age and a poor man; he was her guardian and by any ethical rule therefore banned
from taking advantage of that relationship to improve his own circumstances.
He had done many despicable things in his life, but tying an eager, passionate innocent to a man twice her age, a man who had played in the crypt and had killed her father, stuck even in bis craw.
He leaned over to blow out the candle and lay back in the dark, waiting to see if sleep would be kind to him. After a while he relit the candle, hitched himself up against the pillows, and resignedly picked up his discarded book. Within a few minutes, his door opened.
"Do you want to play backgammon?"
Chloe stood in the door, a diffident little smile on her lips that was impossible to resist. He'd employed enough severity for one night.