Chapter Five
C hase stared at her, certain he was seeing yet another ghost inside the old castle, as Tessa stood in the open doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. A dark look of admonishment flared in her large eyes.
Ignoring the way his heart leapt into his throat at the sight of her, he forced himself to lean casually back in his chair. “Good morning to you, too, Miss Albright.”
“Nodcock,” she repeated, just as vehemently as before.
His lips twisted. “Is that why you came all the way out here—to hurl insults at me? If so, I could have spared you the trouble of a drive and ridden into town myself to let you flay me in Lady Bentley’s drawing room.”
She wisely ignored that baiting. “I’m here because we have unfinished business.” Her brow creased into a troubled frown. “And because I couldn’t sleep last night.” The crease deepened. “Because I kept thinking about you.”
He rose slowly to his feet. “Oh?”
“I kept thinking about our conversation and realized that you were a complete nodcock who somehow managed to escape begging for my forgiveness.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t the answer he wanted.
“So I expect it now.” Her arms tightened across her bosom with barely repressed anger. “Begging. Lots and lots of it. More begging than any man has ever begged before.”
“And then you’ll forgive me?”
She gave a haughty sniff. “Maybe.”
Suppressing a smile, he nodded at his untouched breakfast tray and the pot of hot coffee sitting on the corner of his desk. “Help yourself.” When she hesitated, he added, deadpan, “You’ll need fortification to withstand all that begging.”
She shot him a glare, then acquiesced by blowing out a hard—if wholly exaggerated—sigh. She dropped her arms to her sides and entered the room. She stopped in front of him and looked down at the plates of berries, sweet buns, and cold slices of ham and cheese. The cook must have forgotten in the time he’d been away how much one man could eat and so had served up enough for three, yet he hadn’t the appetite for any of it.
“Go on,” he tempted. “I know how much you love strawberries.”
For a fleeting instant, he saw her indignation waver and appreciation gleam in her eyes, only to dissolve away with another haughty sniff. “Well, if you’re not going to eat them…” She selected a large, dark red berry.
“Where’s your chaperone?” He glanced past her into the hall.
“Lady Bentley said I wouldn’t need one since we’re family…and since my reputation has already been damaged by scandal.”
“I see.” Apparently, Lady Bentley’s chaperoning skills needed drastic improvement. But he was glad Tessa was here, regardless. He didn’t want last night’s conversation to be the last they ever shared.
She paused, berry poised at her lips, and bluntly asked past it, “Why have you returned, Chase?”
“Begging your forgiveness isn’t enough?”
“I didn’t say that wasn’t a splendid start.” She pointed the berry at him. “The real reason.”
“As I told you last night, I’m closing up the castle.”
“Hmm.” She bit into the strawberry.
“You don’t believe me?”
“No,” she answered around the berry bite. “Oh, closing up the castle, perhaps, if you don’t plan on living here. But a duke boxing and bagging himself? Not when he has servants to do it for him.” She swallowed and placed the stem back onto the plate. “You could have stayed in London—or on the Continent for that matter—and simply sent word to have it done.”
“Things need to be properly sorted, all three hundred rooms of them.” For an example, he gestured at the piles of documents on the desktop. “Besides, it’s my responsibility. It’s my home.”
“No, it isn’t,” she countered, as if daring him to contradict her. “A castle, yes, but not a home.”
“A man’s castle is his home.”
She arched a brow.
He conceded and repeated quietly, “No, it isn’t.”
Perhaps it had been once, a very long time ago, before his father died and he became Greysmere. But he didn’t remember any of that life except for unconnected snatches of fuzzy images. For God’s sake, he’d been only six and could remember nothing of his father except for a feeling that the man had been somber, hard, and unforgiving.
“The dower house was more of a home to me than this place ever was,” he admitted.
She blinked, puzzled. “The place on the edge of the estate?”
He gave a confirming nod and turned his focus once more to the desk, this time ignoring the papers in favor of sorting through drawers. “My grandmother lived there while I was a boy. Did you know that?” He glanced up only long enough to see her give a faint shake of her head. “I used to visit her on afternoons when I’d finished with my studies, mostly because she bribed me with ginger beer.”
“Did she truly give beer to a boy?”
He flashed her a brief grin. “Why do you think I have such pleasant memories of her?” His smile faded as he pulled open the center drawer and looked down at its long-forgotten contents. “When Grandmother died, I was ten, and the duchess decided to hand over the castle completely to me and take up residence in the dower house. So she moved there, and I lived here.”
Her lips parted, stunned. “Your mother left you to live alone when you were ten ?”
“I wasn’t alone. I had Marx, my tutor, and Sampson, my valet, and two dozen other household staff.”
Her expression melted into sadness. “Your mother left you to live alone,” she repeated, this time not a hint of question in her voice.
“I know what you’re thinking. That it couldn’t have been a very good life for a boy, to live in a huge castle without any family.” He looked at the drawer full of objects and idly pulled out a brass blotter. “But a castle without parental supervision and no one to tell me what I couldn’t do—what boy wouldn’t have loved that?”
“You,” she said quietly.
His mouth twisted at being called out on that borderline lie, but he didn’t glance up from the drawer. “Well, it didn’t last for very long anyway. I was sent off to Eton that autumn.”
“But you were only ten. Eton doesn’t take boys until they’re thirteen.”
“They made an exception.” He continued to sort through the desk, although he knew everything there would be sold or given away. He didn’t need desk accessories for a desk he would never use again. “I was younger than most of the other students, I’ll admit. But I wasn’t a boy, you see. I was Greysmere. A duke. And the duchess thought Eton would craft me into the kind of man capable for the job.”
“I’ve never thought of being a duke as a job before,” she mused.
“Oh, you have no idea how much,” he muttered and absently pushed around a set of quill knives.
“And the boy you were grew into a good man.”
“Good is relative.” If he possessed any goodness at all in his heart, it was only because of his three friends—Devlin, Lucien, and Shay. They’d met at Eton, all of them outcasts in their own ways. Each still was. “I’ve done a lot to be ashamed of.”
Tessa considered that by staring at the food tray. “You mean in the wars.”
“Among other things.” Things he would never tell a proper lady like Tessa. If she disliked him now, she’d downright hate him after. “For one,” he dodged, “I could have been a better son to the duchess.”
“Well, to begin with,” Tessa interjected, helping herself to a bite of a sweet bun, “you could have called her Mother instead of duchess .”
A faint smile tugged at his lips. “You never met her. If I had ever called her Mother, she would have suffered apoplexy at the use of such an affectionate endearment.” He focused his attention on several half-melted wax sticks. “She started calling me Greysmere the day my father died. Confused the hell out of me. I had no idea who I was, if Maddox or Greysmere was my surname, and I had no bloody idea who Chase was.” In many ways, he still didn’t. “For a while, I thought my name was Your Grace.”
He dared to dart a glance at her. Thank God, it wasn’t pity he saw in her countenance but concern.
“I left Eton at eighteen,” he told her, “and went to the Continent to be a soldier.”
“That was the first time you’d fled.”
He blew out a hard breath. “I suppose.”
But he’d had no choice then, either. The last thing he wanted was to return to Cuillin and take over running the dukedom, to launch into a bleak and predetermined life. So he went to the Continent with his three best friends instead, where they joined the Prussians as mercenaries and spent the next several years putting to good use all those fighting skills Titus had taught them at Eton. Chase had thrived there. On the Continent, he wasn’t a duke. He was a soldier, his reputation based on conduct and capability, not on some birthright over which he had no control.
As if to prove his point, he reached into the bottom desk drawer, pulled out a starburst-shaped blue-and-gold medal on a black-striped length of ribbon, and tossed it onto the desk in front of her. He nodded at it. “I was very good at being a soldier.”
She silently picked up the Pour le Mérite , the Prussian medal known as the Blue Max and the highest honor awarded to military officers who weren’t part of the Prussian royal family. She considered it the same way she had the strawberries and set it back down, unwanted.
“But you came back from the wars,” she reminded him.
“When I was twenty-four.” And only after receiving word that the duchess had fallen gravely ill.
He arrived in London just in time to be at her side when she died. On her deathbed, she had whispered her last wish—that he marry Eleanor Albright, the granddaughter of a duke and a painfully proper but beautiful miss in her first season who had taken the ton by storm. Chase had agreed to the arrangement only to comfort the duchess during the last hours of her life. But he also knew he wasn’t a lad anymore and had run out of excuses for not marrying and producing an heir.
“Then I courted Eleanor.” And did his duty in both respects. A good soldier, indeed.
He put the medal back into the desk and shut the drawer.
“That was when you and I met,” Tessa said with a genuine smile that provided a comfort he didn’t deserve.
“And I’ve never been the same since,” he added with an exaggerated sigh of sheer weariness.
She threw a berry at him.
He caught it and popped it into his mouth.
She knew the rest of the story from that point; he didn’t have to tell her. She knew how he and Eleanor were unsuited in almost all regards, how they simply bumped along more like acquaintances than spouses, mostly ignoring the other’s existence unless absolutely necessary. Oh, they never fought. That would have been an indicator of some kind of passion in their marriage, even if the wrong kind. No, he simply didn’t care what happened in their marriage. He didn’t care what his wife did or didn’t do, didn’t care about being a true partner—he was never cruel to her, never raised a hand to her, never cursed her…yet in some ways the lack of affection he showed her had been even worse.
He’d been a terrible husband, not caring what role his wife played in his life as long as she was a good mother to Thomas. So when she announced one wintry day that she was leaving for London and taking their son with her, he had cared little about that either, except that he knew he would desperately miss his toddler son. But even then, he hadn’t tried to stop her from going.
After all, he had also been a terrible father.
All the poets were wrong, he knew now. The opposite of love wasn’t hatred. It was complete apathy. That was exactly how he’d felt about Eleanor. The only consolation he could eke out now was that he had assumed they would have eventually grown to love each other.
But they had run out of time. He and Eleanor were estranged after only a few years of marriage, and the shipwreck ended all possibility of reconciliation.
He shoved himself away from the desk. “And now I need to close up the estate and return to Spain, where I have a new home waiting for me.” One that didn’t remind him of how horribly wrong his life had gone, how brutal his past. Everything about this place did that. “So if you’re willing, Tessa, I will gladly welcome your help here.” His eyes fixed on hers. “If not, then I understand if you want to leave and will respect your choice.”
He crossed his arms, not to punctuate his decision but to keep himself from reaching for her and begging her to stay.
She stared at him across the wide desk for a long moment. He could almost see the thoughts tumbling through her mind as she considered all he’d just told her and everything she knew about him. They had struck up a good friendship before he married her cousin, and then as now, he had the uncanny sensation that she knew him better than any other woman ever had, including Eleanor. The thought should have frightened him to his core; instead, inexplicably, he took reassurance in it.
Slowly, she circled the desk to stand next to him, so close she had to tilt back her head to keep from breaking eye contact. On the stale winter air which permeated the castle, he caught the soft scent of her rosewater perfume wafting gently up to him. She smelled of summer, flower gardens… life , and he couldn’t help but deeply pull in her scent, like a suffocating man desperate for breath.
“Nodcock,” she murmured, although this time the admonishment lacked her earlier anger. “You’re wrong to think you can find a different life somewhere else. We are who we are, Chase, and there’s no escaping that, no matter how hard we try.”
He needed to back away from her, but he couldn’t bring himself to move, not even when the hint of a wry smile tugged at her lips. Then the challenging chit had the nerve to lean even closer.
“And that’s why we make such a good pair, you and I.” She impulsively placed a kiss to his cheek. “We both know our limitations.”
His cheek burned where her lips had grazed his skin. Affection. He hadn’t experienced that feeling in so long he barely recognized it, and his frozen heart certainly wasn’t prepared for the jolt of it. Always, the women he’d spent time with over the years had seen him as a way to acquire status or money, and those he’d been intimate with had shared in physical release. Nothing more. Hearts had never entered into it.
Until now. That it was Tessa, of all women, who stirred affection inside him left him reeling.
Oblivious to the roiling confusion of emotions she’d set loose inside him, Tessa bounced back around the desk to help herself to the last strawberry.
Chase cleared his throat. “Does that mean you’ve decided to help me?”
She nodded and popped the berry into her mouth. “Men aren’t good at things like packing.”
A grand understatement. She had no idea how truly bad he would be at it. He could have packed up all of Eleanor’s clothes and personal items and sent them to Tessa so she could have kept whatever mementos she wanted and donated the rest to charity. What he would have done with Thomas’s things, though… Dear God, he couldn’t bring himself to even contemplate that.
He certainly couldn’t do this alone.
“Then let me invite you and Winnie to stay here.” His offhanded offer was one of hidden need in disguise. “I’ll give you use of the coach, and you can come and go as you please.” He paused, then added, despite how much it inexplicably irritated him, “And Mr. Renslow is free to call on you here.”
Tessa froze, her mouth pausing in mid-chew at the unexpected invitation.
“After all, it would be more convenient if you were here so you don’t have to travel from Weymouth every day.” He shrugged and reached for his cup of coffee, thankful he’d poured brandy into it earlier. This conversation wasn’t going at all the way he’d planned. Hell, he hadn’t wanted this conversation at all. “I can arrange for a suitable chaperone if Lady Bentley isn’t willing to join you here.”
“As the personal guest of a duke?” She finished eating the berry. “You’ll never be rid of her.”
He chuckled at the matron’s expense. “So you’ll accept?”
She let out a long sigh of capitulation. “Winnie would never forgive me if I didn’t.”
What she meant, he knew, was that she would never forgive herself. But he was fine with whatever excuse she needed to tell herself, as long as she was here.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Tessa proposed, abruptly changing subjects. “It’s too nice a morning not to be outside enjoying it, and we’ll be spending hours and hours inside over the next few weeks. We need to get our air now.”
“Nice morning?” He glanced over his shoulder at the tall window overlooking the deer park behind the castle. There was no mistaking the ominous gray clouds rolling toward them from across the horizon or how the wind had been picking up all day. “Well, it’s not raining. I’ll give you that much.”
“That’s what makes it a nice English day.” She gestured a careless hand at the dark-paneled room around her. “We won’t have to ride far, just a bit away from the castle to see if the estate has changed since you’ve been away. And then I’ll help you sort through the rooms upstairs, I promise.” She lowered her voice, as if she were a devil offering an irresistible temptation. “I happen to know that Cuillin still keeps a couple very fine saddle horses in its stables.”
Her pointed persuasion was working. He was more tempted to ride off than he wanted to admit. “But you’re not wearing a riding habit.”
She laughed and opened her arms wide. “I’m in a castle with hundreds of rooms. I think I can find something to wear.” Before he could claim back his senses and say no, she rushed from the room, slowing only to call over her shoulder, “Don’t pack a thing without me!”
As she hurried through the door, she barely missed smacking into Bates, Chase’s former army aide-de-camp turned butler. The man jumped out of her way, his reflexes still sharp from being honed in the wars before coming to Cuillin to be Chase’s valet. He’d been promoted to butler when Chase left for the Continent, when the previous butler also left for employment elsewhere.
“Apologies!” Tessa called out over her shoulder as she scurried away.
Bates stepped into the study but turned to follow Chase’s gaze as he stared after her in amazement. The chit really was a force of nature.
“Is Miss Albright leaving?” Bates asked.
“No.” Chase prayed the single-word answer hid his delight that she had decided to help. “Miss Albright will be staying at Cuillin as my guest for the next few weeks, along with her sister Winifred and Lady Bentley. Please let the housekeeper know and have the best guest rooms made ready.”
“Yes, sir.” If the man was surprised at the news, he was well-trained enough not to let it show.
Chase waved Bates away as the man reached to take the breakfast tray, knowing Tessa would want another sweet roll before they rode off. A knowing smile tugged at his lips. The years hadn’t changed her so much as to pass up sweets when she could get them.
“Bates,” he said as the butler turned to leave, a new thought striking him. “Do you know any men who might have fought at Genappe, especially anyone who served under Major General Albright?”
“Not off the top of my head, but I can make inquiries, if you’d like.”
“Please. Make a list of names and ranks for me.” He added in afterthought, “The lower the rank, the better.”
“Yes, sir.” The butler took the liberty of topping off Chase’s cup of coffee. “Can I ask what it’s in regards to?”
Chase dismissed that with a shake of his head. “Probably nothing.”
Bates excused himself with a nod.
Finally alone again, Chase flopped into the desk chair, hung back his head, closed his eyes, and focused on steadying the rise and fall of his breathing, exactly as Titus had taught him. The conversation with Tessa and all the memories it had stirred up had sent his heart thumping with an unease that was boiling low in his gut and flaring into his limbs.
Perhaps returning here had been a grand mistake after all. Perhaps Tessa was right, and he should have left the boxing and bagging to the servants. It would have certainly been a hell of a lot easier on him to admit to his cowardice, at least to himself, and stayed away.
“Not in bloody hell,” he muttered.
He shoved himself to his feet and began to sort through the desk drawers with new purpose. After all, the sooner he was done here, the sooner he could leave.