‘You’re the strongest woman I know, Georgia,’ Max insisted because he couldn’t hold her close and comfort her without wanting her and that was impossible for both of them.
‘No, I’m weak,’ she argued and now he was worried she would never recover from years of Jascombe chipping away her confidence.
‘Do you think any woman would have survived a marriage like that unscathed?’
‘He so nearly broke me.’
‘But he didn’t, did he? You acted so well nobody suspected what a beast he was in private. He must have hated the fact you were stronger inside than he was and he couldn’t crush your spirit.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said as if coming to terms with something revolutionary.
‘It has been known,’ he said wryly, ‘but that’s enough about him. Are you going to tell me why you came here when there must be more exciting places for a fashionable lady to visit while she is on tour?’
‘I had almost forgotten what you look like.’
‘And we both know you don’t want me visiting you,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t fit your world and I know too much about you.’
‘I don’t mean to be difficult, Max,’ she said and he almost laughed because she was born difficult and he wouldn’t have her any other way, despite the heartache she had caused him over the years.
‘You never did, but why did you really come out of your way to see me, Georgia?’
‘You are such a nag nowadays,’ she said almost sulkily, but then her worries about Ness keeping her daughters came tumbling out and he was so astonished he wasn’t insulted.
‘So you have been making yourself miserable because Ness took your girls off your hands so that you could recuperate in peace?’ he said incredulously.
‘Don’t make me sound so foolish, Max. Edgar made Ness their guardian so he can decide where they live and with whom.’
‘They are females who have no place in the ducal succession. Why would he keep them close when they have a perfectly good mother to save him the bother?’
‘Because they are Edgar’s children and the Duchess will cling to them like a leech. She thought Edgar could do no wrong, so she won’t care if they are girls; they are his children and she blindly adored him.’
‘The Duke didn’t adore him. My guess is he knew what a crooked dolt he had spawned. Ness is a bumbling idiot in many ways, but he has enough sense not to want that unsavoury bit of family history to be repeated.’
‘Then why did he take my girls away and tell me that they can’t come back until he says so?’
‘Because he’s a bumbling idiot, of course, and I expect he wants to make sure you are well enough to take them off his hands for good by the autumn. The last thing he will want then is a pair of lively young girls underfoot when his new grandchild is born.’
‘Lord Chert’s Marchioness is with child, then?’ she asked incredulously, and Max nodded. ‘Why didn’t the Duke tell me and how do you know?’
‘My godmother is Lady Chert’s aunt and writes about all sorts of things to me that she probably should not because she knows I never go anywhere important to tattle about them.’
‘Not that you would even if you didn’t live in the middle of nowhere.’
‘No, I’m too safe for my own good,’ he said sourly, but Georgia wasn’t listening.
‘If his son and heir has finally got on and done his duty to the Duke’s precious succession, maybe he really does only want me to be fit and well before the child is born.’
‘Of course he does—Ness doesn’t want your girls, Georgia. All he cares about is passing on his titles and possessions to the next heir until the end of time.’
‘What about the Duchess?’
‘What about her?’ Max said cynically.
Given the damage the woman had done by spoiling her second son so much he grew up devious and selfish, he refused to pity a duchess with nothing to do but pretend she was important and worship the memory of her repellent son.
‘Now Lady Chert is with child, I suppose the Duchess’s whims and fancies will matter less than ever to her husband,’ Georgia mused.
‘She served her purpose and gave the Duke an heir and a spare, but he doesn’t matter much to her either, so don’t waste your pity. The Duchess of Ness is the most selfish and vain woman I have ever met.’
‘Although I hate the thought of her getting her claws into my girls, she has lost the one person on earth she truly cared about.’
‘Doesn’t it tell you all you need to know that her darling was Lord Edgar Jascombe? I suspect she made him in her own image.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said with a shudder.
‘I am doing well.’
‘Stop trying to make me laugh, it isn’t funny.’
‘No, it’s not, but a severe bout of the influenza can leave anyone prey to gloomy thoughts and yours must have been severe for Ness to have noticed.’
‘I can’t stop worrying about them stuck in that stiff old house with the same people who raised their father to be a sly brute.’
‘Not even knowing how eager Ness will be to get them out of the way before his next heir in line is born? I’m sure it won’t dare be born a girl, but if it is can you imagine how much worse it would seem to Ness and his heir if there were two other females at Mynham to rub in the fact all their hopes rested with Chert getting it right next time?’
‘I have always been surprised the Duke didn’t order Lord Chert to marry sooner.’
‘Maybe he was waiting for him to meet his match,’ Max said, although he suspected Lord Chert had enjoyed being a notable catch too much to pin himself down until his father insisted he marry a suitable future duchess. ‘I hope Lady Chert is content to give birth only to boys.’
‘She has my sympathy. All I want is for my girls to grow up happy in my care instead of the Duke’s. Oh, and to be far too wary of charming and heartless men like their father to be taken in by one as I was.’
‘It would be better if you showed them how to live fully and freely by example, Georgia love,’ he told her and what the devil was he thinking of?
Georgia realised she was gaping at Max with her mouth open and closed it hurriedly. What did he mean live fully and freely? And love? It was a careless term of endearment from an old friend, of course, but her heart was still racing—with fear he meant it, not because it sounded like an adventure she would never dare have. And even this far away from him she was tingling with who knew what feeling now and it simply wouldn’t do.
‘What’s wrong with how I live?’ she said warily.
‘You are in danger of living your life through your girls like your mother-in-law did with Jascombe.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’
‘Maybe it is, but you still need to live better than her,’ he said implacably.
‘I do,’ she said shortly.
‘You might if you stopped being Jascombe’s abused wife, but you haven’t yet, have you?’
‘Easy for you to say,’ she muttered sulkily, but he heard her anyway.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he said grimly and he did look as if it had cost him dear to say it. ‘And you never shirked a challenge when we were children,’ he added slyly.
‘We’re not children any more,’ she snapped and there was that silly prickle of awareness of him as a man again. It was unaccountable and, as she didn’t want to account for it, she ignored it as best she could.
‘No,’ he said dourly and it was his turn to stare at the hills.
He truly loved this hard-edged but forlorn old place, didn’t he? Max had found his own way in life, first at Cambridge as a scholar, then as an unexpected landowner and master of a neglected castle. She could hardly accuse him of not knowing what he was talking about, but she wanted to. She wanted to say he was wrong, yet what had she built on the ashes of her supposed-to-be wonderful life when Edgar died? A restless social life to stop her doting on her girls didn’t look much of an achievement from here.
Max was rebuilding a castle and estate with fierce energy while she danced and pretended she was carefree in London. He was so much more complicated than he seemed eight years ago, though, wasn’t he? This Max was tall instead of lanky and awkward, his face had lost the mismatched look his strong features had as a youth. He had grown into his looks and she imagined him dressed as a fashionable beau and knew he would fascinate the finicky society beauties if he inhabited her world instead of his.
The foundations of her life wanted to shift as jealousy of her fashionable friends ogling him in a rake’s dashing clothing insisted he must stay here. She didn’t want him to join the charade she had played in for the last five years so maybe he was right and she did need to try harder.
A memory of Max’s brother Zachary with his fiery, passionate wife, Martha, both oblivious to anyone else in the midst of a society crush, sneaked into her head and whispered theirs looked a passion worth taking risks for. But she wasn’t Martha and why would Max watch her as hungrily as his brother did Martha? She felt herself blush again as curiosity asked how she would feel if he ever did. Hot, she decided, and flustered and she preferred being cool and composed, but she was very glad he was still staring at his beloved hills so he didn’t notice that blush and wonder what had caused it.
‘Why do you love this place so much?’ she asked him once her cheeks felt cool enough to risk it. ‘It’s not as if you grew up here. If your earliest memories were of creeping around it at night or playing in the grounds with your brother and sisters, I could understand it, but as far as I know you had never set eyes on Holdfast until you came here to see if you would be willing to take it on five years ago.’
‘It needed me,’ he said with a brooding glance back at the conglomeration of buildings from various periods built inside the castle walls over the years which, along with the original keep, made up an eccentric whole. ‘And I needed it,’ he added as if honesty demanded it.
‘Why?’
‘Maybe it was to put my heart and soul into and keep me busy while I drag it back from the edge of ruin and make it a family home again.’
‘You don’t have a family to make one for,’ she said impulsively. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, that was so clumsy of me and so rude,’ she added because he might long for a family to fill his lonely old castle with for all she knew.
‘I have Becky and my niece now she has asked to live with me,’ he said stiffly and didn’t seem to want her apology. ‘Her sitting rooms and the downstairs are ready for them and now the bedrooms are finished she can move in.’
‘That was quick.’
‘I was already working on the Little House in case she and Jack needed a home. He had talked of selling out before Napoleon’s escape from Elba and I would have been glad of their help while he decided what he wanted to do next.’
‘I am so sorry for your loss as well as your sister’s, but why does she want to come here where she’ll often be alone while you are so busy? I know your mother asked her to live at Flaxonby Dower House and Zach and his wife begged her to stay at Flaxonby itself. I expect her husband’s parents would love to have her and little Phoebe to live with them as well, so why on earth is she coming here instead?’
‘Some of us happen to like it, but maybe you should ask her.’ Now he sounded offended and he was clearly impatient for her to leave and take her impertinent questions with her.
‘Maybe I should, but she would have more company if she lived with your mother or brother or with Captain Sothern’s parents,’ she persisted because it felt easier to tread on his toes than discuss her sore places again instead.
‘Apparently that’s why she wants to live here,’ Max said stiffly.
‘So she can be lonely while you are busy?’
‘No, so she can be alone when she needs to be and feel the loss of a fine man she truly loved and will miss until her dying day,’ he said as if he didn’t expect her to understand and he was quite right.
All she had wanted to do when Edgar died was fill the time when her girls didn’t need her with as much lightness and gaiety as possible since he had denied her any from the moment they were married.
‘You will carry on restoring this place while Becky mourns?’
‘It’s what she wants.’
Becky had been so jealous of Georgia as a child, because she was the same age as Max and could keep up with him when Becky got left behind—now Becky would have Max all to herself. Georgia supposed living with him really would suit her and Becky could mourn in peace while Max was a loving father figure to his little niece. Georgia was the jealous one now because she would have loved for her girls to have such a good one.
‘It sounds like the perfect solution for you both,’ she said.
‘Aye, we are neither of us very sociable nowadays.’
‘Unlike me?’
‘Each to their own and Holdfast suits me.’
‘You think you are stern and stony and demand respect?’ she teased him.
‘Not yet, but I do love it and I respect the people who work this land. Holdfast has been my salvation as well as the other way about and I am content here.’
‘Are you? Is this really all you ever wanted in life, Max?’
‘No,’ he said abruptly and frowned as if she had trodden somewhere forbidden. ‘I couldn’t have that, but Holdfast is more than a second best for a second-best Chilton.’
What couldn’t he have, then? Had he loved someone and lost her? The thought of it made her heart ache, for him of course. Sympathy for a friend must explain the sick feeling in her belly and this strange ache in her heart. She didn’t want him to have suffered the same sort of mental anguish she had endured for a very different reason. Even so, she couldn’t imagine why any young woman with a particle of sense would turn him down, but someone must have done for him to look so bleak when he said it.
‘You were never second best to Zachary, Max,’ she said gently. ‘Your family love you for how you are and they know you would lay down your life for any one of them if they ever needed you to.’
He gave her a complicated look, as if she didn’t understand—and he was right, she didn’t. ‘Do you feel well enough to walk as far as the church with me?’ he said as if he had been idle with her for long enough, but was too polite to come out and say so.
‘Yes, and I hate to admit that my father-in-law is right, but your fresh Northumbrian air does seem to be doing me good,’ she told him.
As they walked along side by side, she was relieved the strange tingly feeling had died down. It must be a leftover symptom from her recent illness and, of course, it had nothing to do with the fact Max was so clearly a mature man now instead of the lanky boy she remembered. It wouldn’t do her any good if he was the cause of it, since he clearly wanted her gone so he could get on with his real life.
‘Good, but I would hate you to think I envy Zach his title and possessions in any way. I got over doing that when my mother told me my father had worked relentlessly to redeem the mortgages on Flaxonby, then tried to make enough money to buy this place back for his mother and she swears the overwork killed him. I always knew Zach had a heavy burden to shoulder when our father died so young and he’s always been welcome to Flaxonby and the title as far as I am concerned.’
‘Then why call yourself second best?’
He frowned at the distant hills as if measuring words before he said them. She didn’t like the idea as she looked back at the ease they once shared and envied her younger self so deeply it felt hurtful.
‘Because my grandmother would if she knew I own her precious castle and not Zach,’ he said at last. ‘She never liked me and maybe that was because I follow my mother’s dark looks rather than being a Viking Chilton like Zach. But I do know she would hate the trick Zach and Martha played on Alderman Tolbourne when he gifted them Holdfast because the granddaughter he had disowned as a child had married a viscount.
‘When they handed it straight on to me, Lady Margaret DeMayne-Chilton would say they had short-changed her as well as Martha’s paternal grandfather. Never mind if Tolbourne only wanted to boast his great-grandson would own the castle of our ancestors one day solely because of his generosity, Lady Margaret would be furious I now own it as well.’
‘You are the best owner this place could have and you love it. You are restoring it and she should have been grateful to have two fine grandsons instead of being such an arrogant old killjoy.’
‘A compliment, my lady?’ he said, but his self-mocking bow set her at a distance again and she felt stupidly bereft.
‘Yes, but we are talking about your grandmama,’ she prompted him.
‘Aye, well, she was the sole heiress to Holdfast in its glory days,’ he excused the old dragon, as if loving it had made him understand Lady Margaret better.
‘She married the careless rogue who lost it on the turn of a card of her own free will.’
‘True,’ he admitted with a rueful smile.
‘If you accept that Holdfast Castle has the best master it could have, I will think about my frivolous London life a little harder.’
‘I will if you will, then,’ he said stiffly and her heart ached.
‘And I am my own woman now,’ she said sharply and shrugged to say sorry. ‘But thank you for listening to my woes and telling me Lady Chert is with child,’ she said to change the subject. ‘Now I really must go or it will be dark before I get to Edinburgh and Aunt Isobel will send out a search party.’
They had reached the little church where the family, its servants and estate workers had worshipped for generations.
‘We can go back a shorter way,’ he said as if he would be delighted to see the back of her so he could return to his labours.
‘Good idea.’ She suddenly realised why she hardly ever came here—it was because she missed him so much when she left.
‘Please give my compliments to your aunt,’ he said with chilly politeness as he waited to hand her up into her carriage.
‘Of course.’ She gave him a slightly mocking curtsy and was shocked when his bow was so slight it was very nearly rude. ‘Goodbye, Max,’ she said as lightly as she could.
He handed her into her elegant travelling carriage as rapidly as he could, but she felt a stupid bolt of something she didn’t want to know about shoot through her at the mere touch of his hand. It felt sharp and hot and shameful and she didn’t understand it, or want to. Some of the most handsome gentlemen of the ton had handed her into carriages or taken her hand in the dance and she had either felt nothing at all or wanted to snatch her hand away. Now that same hand wanted to linger in Max’s and that was just plain ridiculous.
‘Goodbye, my lady,’ he said austerely.
‘Mr Chilton,’ she corrected herself and wanted to be glad when he stepped back with an abrupt nod.
She kept her gaze firmly to the front as the coach began to move because she didn’t want him to know about the tears in her eyes. At least Aunt Isobel would be pleased to see her. Once Becky was installed at Holdfast, she would be even less welcome here than she had been today. Now all she had to do was learn to put the good bits of the past behind her as well as the bad.