An Experiment in Love

Chapter 16

That was a disaster. Chloe squelched up the steps leaving Kit to pay the triple fare demanded by the driver who had threatened to leave them on the river bank, along with their buckets of mud. The two subdued youths, expecting dismissal for laughing at an earl, scuttled down the basement steps.

Chloe couldn't blame them, it must have been an hilarious sight. The door opened to reveal the butler's horrified face. 'Put newspapers down in the hall,' Chloe suggested as she dripped on the doorstep. She did not dare look at Kit.

He had been virtually silent all the way back. She had tried apologising and he had been appallingly polite, assuring her she should not give it a moment's thought. It was only his sense of honour that prevented him from calling the betrothal off there and then, she was certain.

'Are you cold?' he asked as footmen laid papers up the stairs and maids descended with towels. 'You shivered.'

'No.'

'Then you will be all right for this evening?' Kit's unfortunate valet was trying to peel his coat off.

'This evening?'

'It is Wednesday. Almack's.'

'You will escort me?' Chloe stared.

'If you feel up to it. Lady Chloe, I am sorry.'

He couldn't be breaking it off and offering to take her to Almack's all at once. 'Wait a moment, please, Jane,' she said to the maid who was bundling her towards the bottom step.

Kit seemed oblivious of the servants around them. 'I should never have let you go out on the mud. You might have drowned or been hurt.'

'I do not think you could have stopped me.' That was not what she should have said. She should have assured him there was nothing he could have done, that she had been too far away, too careless. But that was not what she meant and if they were to be married it was important he understand. 'I would not have let you. This is the sort of thing I do, I'm afraid. Not mud very often, but cliffs, caves and moorlands.'

The staff seemed to have melted away as she stood there, praying he was not going to behave like a typical protective man. He regarded her without expression, then he grinned, his teeth startlingly white in his filthy face. 'Good thing I've got a head for heights in that case. Mayes! I need to get these boots off before I go upstairs.'

Chloe fled to her bedchamber before he saw the tear-tracks down her muddy cheeks. Kit was doing his utmost to accept her interests and to adapt to her behaviour, behaviour that no other man she could think of would tolerate. And she had done virtually nothing to try and be what he must surely want from a wife, someone attractive, conventional, sociable. If Kit was prepared to make sacrifices for her, then she must make them for him. His willingness to compromise made her love him more. Would he simply accept her own gestures in that direction as his due as a man, or might he see them for what they were?

'Jane,' she said as she climbed out of the second change of bathwater. 'Please ask Lady Penelope to join me.'

Penelope arrived when Chloe was dry, clad in a dressing robe and standing in front of two open clothes presses. 'Did you have a nice day, dear?'

'It had its moments. Penny, I need your help.'

'Another part of the experimental process?'

'This may be the most difficult.' She was becoming desperate. If Kit could not find it in him to love her, how was she going to bear it? 'Can you make me look like an Incomparable?'

Her loving sister sat down on the bed and went off into peels of laughter. Oh dear. It was going to be that difficult?