by Candace Camp
Megan could not help but chuckle. There was something infectious about Theo’s smile. She looked at him and once again felt that strange tug inside her. The feeling was bizarre and unsettling, and she could not understand why she was experiencing it. She was not even sure what the sensation was.
However, she was sure that she should not be feeling it for this man. He was her sworn enemy, the man she had hated for ten years.
She put her hand to her midsection, as if to quiet the tumult there.
“I’ll take you up to the nursery,” Theo said. “It’s something of a climb, I’m afraid. In general, Mother has never approved of the notion of sequestering children away in the nursery. However, given the twins’ collection of animals, it seemed the most logical thing to stick them and their menagerie at some distance from the rest of us. So they are up on the third story.”
Megan, never having lived in the sort of wealthy household that had a separate nursery area for the children, was not sure exactly what to expect. From tales she had heard and read, she half expected some sort of gloomy area tucked away under the eaves, but when they reached it, she found that the Moreland nursery was a pleasantly sunny place with a large schoolroom and several smaller rooms leading off from it.
Shelves filled with toys and books lined the two long walls of the rectangular room. Four desks lined up back to back stood in the center of the room, and at one end of them stood a large globe on a stand. A chart of the solar system and an astronomical map of the night sky were pinned to the wall, as were several smaller maps of England, Europe and the world. The world map, Megan noticed, was dotted with pins of various colors, the predominant ones of red. Along the far wall, in the sun streaming in through the windows, were several cages containing animals.
The twins were engaged in feeding their various animals, the dog, Rufus, beside them, gazing hopefully into the cages. Con and Alex turned at the sound of their entrance, and broke into smiles when they saw Megan and Theo.
“Theo! Miss Henderson!” they chorused.
Alex set the cup of fruits and nuts inside the large birdcage and closed the door, and the boys approached them.
“We’ve already fed the boa,” Alex said apologetically. “I’m sorry. If we had known you would come up here, we would have waited.”
“That’s all right,” Megan replied candidly. While she had grown up with boys and their variety of pets, watching a snake swallow several live mice did not appeal to her. “But you could introduce me to your other animals, if you like.”
“But first,” Theo put in, “I’ve brought Miss Henderson up here to tell you that she is going to be your new tutor.”
The two boys stared at her in surprise, but she was pleased to see that their surprise was quickly replaced by excitement.
“Wizard!” Alex exclaimed.
“You’ll be ever so much better a tutor!” Con added. “You’re not at all stuffy.”
“They usually are,” Alex explained.
“Well, I shall try my best not to be,” Megan assured them. “Now, why don’t we look at your animals! That’s a beautiful parrot.”
She pointed to the vivid red-and-blue bird sitting on its perch of a dead branch inside its large cage. It was busily cracking nuts with its powerful beak, but it paused to turn its head and regard her with one bright eye.
Dropping the nut in its beak, the parrot let out a loud squawk. “Hello!”
“Hello,” Megan answered, going over to him.
“Wellie. Treat. Wellie. Treat.” The bird began to shift from one claw to the other on its perch, turning its head this way and that to watch Megan.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Wellington. Everyone calls him Wellie,” Con answered, coming up beside her.
“Don’t put your finger through the bars,” Alex warned, joining them. “Wellington sometimes takes a nip at one.”
Behind them, Theo let out a snort. “Sometimes? Without fail is more like it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful bird,” Megan said. “Where is it from?”
“The Solomon Islands,” Theo answered, coming up behind her. “I sent him to the boys, a fact for which much of my family never stops blaming me.”
“It’s not Wellington’s fault he gets out sometimes,” Con protested. “He only does what’s natural to him.”
“That’s true. A strong argument for leaving him in the jungle,” Theo responded. “There he can fly about all he pleases. I don’t really believe in taking animals from their habitat, but sometimes I find it hard to resist—particularly in this case, where I found him already caged in a market.”
“We’re awfully glad you did,” Con told him. “And Hercules, as well.”
“Hercules?” Megan asked, raising her brows.
“The boa,” Con replied, nodding his head toward the thick snake curled sleeping in another large cage.
“Come, see the others. Here are the turtle and frog.”
Megan let herself be led from cage to terrarium to cage to aquarium, admiring a variety of fish, fowl and reptiles, and even a rabbit and a fuzzy creature that the twins informed her was a guinea pig.
“You must be very responsible,” Megan told the boys.
They looked at her, slightly surprised. It was obviously not an appellation that they were accustomed to having attributed to them.
“Taking care of all these animals,” she explained.
“Oh.” The boys glanced at one another, and Alex said with a smile, “Yes, I suppose we are, actually.”
“Did you hear that, Theo?” Con asked, turning to his older brother.
“I certainly did.” Theo smiled at Megan. “I think Mother may have found the perfect tutor for you boys this time.”
Megan felt warmed all through by Theo’s smile. She could feel a blush rising up in her cheeks, and she looked away from him quickly.
It was crazy that she should react to him this way, she thought. Bizarre. She needed to get away and think this thing through by herself. Everything was different from what she had expected. She had not really thought of what she expected the Duke of Broughton’s family to be, but certainly it was not what she had seen of them. Theo’s sister, the twins, the duchess were warm and friendly, people who, if she had met them in any other circumstances, she would have liked immediately.
Even in these circumstances, she liked them, Megan had to admit. Of course, they were not responsible for what Theo had done. It was not beyond the realm of reason that they should be bright or concerned or humorous. Any family could turn out one bad specimen. Theo was not necessarily like his family.
The problem, though, Megan knew, was that Theo did seem like the rest of his family. He was charming and handsome and possessed a smile that she could feel all through her.
That was what she had to adjust to, she knew. She had to prepare herself to deal not with a cold and obvious villain, but with a man whose wickedness was concealed beneath a pleasant, appealing mask. She should have known that it would be too easy, too simplistic, for Moreland to be the way she had pictured him. After all, had not her own brother sent them a letter shortly after he joined up with Moreland’s party in which he had declared Moreland a “capital fellow”?
The man was deceptive, and she had to guard against his deception. She had to guard against her own feelings. She could not let her liking for Theo’s family color her judgment. Nor could she make the mistake of taking Theo Moreland at face value.
To succeed on her quest, Megan knew that she must be as deceptive as Moreland himself was. She had to pretend to like him, to be fooled by his easy charm, and all the while, inside, she must be like iron.
She had been in worse situations than this, she reminded herself, had faced worse enemies. She would get through this just as she had gotten through those other investigations, with determination and good sense. She had to. She owed it to Dennis.
“I should go now,” she said, and gave the boys a smile, th
en turned one that was less genuine toward Theo. “I have a great many things to do in order to get ready.”
“Are you coming back tomorrow?” Alex asked.
“No. I am afraid it will have to be the day after tomorrow. There are certain tasks that I must complete first.”
Like talking to the other men who had accompanied Theo Moreland and her brother on their trek up the Amazon. She had not really expected to be hired on here—and certainly not so quickly. She would have to do her interviews with Andrew Barchester and Julian Coffey tomorrow.
She knew that once she began working at Broughton House, she would have very little time on her own to interview people. Servants rarely got more than one day every two weeks off from work, and she suspected that it was probably even more difficult for governesses, who were probably expected to be with their charges every day, even if there were no studies pursued that day. It might be somewhat better for a tutor of boys as old as the twins, who did not need constant watching over as younger children did, but she could not count on that.
The boys insisted on coming down to see her off, a fact for which Megan was grateful. She frankly did not want to have to spend any more time alone in Theo’s company. It was altogether too unsettling.
Alex and Con kept up a steady stream of chatter as they went down the stairs, eliminating any necessity for Megan or Theo to speak.
She turned to the others to say a quick goodbye at the front door. Theo extended his hand to her, and it was impossible not to take it. Megan’s breath quickened as his hand engulfed hers. His palm was warm and a little rough, surprising her. She would not have expected an aristocrat to have worked enough to form calluses. Moreland must have been involved somehow in the menial tasks of his explorations. She had always pictured him riding along on some conveyance or other, with plenty of native servants to do all the work.
Theo held her hand a fraction of an instant too long, releasing it just as her eyes flew to his in question. There was a certain heat in his gaze that sent an answering flame licking through her, but there was something else, a kind of watchfulness that reawakened the uneasy feeling she had experienced when she first met him.
The smile she gave him and the boys was a trifle unsteady. Quickly she turned and walked out the door and down the street, firmly refraining from breaking into a run. She could not shake the notion that somehow, impossible though it seemed, Theo Moreland knew who she was.
CHAPTER 4
Theo barely heard the chatter of the twins as he stood in the doorway, looking after the retreating figure of Megan Henderson. Who the devil was she?
Con and Alex took off at their usual pace back up the stairs, and Theo turned and strolled through the hallway and out onto the terrace. He took the wide, shallow steps down onto the flagstone path that led to the arbor.
He stopped at the place where he had caught his first glimpse of Miss Henderson and stood, remembering the moment.
Recognition had jolted through him when he saw her, stopping him dead in his tracks. He could not believe it, and yet the fact of it was looking straight at him. Miss Henderson, the twins’ new teacher, was the woman who had come to him in his dream years ago. The woman who at the time had seemed so real to him, but whom he had come to realize must have been a figment of his imagination, a product of his fevered, delirious dreams.
However, now he knew that his assumptions were not true. The woman was very real indeed…and about to be living in his own house.
Theo shook his head in confusion and walked over to the arbor where his mother and the tutor had been sitting. He sat down in the chair Miss Henderson had occupied. The odor of the first blooming roses mingled with the subtler, faintly lavender scent of Megan’s perfume.
He had forgotten how beautiful the woman had been—no, not beautiful, exactly, in that sort of perfect, stunning way that his sister Kyria was beautiful. No, this woman was intriguing, enticing, with a soft, curvaceous body hidden and restrained by the plain dark clothes she wore, her hair warmly cinnamon in color and curling, seeming about to escape from its pins at any moment. And her smile…
Theo let out a groan, sinking his head onto his hands. He remembered that smile perfectly—the soft, wide mouth with its plump lower lip, slightly indented in the center, quirking a little to one side in an enchanting, eminently kissable way, her mahogany-colored eyes warm and inviting.
But she wasn’t real. She was a dream! So how had she turned up here in the Broughton House garden?
It had been ten years, and he had been terribly ill at the time, Theo reminded himself. The odds were he simply did not remember exactly what the woman in his dream looked like, and when he saw Miss Henderson, she had resembled the woman enough that his mind attached the teacher’s face to the image he had seen.
Even as he came up with the logical explanation for the odd occurrence, Theo knew that it was not so. That dream was as real, as vivid to him, as it had been ten years ago. He had only to close his eyes and he could remember the slab of stone hard beneath his body, and the sweat slicking his flesh and dampening his hair. He had been burning up with fever, his mouth constantly dry and parched no matter how much they poured that drink down his throat. The air had been stifling, heavy with the smoke from the incense burners on either end of the slab on which he lay. He remembered the low, rocky ceiling that arched over him, the rough walls, damp with the moisture of the cave.
He remembered, too, the dark, silent girl who had tended to him, wiping the sweat from his face and urging the drink on him, the metal of the goblet cool against his fevered lips. Her low voice had chanted in some foreign tongue. Dennis had been there, too, most of the time, talking to him, urging him to return from the netherworld in which he floated.
But neither Dennis nor the black-haired maiden had been there when the woman had come to him. His fever had been burning more hotly than ever, and he had been assaulted by hallucinations—visions of animals and birds and strange, monstrous people had danced around him. And he had sweated and shivered, aware deep inside that life was slipping from him.
Then she had appeared at the end of the slab, a wondrously normal, heartening sight in his confused world. A plain white gown had fallen straight from her shoulders, and her hair had tumbled down around her shoulders, soft and riotously curling, a warm reddish-brown, slightly darker in the flare of the torchlight than it had looked today in the sun of the rose garden. She had been young, her cheeks pink with the blush of youth.
He had gazed at her then, having never seen her before, yet somehow viscerally knowing her, with an awareness that went much deeper than mental understanding. They were connected in a deep, intense way that he could not have explained yet he understood with every fiber of his being.
“You must not die,” she had said to him, and walked around to stand beside his head.
He had looked at her, unable to speak, too weak even to raise his head. She had smiled down at him then, a wonderful, inviting smile that brought out the hint of mischief in her sparkling brown eyes.
“I won’t let you,” she went on. “Do you understand? You cannot die yet. I am waiting for you.”
Then she had bent and softly kissed his lips. He could still recall the butterfly-soft flutter of her mouth.
Theo had spoken of his vision to no one, not even Dennis. It had been too real and at the same time too bizarre to share with anyone. He could not explain his certainty that he knew the woman even though he had never seen her before. Nor did he want to share the intense flash of hunger that had darted through him at the sight of her.
It was the same stirring of desire that had arisen in him today when he first saw Megan Henderson. There was something about her, something that went beyond all notions of beauty or desirability, to an attraction so deep and elemental that it seemed a part of him. He had not felt anything like it with any other woman.
He remembered what his brother Reed had told him about the first time Reed saw Anna, the woman who would eventually become
his wife. It had been like a blow to the chest, Reed had said, and Theo had thought the description overly dramatic. Yet today what he had felt had been as strong as that, as intense, though it had been more of a jolt all through him rather than a blow to his heart.
He had to wonder what that meant about the twins’ new teacher. Not, he felt sure, that he was going to marry the woman. He had realized some time ago that he was apparently missing the romantic streak that seemed to run through the rest of his family. His parents, his brother, his sisters—even his twin—all had married for love. Theo, however, was sure that he had never felt the emotion. He had been attracted to many women over the years, had even indulged in affairs with those who were free and willing to engage in such relationships, both here in London and in some of the other places he had traveled.
There had been one woman—the clever, ambitious owner of a millinery store—with whom he had kept company happily every time he returned to London. That relationship had lasted almost three years, off and on, and had ended amicably when he’d returned from his trip to China to find that she had entered into a more permanent relationship with a man who stayed home. He had enjoyed her company, had found pleasure in her bed, yet he had never felt the sort of heart-thudding joy upon seeing her that he had witnessed on Kyria’s or Olivia’s faces when they saw their husbands.
He would have dismissed such happiness as a feminine trait had he not seen the same sort of besotted expression on his father’s face every time he’d looked upon his duchess during the last thirty-four years. The fact was, obviously, that the Morelands loved deeply and for a long time—except, apparently, for him.
