Since his ignominious return to England for Phillip’s funeral, which had occurred not long after Morgan’s death, his existence had been steeped in misery and the attempt to escape it by any means possible. Particularly by drowning his demons in whisky and numbing himself as best as he knew how. The deaths of his brother and best friend still shook him to his core even now, six months later.
But now was not the time for mourning, or grief, or dwelling in the pain of his past. It was instead about seizing the moment. About remembering how to enjoy life. About twirling Miss Governess until she grew so dizzy and fell so far beneath his seductive spell, she could not help but acquiesce and become his mistress.
He smiled down at her as they faced each other and waited for the music to begin.
She stared up at him solemnly, and the height difference between them struck him for the first time. She was petite in stature, the top of her head only reaching to his chin. He extended his hand, and she placed hers in his. Con and Nora began to play the lively tune.
Because he did not know how to dance Mrs. McWhatnot’s reel, and because he certainly did not know Miss Governess’s special two-person version of the bloody thing, he found himself in the unusual position of allowing the female to lead. Of allowing his sunset-haired, stubborn, vexing, con-bloody-founding siren to lead. It took only a note or two of the music for her to realize he was waiting to follow her. And then she took charge.
Predictably.
Maddeningly.
As they danced, his hand slid to her trim waist—hidden beneath the shapeless lines of her drab gown—for a turn before she wordlessly rebuffed him. He bit back a grin and spun about her, copying her footwork. Odd, but he didn’t mind allowing her to lead. She took the reins and went with abandon. They twirled and circled each other, they did their paces up and down the chamber. Con and Nora picked up time, playing the reel faster and forcing them to speed up their steps.
By the time the song ended, he was as breathless as Miss Governess. They stood opposite each other, hands still linked, and when she would have extricated herself from his grasp, he held firm for one moment longer. Wild color bloomed on her cheeks from her exertion, and a genuine smile curved her pink lips. Small, curled tendrils of her lustrous hair had escaped her hideous cap, making her look even younger and softer and lush.
How he wished he could kiss her. How he wished they did not have an audience.
But he could not, so he sketched a bow and brought her hand to his lips instead. “Thank you, Miss Turnbow.”
She stared at him, a stricken expression on her face before she schooled her features back into her prim and proper governess mask. She dipped into a smooth curtsy. “Thank you for the honor, Your Grace.”
Her soft words and sweet voice moved over him like a caress. His gut tightened, and only partially because he wondered at the reason for the emotion he had seen glittering in her eyes before she dashed them away. She was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, cloaked in intrigue. What was it about her that burrowed beneath his skin in a way no other female had? Why could he not shake the instinct that there was a great deal more to Miss Jacinda Turnbow than she pretended?
He forced himself to release her hand and turn back to his sisters, who were both looking on with avid interest. Curious little articles. “Thank you as well, Con and Nora. It was a lovely way to spend the evening, and you are both quite skilled.”
“Miss Turnbow has been busy teaching us all manner of new dances,” Con said, exhibiting an enthusiasm he had never seen in her before. “She knows so many lively ones.”
Well, he supposed he could not say Miss Governess did not perform her duty. It seemed she was quite industrious. “Excellent, though you cannot have learned to play with such finesse in a mere week.”
He could not resist alluding to their intentional increase in the tempo so he and Miss Turnbow were skipping about like Bedlamites by the time the last note rang out. He was more than aware of their every attempt to make mischief.
“Mother taught us to play,” Nora said softly then, shaking him with her sudden candor. “She liked to entertain us in the evenings. The sad ones were always her favorite, but we could persuade her to play reels if we promised to read her the letters you wrote us.”
Mother. He stiffened as a fresh rush of sadness flooded him. She had been the kindest, gentlest soul. Nothing but sweet and good, with the compassion of an angel and a faultless ability to see the best in everyone around her, she had been the heart of the family. She had been many years younger than Crispin’s father, whose first wife had died birthing a stillborn daughter. Where the old duke had been aloof and cool, Mother had been the opposite. When she had died unexpectedly while he was on the Continent at war, it had eaten him alive.
It touched his black heart to think his mother had longed to hear the silly epistles he’d written his young sisters. His words had always been careless and light, never alluding to the horrors of battle. Even the letters he had sent to Mother had been carefully expunged of anything that would cause her undue worry from afar. All the time he had been gone, he had imagined no one had truly missed him. That his family had simply carried on in his absence, as if he were a wound that had healed over to form a scar. A memory and nothing more. Had he been wrong?
“Brother?”
Nora’s voice, questioning and tinged with confusion, jolted his wandering mind from its reminiscences. He blinked, focusing on her, but his vision was suddenly blurred. He blinked more furiously, frowning. Why were his cursed eyes wet?
“Are you crying?” Con asked in hushed tones.
No, he damn well was not. Gritting his teeth, he reached into his coat and extracted a monogrammed handkerchief, dabbing at his infernal eyes that refused to cooperate. “Of course not,” he dismissed. “I am merely…”
Brimstone and Beelzebub.
He was crying like a babe. The liquid in his eyes was tears.
What in the bloody hell? Such a revolting show of weakness had not emerged from him since the day he had killed his first soldier on the field of battle, and even then, the liquid in his eyes had been more a product of his violent retching of bile than anything else.
He scrubbed at his eyes with more force than necessary before hastily stuffing the scrap of fabric back into his coat. “Miss Turnbow trounced on my toe,” he announced, daring anyone to contradict him.
Bad enough he had been assailed by such a lowering, unacceptable emotion as melancholy. But to have been witnessed turning into a watering pot by three females, two of whom were his minx sisters and one of whom was the woman he wanted to tup until his cock went raw… it was the outside of enough.
“You are weeping,” Nora said in the same tones she might use to announce he had sprouted cloven hooves.
“That was a lovely rendition of ‘Mrs. McCleod’,” came the firm, dulcet voice of Miss Governess as she swished past him. “Thank you for playing, Lady Honora and Lady Constance, but I do fear the hour grows late, and it is already half past eight.”
The heady fragrance of jasmine trailed in her wake, and for the first time it occurred to him it was rather odd for a woman of her reduced circumstances to wear a scent. Then again, the only females he dallied with these days were strumpets, and even they perfumed themselves equally above and below.
He cleared his throat, pretending he had not just made a fool of himself, for what else was he to do? “If you will excuse me, sisters and Miss Turnbow, I have some urgent correspondence to which I must attend. Thank you again for the evening’s entertainment.”
“Pray forgive me for my misstep,” Miss Governess could not resist calling after him as he gave them his back and made a hasty retreat like the coward he was.
“You are forgiven, Miss Governess,” he clipped, not bothering to turn about. Not wishing to face her knowing gaze or the wonderment of his sisters. Not even certain how such a thing as his unrefined, unfettered feelings had come to be. He had thought himself impervious to that rot.
Tears. Crying like a bloody maudlin female.
He slammed the door at his back. It was not to be borne. There was only one swift solution he could countenance. One reliable means of dulling the unwanted intrusion of old ghosts and grief.
The time was half past eight, Miss Governess had said, and he had not had a drop of whisky since yesterday at The Duke’s Bastard. That injustice was about to be rectified, posthaste.
Chapter Ten
Someone had been in his study.
Crispin made the realization the moment he sat down at his desk, glass of whisky in hand. His correspondence was not stacked in the neat order in which he had left it, bound by a ribbon and ordered according to the date of receipt. Several envelopes were scattered in a paper waterfall, and the ribbon was nowhere to be seen. His quill and ink had been moved. The letter he had been in the process of writing to the dowager Marchioness of Searle had been smudged.
Suspecting Con and Nora of yet another prank involving a creature or a carcass, he lowered his glass to the polished surface of his desk and began a cursory inventory. Aside from the misplacement of his papers and the missing ribbon, everything appeared to be in order.
He opened each drawer, taking care to rummage about lest the minxes had hidden something prone to rot and stink. About a month ago, they had left a decaying potato beneath his bed, and his chamber had been befouled and uninhabitable for an entire evening before a chamber maid discovered the source of the stench and removed the malodorous thing. The carpet had required a thorough scouring, and he had been ready to tan their hides.
When he reached the drawer where he kept the journals he had written during his years at war, a scratch upon the lock gave him pause. He had not known his sisters to attempt to pick locks, but the effort had clearly been made. Anger unfurled in his gut. His journals were private, damn it. Did the hoydens know no bounds?
Retrieving the key from his pocket, he unlocked the drawer. What he found within was more troubling than a rotting potato or a dead mouse, however. His journals seemed to be in their proper order, the small leather-bound volume he’d kept during his first year of war atop the tidy pile.
Just to be certain, he extracted it, flipping through the pages of his familiar scrawl. Tucked almost imperceptibly between the pages of battle observations, he discovered not one but two folded notes.
Frowning, he removed them, unfolding the first and scanning the contents. Not only did he not recognize the handwriting, but he could not make sense of the gibberish scribbled upon the page. A series of letters that failed to make words, the note rather called to mind the enciphered dispatches of French soldiers that had repeatedly fallen into the hands of the Spanish guerilla fighters.
This did not seem like the work of his sisters. Con and Nora had yet to learn the finer art of subtlety. When they made mischief, the results were obvious, whether it be a shrieking governess or an unpardonable stench.
The second note contained more of the same nonsensical alphabetic lines. Retrieving the other two journals from his drawer, he searched them as well, until he had unearthed a total of seven letters altogether, all penned in the same neat hand, all a sequence of letters that appeared to bear no obvious pattern. An icy chill he could not shake settled deep in his bones. These were no ordinary letters, and though he had not an inkling as to their contents, he was willing to wager everything he owned that they were not the product of hoydenish tomfoolery.
But why would someone pick the lock on his drawer and hide ciphered letters within it? More to the point, who would do such a thing? Whoever it was, he had done an abysmal job at covering his tracks, for he had left quite an easy trail for Crispin to follow. Indeed, the fellow was likely a novice to make so many errors.
Briefly, his mind flitted to his run-in with Miss Turnbow on her first night as governess. She had been in his study, trespassing where she did not belong, had she not? But a governess who went about stashing ciphered letters in his desk drawer seemed as farfetched as a Gothic novel.
The person responsible had placed the letters where he had for a reason, and if Crispin wished to catch the villain at his game, there was only one manner in which he could conceive of doing it. Allowing his whisky to go untouched, he painstakingly copied each letter before placing the originals back in his journals, stacking them in their place within the drawer, and locking it once more.
There was only one man in all London he trusted. One man upon whom he knew he could rely for anything he required. Crispin hastily scrawled a note to accompany the copies, tucked the lot into an envelope, and sent the missive on its way before going in search of the one quarry he longed to corner more than the scoundrel who had planted the worrying letters in his desk.
Miss Jacinda Turnbow.
A glance at his pocket watch revealed that she would be completing her daily duties at any moment. His timing was perfect.
The mystery of the bloody ciphers could wait until tomorrow morning. For now, he had far more pressing matters to concern him.
*
Jacinda was still puzzling over the Duke of Whitley’s inexplicable behavior when she left Lady Constance and Lady Honora behind for the evening. They had said their prayers, washed their hands and faces, and settled into bed for the night. One fortnight into her tenure as governess, and she could not help but feel she had made wondrous progress with the girls. They had come a long way from the hellions of her first day. And while she had never before acted as governess, delighted in her accomplishment. Challenges had ever thrilled her, and Lady Honora and Lady Constance were no exception.
Nor was their brother.
Thoughts of the handsome, wicked duke brought the inevitable frown and accompanying amalgam of guilt and anger. She stepped into the hallway, headed in the direction of her comfortable apartments, so mired in her thoughts, she did not realize she wasn’t alone until it was too late to flee.
She stopped, her skirts swirling around her ankles with the force of her cessation of motion. Her hand went to her wildly slamming heart, willing it to calm. She swallowed and licked lips that had gone dry.
The Duke of Whitley leaned his hip against the papered wall, the flickering light of the candle sconces bathing him in a golden glow. She was not certain if he had given her a fright with his unexpected presence or simply by being a man she did not dare trust herself to be alone with.
This morning had been a revelation. So, too, had the evening. He had attempted to seduce her and make her his mistress. And then, shockingly, he had listened to her impassioned speech. Most stupefying of all, he had been on his best behavior following dinner, conversing with his sisters, humoring them by dancing to their reel.
And crying at the mentioning of his dead mother.
Her heart still hurt to recall the grief in his expression, the vulnerability, the confusion. He had been perplexed by his own emotion, and a fierce urge to protect him had risen within her. One she could not quite tamp down as she knew she must.
Feelings.
How very vexing.
She was susceptible to the Duke of Whitley, and not just physically as she had supposed that morning following her utter folly. But emotionally as well. He was dark and wounded, and something in him called to something primitive in her. She could not shake the impression there was a great deal more to the man behind the façade he presented to the world. That he was suffering and jaded and bitter, desperate for redemption.
And she was the one who would snatch it from his grasp.
She went cold.
“Your Grace,” Jacinda whispered, mindful of the fact that voices could carry in the hall at this quiet time of night, when the servants had dwindled in ranks and most of the day’s tasks had been done. “Is something amiss?”
“Something is amiss,” he said. “Yes.”
And still he did not move. Did not elaborate.
She drank in the sight of him in a way that ought to shame her. Heat settled between her thighs, chasing the cold. She told h
erself it was a base physical need. Somehow, he had unleashed an old urge in her that she had thought long gone. Her flesh was not yet dead, apparently. But her honor and duty both precluded her from seeking solace in the bed of the man before her.
“Is there something you require of me?” she asked, her cheeks going hot when she realized the unintentional implications of her query. “In regard to my charges, that is?”
He grinned. “How good of you to clarify the nature of your question, for I was about to respond in a manner most unbecoming of the gentleman I am.”
She snorted, the lateness of the evening and the intimacies they had shared making her bold. “I was not aware you are a gentleman at all.”
“By birth, though not by nature,” he agreed, a devastating grin on his lips.
Still, he did not move. Did not go away as she hoped he would. Her ability to resist him waned by the moment. If he had been arrogant and cruel, if he had been clipped and demanding, hiding himself behind his disdain and his superiority and his power over her, she would have continued on her way. But this Whitley was far more dangerous even than the man who had kissed her and stripped half her gown away in his study.
“Perhaps you are more of a gentleman by nature than you suppose,” she suggested softly.
He inclined his head, his sudden proximity to her disturbing. “I am a soldier, madam, and a soldier must be adept at playing any role given him even when it does not suit.”
To her dismay, she realized he had not moved. It had been she who had drawn closer to him, like a blossom growing toward the sun. She stopped, pressed damp palms to her gown, willed her galloping heart to calm its pace.
“Do you mean to suggest being a gentleman does not suit you?” she dared to ask, the need to prolong their interaction unassailable. She told herself it was for the good of her task that she encouraged candid speech between them. Perhaps in this fashion, she might discover truths about the Duke of Whitley that might have otherwise evaded her.
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