Governess Gone Rogue

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  “I can’t think why,” she countered, wrinkling up her nose. “Boys exclude girls from their games all the time.”

  “Well, yes, but . . .” He paused to take a swig of lemonade, giving her a rueful look. “We both know you’re not the sort to let a pesky detail like gender stop you.”

  She gave him a reproving nudge with her foot. “And a good thing, too! Or you’d have gone through at least half a dozen tutors by now.”

  “Not that many, surely.”

  “You think I’m exaggerating? The boys told me that the first one you hired, a Mr. Partridge, only lasted three days. You make the appropriate calculations.” She laughed as he grimaced.

  “And,” she added, “the fact that I’m female wasn’t the reason I was booted off. At least, that’s not the reason the boys gave me. Archie, they said, can wag the tail.” She gave a sniff of injured dignity, still stinging from her dismissal. “Whatever that means.”

  Jamie laughed. “It means he’s a very good batsman.”

  “Unlike me,” she admitted, her indignation fading into discouragement.

  “You just need practice. And a bit of proper instruction.”

  “I’ll take instruction, if you’re offering it,” she said at once. “What was I doing wrong?”

  “Your grip was off, for one thing. And your stance, too. Which reminds me,” he added, gesturing to her skirt. “You should always wear pads when you bat. To protect your legs.”

  “Yes, so the boys told me, but that’s rather difficult in a skirt. Of course,” she added, laughing, “I could always put my trousers back on.”

  He didn’t laugh with her. Instead, he looked down. “Ladies wear them underneath their skirts,” he murmured, his gaze gliding over her legs, a slow perusal that made Amanda feel suddenly hot and flustered. But when he looked up again, his impassive face told her nothing. “The pads, I mean.”

  He looked away, and Amanda felt a tiny jolt of disappointment, a feeling that caused her to become immediately irritated with herself. For heaven’s sake, she didn’t want him staring at her legs and thinking things. Did she?

  Mr. Bartlett’s mind had clearly turned in that direction, and look how disastrously that had turned out. But even as she reminded herself of past history, she was also more acutely aware than ever before that Jamie was nothing like Mr. Bartlett. Her previous employer’s gaze roaming over her had been an invasion of her privacy and had never impelled her to any feeling beyond a desire to slap his flushed round face.

  Jamie’s look was inspiring an entirely different feeling, but she knew that wasn’t the point. Jamie was her employer, and however lusciously feminine she felt when he looked at her legs, nothing good could result from it.

  With that reminder, Amanda returned to the topic of cricket, a far safer one than the topic of what she ought to wear under her skirts. “You said my grip was wrong. How so?”

  “I’ll show you.” He popped the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth, set aside his lemonade, and turned toward her, reaching for the bat that lay on the blanket between them. But before he could show her how to hold it properly, he suddenly gave a chuckle. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “This is my old bat from schooldays.”

  “Is it? The boys dug it out for me to use. They told me their bats wouldn’t do, that I needed a longer one. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “No, not at all,” he assured her. “And the boys are quite right. You’re too tall for a child’s bat.”

  Amanda frowned, puzzled. “But you said this was your bat from schooldays. Or did you mean university?”

  “No, it’s definitely from Harrow days. But I was quite tall, even then.” He turned it over and laughed again. “By God, this brings back memories. Where did they find it?”

  “The attics, I think.” She leaned closer, a bit dubious. “Are you sure it’s yours?”

  “Absolutely. Why do you ask?”

  “It has a girl’s name on it.” She pointed to the handle of the bat and the name carved into the wood with delicate precision. “Sarah.”

  “Ah, yes.” He smiled a little, staring down at the bat. “Sarah Dunn. She was the daughter of a neighboring farmer.”

  “Your first love?”

  “Yes, although I’m not sure love had much to do with it, honestly,” he answered, looking up. “After all, we were only fifteen. It was an adolescent infatuation—violent and passionate, to be sure, but we were far too young for it to be anything more.”

  She thought of the first time she’d seen Kenneth Halsbury, leaning indolently against the boot of a carriage in the drive at Willowbank, smoking a cigarette while he waited for his father, who’d been meeting with Mrs. Calloway, the headmistress. It had been a warm, still evening just before the start of summer term, and she’d been walking up the drive. He’d turned at the sound of her heels on the gravel, and the sight of his face had sent her entire life spinning into chaos. Her passion for teaching had given way to passion of a different sort, and three months later, she’d found herself ruined and left on her own to face her broken heart, destroyed career, and shattered dreams.

  Looking back, she didn’t know quite why one look at Kenneth on that fateful day should have had such a powerful effect on her. Perhaps because she’d been twenty-six but knew nothing of men, or perhaps because Papa had just died and she was still mired in grief, or perhaps because at Willowbank she’d been surrounded by females twenty-four hours a day. Whatever the reason, the first moment she’d set eyes on him, her heart had leaped in her chest with a joy so acute, it had felt more like pain. A bit like when Jamie had looked at her legs.

  “Infatuation,” she said with feeling, “can feel like love. No matter what your age.”

  “Only until one finds the real thing.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed, though she was somewhat skeptical that the real thing even existed. “Did you break this girl’s heart?”

  “No. Not that I haven’t broken my share, I’m sorry to say,” he added at once. “I was quite wild in my youth, and if a girl got too close to me, I was usually off like a shot, her heart be damned. But Sarah was different. Still, it didn’t matter what either of us felt.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was home for the summer holidays, and we were meeting in secret. My father caught us behind the hedgerows one day, and the fat was in the fire, as they say.” He paused and looked down at the cricket bat, rubbing the letters carved there with his thumb. “He called Sarah a name I won’t repeat and went for me with his walking stick. Got me a good whack to the head, too. Gave me quite a scar.” He shifted the bat to one hand and pulled a lock of hair back from his forehead with the other, revealing a jagged dent at his left temple just below the hairline. “See? Right there. Gave me a concussion, too.”

  “Oh God, Jamie,” she whispered, too sickened by the story to bother with proper forms of address.

  “It was a blessing,” he assured her. “I’m quite glad it happened.”

  “Glad?” she echoed, incredulous. “How can you be?”

  His eyes suddenly glittered, like green glass in the sun. “Because that was the day I hit him back. My father never laid a hand on me again.”

  Amanda felt sick. “What about your brother? Couldn’t he have protected you at all?”

  He shook his head. “Geoff’s health was always poor, especially when we were boys. Weak chest. Good thing, too.”

  “Good thing?”

  “Yes. When he was only five, the doctors recommended sending him to the spas in France to get stronger, and my father didn’t want a sickly heir, so he agreed. Geoff and his tutor were gone most of the time when we were growing up, which kept him safe from the old man’s notions of discipline. Later, when I was old enough and strong enough to defy the old man, I made it clear that if he ever laid a hand on Geoff, I wouldn’t just cosh him with his walking stick, I’d kill him with it.”

  “You shouldn’t have had to.” Amanda felt a flash of impotent rage. “Someone sho
uld have been there for you—an uncle, a cousin—someone should have protected you! Both of you.”

  At those words, his expression gentled. “Don’t look so stricken, love,” he said softly. “That day the old man found me with Sarah, everything turned out all right. And even if it hadn’t,” he added with a wicked smile, “that kiss was worth it.”

  Amanda stared at him, her anger giving way in the wake of that smile to an entirely different emotion. Her heart began to pound hard in her chest, her lips began to tingle, and when he lowered his gaze to her mouth, she felt desperately compelled to say something, anything, to divert his attention. “My first love was a poet,” she blurted out. “At least, he wasn’t really a poet, but he wanted to be.”

  “Was he any good?”

  “I thought so at the time.” She paused a moment. “Probably not,” she amended, making both of them laugh.

  Jamie reached for his bottle of lemonade and took a swallow. “Did he write poems about you? He must have done, if he was in love with you.”

  Had Kenneth ever been in love with her? She was inclined to doubt it. He’d said he loved her, but Kenneth had said a lot of things in the heat of passion, and it hardly mattered now anyway. Whatever his true feelings had been, Kenneth’s notions of love had never included matrimony.

  “He composed one or two poems about me,” she admitted. “He once wrote—” She broke off, strangely embarrassed and well aware that if she wanted to keep her ruined reputation a secret, she probably shouldn’t say anything about the man who had ruined it. “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me. What did he write about you? I’m keen to know.”

  “I can’t think why,” she said, and laughed a little, feeling awkward and cursing her impulsive tongue. But Jamie was watching her, waiting for a reply, and she reluctantly went on, “Very well. He once wrote that my eyes were like sunlight in a forest’s dark embrace.”

  She forced another laugh, a dismissive one. “It sounds quite torrid, doesn’t it?”

  “Torrid, perhaps, but . . .” He paused, looking at her. “It’s an apt description.”

  “Is it?” That took her back. She considered a moment, still doubtful even after all this time. She shook her head, looking away. “I never could see it. I still can’t.”

  “I can.”

  The intensity in his voice startled her, and when she looked at him, her breath caught, for there was a hint of something she’d never before seen in those clear, cool eyes. Tenderness.

  Suddenly, everything around them—the brightly colored autumn leaves on the trees, the grass of mottled green and gold, the topaz-blue sky—seemed to grow dim and fade away. The sounds of traffic along Park Lane and the voices of the people all around receded into silence. The only thing she saw was him, and the only thing she heard was the rush of excitement pulsing through her veins, and the only thing she felt was longing.

  His gaze slid to her mouth, his eyes darkening to a duskier green, and wildly, she wondered if he was going to kiss her. She imagined it, his mouth on hers and his arms strong and tight around her, and the longing within her deepened and spread, bringing with it something she hadn’t allowed herself to face, or even admit existed: her own deep and profound loneliness.

  She wanted Jamie’s kiss. For the first time in over two years, she wanted a man’s mouth on hers and his arms around her and his hands on her, and for all the same reasons: to banish the emotional isolation of her existence, and to ease, if only for a few glorious, stolen moments, the pain of being alone.

  Did he want that, too? she wondered, staring into eyes that were the foggy, misty green of frost on an English meadow. He must, she thought, looking at the lines that suffering and grief had carved into the edges of his face. Surely he must.

  He leaned another fraction closer. So did she, aching with hungers of both body and soul.

  “Papa? You’re here!”

  He jerked back, and the spell was broken. She ought to have been relieved, but when he turned away, relief was not what she felt. Instead, disappointment pierced her chest, and as he stood up and walked away, she berated herself for a fool.

  A kiss, however wonderful it might feel, couldn’t change her life. It couldn’t erase the colossal error in judgment that had led her here; it could only tempt her to make that error a second time.

  Romance had no place in her life now. She’d had that once, it was over, and now, she had no romantic illusions left. She had only her work and her pupils. She looked past Jamie, and when she saw Colin and Owen racing toward him across the grass, she knew their happiness would have to be her consolation.

  Sometimes, taking a holiday could clear one’s head and make work easier, but if Jamie thought his afternoon off would do that for him, he was destined for disappointment. And if he’d hoped that resuming the composition of his speech would be a distraction from what had almost happened in the park with Amanda that afternoon, he was sadly mistaken.

  Even after hours in his study, the wastepaper basket beside him overflowing with a fresh lot of crumpled, pathetic efforts, his speech was no further along, Amanda was still vivid in his mind, and the arousal he’d felt, though banked at the moment, was still there, burning deep and low and waiting for any excuse to ignite.

  He’d nearly kissed her. His hand tightened around his pen, the nib spreading ink across the page of his speech, but he barely noticed. In a park, surrounded by people, he’d almost kissed a woman he barely knew. When he hadn’t kissed a woman, or even wanted to, in over three years. A woman who was not Pat. A woman who, less than three weeks ago, he’d thought was a man, for God’s sake.

  There was only one explanation for the entire baffling episode. Jamie tossed down his pen with a sound of exasperation, plunked his elbows on the desk, and rubbed his hands over his tired eyes. He was going mad.

  Perhaps it was the strain of work. Or perhaps his body was rebelling at last against three years of self-imposed celibacy. But whatever the cause, his sanity was definitely slipping.

  The admission didn’t help, for even as he made it, the arousal he’d felt that afternoon stirred within him again, and he just couldn’t summon the will to fight it, not this time.

  When he closed his eyes, her face came first to his mind, her parted lips, her black lashes half closed over those extraordinary eyes, the delicate pink flush in her cheeks. There’d been desire there, in her face, and as he recalled it, his own body responded. His breathing quickened, his muscles tightened, and the arousal he’d banked only hours ago flared up within him, but instead of putting out that fire, he chose to fan the flames.

  Easing back in his chair, he conjured pictures from imagination and guesswork—pictures of small, perfect breasts and long, slim legs. He imagined caressing her, sliding his hands along her waist and hips, cupping her buttocks, drawing her closer. He imagined kissing her, the satiny feel of her lips, the lush, sweet taste of her mouth.

  Something, a vague whisper of uneasiness, intruded on these erotic imaginings. He frowned, working to push the feeling away, his body rebelling against any interruption to a hard-won, well-deserved, long-suppressed sexual fantasy.

  He would not let me out until I kissed him.

  Damn it.

  Jamie opened his eyes and straightened in his chair, hating himself—not, sadly, for his illicit and inappropriate imaginings of Amanda, but for the pangs of conscience that had just ruined them.

  Cursing, he reached for the glass of whisky on the desk beside him, downed it all in one swallow, and set the glass back down. Then, with the determination and self-restraint borne of long practice, he pushed erotic thoughts of his employee out of his mind, picked up his pen, and tried to resume his work.

  He read the opening paragraph of his speech, trying to judge it objectively, but after the torrid thoughts that had been running through his mind, any words about why it was vital to increase the budget for the education of Britain’s poorer classes seemed terribly dull.

  He inked his pen, crosse
d out the opening, and valiantly tried again. “The British have always taken great pride in the education of the children in our upper classes,” he murmured as he wrote. “Surely the accident of birth should not deprive those less fortunate—”

  He stopped, his concentration broken again, but not because of any erotic imaginings. No, he thought he’d heard a noise directly overhead. He looked up, frowning at the ceiling, but though he waited several moments, the sound was not repeated, and he concluded it must have been a mouse he’d heard, or perhaps Oscar, the boys’ cat. He bent his head and went on with his task.

  “Nor should we be prevented from doing right by all our people,” he resumed, writing as he spoke. “Surely the great wealth and prosperity of our nation can only be enhanced by a well-educated populace—”

  The noise came again, louder this time, and he realized it was no mouse or cat he was hearing. It was the unmistakable tread of footsteps. He looked up again, his gaze following the sound across the floorboards of the attic above as they passed directly over his head.

  Maids’ quarters were in the attics, but with the family at Ravenwood, no maids were in residence. Amanda was in the nanny’s room beside the nursery, and Mrs. Richmond and Samuel’s rooms were below stairs, so there should be no one up in the attics, especially not in the room directly above, a room used only for storage.

  The footsteps stopped, but then Jamie heard a sliding sound and a soft thud, and he put down his pen, knowing it had to be the boys. They’d gotten out of bed, sneaked out of their rooms, and for a reason he had no doubt involved mischief of some sort, were rooting around in the attics.

  He picked up the lamp on his desk and went up to investigate.

  At the top of the attic stairs, he found the corridor to his left completely closed off, as it should be, but the door leading to the one on the right was open, and he could see lamplight spilling down the corridor from the room at the very end of the passage, the room directly over his study.

  Wondering what on earth his two scapegraces were up to, he started down the corridor, but when he reached the doorway, he found that it was not Colin and Owen rooting about amid broken-down furnishings, old trunks, and storage crates.