Laura didn’t respond. Callum strode forward, and Laura hobbled behind him. Darkness eased off of her, as though she swam in anxious thoughts.
The room that was traditionally held by the governess was at the far end of the third-floor hallway—a room double the size of most bedrooms in the mansion, with a large four-poster bed and a wide window that looked out over the rose garden. As they swept through the hall, Callum pointed out that the rest of the family’s bedrooms also were found in this hallway.
“Oh? So close?” Laura asked. She sounded a bit incredulous.
“A bit different than most other governess positions, I suppose. Perhaps we’re just a friendlier sort,” he offered, although he layered his words with sarcasm.
“Perhaps …” Laura said doubtfully.
When they reached the governess’s bedroom, Callum marched inside and lit several candles, the lights of which flashed across the white bedspread, the porcelain wash basin, the painting of one of his other dead relatives on the wall. There wasn’t much personality to the room, but it was one of their finest guest quarters, ornate and delicate. Callum watched Laura’s expression change from one of fear and apprehension and angst, to one of appreciation. She sighed and dropped her hat on the top of the bed and drew her fingers across her forehead. Perhaps if she’d been someone else, Callum might have asked if she had some kind of headache. He held the question back.
“Thank you again for showing me to my room,” she said. She seemed oddly deflated. “It’s occurred to me yet again that I still don’t know your name. Now that we’ve arrived in a big, empty house, I would appreciate it a great deal to know.”
Callum stiffened. Why was he so resistant to allow her access to anything about him? “My name is Callum Burke,” he said. “I am the son of Graham Burke, your new employer.”
There was a flicker in Laura’s eyes. Clever as she was, she didn’t alter her expression much, and her face was quite difficult to read. Callum had revealed his biggest card, the reason she was meant to respect him, despite their similarity in ages.
“Wonderful to meet you,” Laura murmured. “I wish only I could meet the whole family tonight.”
“I’m sure it’ll happen in due time,” Callum said. “The children are still quite young, only six. Perhaps you’ll be with us for quite a while.”
Laura shifted her weight and parted her lips. Before Callum could retreat, she murmured, “What a terrible thing to have happen to those boys. I can’t imagine what heartache …”
“Yes, well,” Callum said. His heart blackened. How dare she bring up one of the most immense tragedies in his family’s timeline? He thought about blurting that it would behoove her, yet again, to keep her mouth shut—to keep her emotions to herself. But instead, he turned towards the hall and hovered outside. He felt an incredible wave of power, like she was a puppet on a string he could now fully control, now that she understood his position. “Again, welcome to Treadway House. Dinner will be served in approximately two hours.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead, he shot around and marched down the hall, but his belly simmered with confusion. Why had he requested her attendance for dinner? Didn’t he want nothing more than to sit in the silence of himself, before the rest of his family returned? In the wake of so much tragedy, it was such a struggle to be around them these days—as there was a consistent air of sadness, something they couldn’t shake. It was part of the reason he’d gone away, if only to carve out room in his mind only for himself.
Oh, but there was something delicious about messing with the governess, a woman who was clearly finicky yet unsure of herself—a woman who now looked at him as though she’d taken a tremendous misstep and now had to make it all up to him. She didn’t seem entirely like the kind of governess his father might hire, and Callum was curious to read over her letter of recommendation and discover her past.
A proper governess was quiet and demure and talked endlessly about her gratefulness. Laura Gateway was quite different, and for this reason, had piqued his interest. Perhaps, if he dug into her a bit more, he could inform his father that he felt her unfit for the position.
Of course, to rid the house of a pretty brunette with sparkling green eyes felt like a waste—not that, with everything going on in his life, he had space in his mind for anything to do with flirtation or romance or whatever it was a man of his age, 22 years old, was meant to spend his time thinking about.
Chapter 3
The moment Callum disappeared down the hall, Laura fell back on the bed and covered her face with her hands. The previous hour had been an exercise in endless disaster: one misstep after another. It had found her belittling the son of her father’s previous business partner (and her current employer), asking about the “tragedy” in their family, and generally speaking out of turn. If she was meant to be a proper governess, a necessity for her to orchestrate the better parts of her plan, she had to play by the rules of this world.
But perhaps all wasn’t yet lost. Callum Burke had invited her to dinner, and she could tread lightly, ask questions, smile. Yes. She would apologize profusely and state that her terror from the road had led her to act inappropriately. And perhaps they could press forward, become cordial. Slowly, she would fade away, become an almost invisible inner working member of the house.
With her mind calmer, Laura tose up to blink about the enormous bedroom, the ornate wash basin, the large window that looked out towards the back of the house. Before Laura and her parents had been forced out of their home, her own bedroom had been perhaps a quarter of the size of this one, decorated plainly, with a bed that had a mattress with a large dip in the centre. In the previous year, their accounts had grown so dire that Laura’s Uncle Harold had taken Laura’s parents into his own home. Laura’s father had demanded that she come along with them. “I don’t want you out in the world on your own,” he’d said. “There’s such rage in creatures outside of this family … I don’t want to know what might happen to you if …”
Laura knew that her father’s apprehension was tied up in his own bad luck. Sixteen years earlier, Timothy Pearce had been a rather successful businessman, together with his partner Graham Burke, the lord of Treadway House. Graham had insisted that Timothy had robbed and embezzled from him, which had led to Timothy Pearce’s ruin. It was the kind of mark on a man’s name that he couldn’t escape, not without drastic measure.
In the years since that ruin, Laura had watched her parents slowly crumble. They’d grown older and more wrinkled, their motions clumsier, and their eyes darker and shadowed. Laura’s parents hadn’t been able to offer anything to anyone Laura might have courted, but Laura hadn’t been interested in this concept, anyway. Rather, she’d focused her sights totally on revenge. If Graham Burke could tear a knife through her father’s existence—if he could have such a hand in her family’s ruin—then Laura wanted to return the favour.
Laura grabbed her small travel bag and glanced at her letter of reference, her travel papers. Everything was accounted for, besides the coins that the men had stolen.
Callum Burke. It was a name she recognized, although she no longer recognized Callum himself. She hadn’t seen him since she’d been perhaps six years old, a little girl with braids and a crooked smile and, if she remembered correctly, an ability to outrace Callum, if she challenged him.
Back then, Laura remembered little Callum and his older brother, Charles—who’d died just the previous year in a horrific accident. She shivered with the knowledge that if it hadn’t been for that accident, she wouldn’t have this position as governess. It had left the children—Roddy and Pete—orphans.
Of course, it had been Charles’ idea to insist on reparations for his father, which had led to her family’s devastating losses. It was a complicated feeling, this: her rage stirring along with her immense sadness at the tragedy.
She felt it within Callum—the loss of an only brother, the eldest, the one he’d looked up to. Laura had always been an only chi
ld, but she remembered those lost and glossy days when she and Callum had been children together. He’d tried to rush after his brother in every capacity, only for Charles to tell him he simply “couldn’t keep up.”
The tragedy? Laura had heard it was a drowning, an incident that had taken both Charles and his young wife. It was dreadful, and news of it had quivered across London, whispered like any other gossip. “Just horrible,” her father had uttered when he learned, before stepping into his study and sitting in there alone for several hours. This had been only a few months before they’d had to move in with Laura’s uncle, thus giving up their home, the place she’d been raised.
When Treadway House had announced plans to hire a governess, Laura had applied and accepted, all without explaining her actions to her father. When she’d stated her decision, he’d pleaded with her not to go. The deception seemed too great. When she’d informed him, they’d already been at her uncle’s, surrounded by his things, with his ear surely pressed against the nearest door, inhaling their words. She hated the idea that he knew her and her father and her mother’s goings-on. They’d always been a private family. It was clear that privacy was a thing only some people could afford.
“But Father, my deception is not the first deception in this incredible sea of lies,” she’d insisted. “There was mismanagement, which led to the barrister losing the case that could have ultimately led to your dismissal. Your name, slandered, dragged through mud, Father! And you and I both know that the Burkes’ fabricated evidence with the use of false signatures, upon contracts that you knew nothing about. Father—we received no money from fraudulent investors, and we know nothing of the goods that were said to be stolen. In fact, only the Burkes had access to these goods! Father, haven’t you considered … what if the goods were stolen at the port, rather than on the London road as the Burkes claim?”
At this, her father had stuttered and said, “Darling girl, I hadn’t a clue that you were up late at night having these thoughts. These affairs have happened long ago and continue to string forward, and I think it better that we all push forward, attempt to find peace …”
“But Father, there’s no peace for us here at your brother, my uncle’s. We’re trapped here, and you’re trapped with a name that hasn’t power any longer. Unless I do something, Father … It has to be me. He doesn’t know who I am. This is the perfect strategy, the only option we have …”
“There’s nothing to be done, Laura. I don’t know how you plan to make anything of this from within the halls of Treadway, but the deception is both dangerous to you and foolish within the situation itself. Do you have any comprehension of what they might do to you if …”
“Father, simply let me try,” Laura had insisted.
Her father hadn’t spoken with her much throughout the weeks prior to her departure. She’d heard him grumbling to her mother frequently. “I don’t know what she plans to do, but I worry endlessly,” Mr Pearce had said. “If what she believes to be true about the Burkes, then this is truly a dangerous home to reside in. She’s walking directly into the belly of the beast.”
“What strength she thinks she has,” her mother had sighed. “It’s as though she doesn’t have any comprehension of her own fallibility.”
“Isn’t that youth?” her father had whispered. “Perhaps we had it once, as well.”
Now, here she was—Laura Pearce, with a letter of recommendation that called her “Laura Gateway,” without the link back to Graham Burke’s previous business partner, the man who he said embezzled and stole. Laura stood in the centre of the governess’ quarters with her hands on her hips. The house shifted and creaked around her with the late-spring wind. Arriving at a nearly empty house, together with the son of the very man she wanted to spy on, hadn’t been a portion of her plan. She’d known there would be elements of her strategy that would alter as she learned more of the rules of the game, but this felt ridiculous.
Perhaps Laura had been incorrect in her estimations. Perhaps this drive to spy, to scheme, to get to the belly of this beast had been short-sighted. She sighed and shivered and glanced back at her travel documents. Regardless, she couldn’t very well make her way out of Treadway House that night. She would dine with Callum Burke. She would behave, at least as well as she could, given his arrogance and cocky smile. With every moment that ticked by, she had to face the present with more bravery than she’d ever felt in her life.
It would be exhausting, and it could very well ruin her life. But she had to find a way, if only to avenge her father and her family’s name.
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What A Wicked Duke Demands (Historical Regency Romance) Page 34
