The Maiden and the Mercenary

by Nicole Locke

  She had come bustling out of Miss Thibett’s private quarters, eager to be done with this interruption to her busy day, then halted in her tracks and eyed him as if she was astonished not to have been warned he was dangerous. It only took an instant for her defences to go back up, but he still saw an eager and yearning young woman behind her stiff façade. Now he could not get that version of her out of his mind. Did she truly believe a dire gown and stiff manner could blind a red-blooded male to the real woman under the disguise?

  Well, she might be deluded about her neat figure and astonishing blue eyes becoming invisible because of it, but he had to look at her as just one more task on the list he must work his way through if his three wards were to feel safe and cared for again. Perhaps he ought to look elsewhere for a governess. He could always apologise for troubling her and go away again.

  ‘Emma is well in herself, but distraught at the loss of her parents,’ she said carefully, as if she had to consider every word before she said it. ‘Your letter saying you would come for her as soon as you could did much to reassure her she had not been forgotten.’

  Something told him she truly cared about Emma, so perhaps he was wrong and Emma’s scheme could work, if he kept as chilly a distance from this woman as she was sure to do from him. Maybe if he pretended hard enough that he had never seen the real Miss Yelverton, he could forget the vibrant young woman behind the aloof schoolmistress. He had Emma’s tear-stained letter in his pocket to say how dearly his eldest ward wanted this guarded female to stay part of her life, and Emma needed every ounce of security he could find for her right now. He would do anything he could to make her happy. If putting aside his doubts and trying to win over this young woman was what it took to make her feel better, then so be it.

  Somehow it had become his job to win Miss Yelverton over. Now all he had to do was convince her that her future lay at Chantry Old Hall with him and his unexpected family of three wards and a tricky maiden aunt. He felt a rueful smile threaten at the thought of the latter, despite Miss Yelverton’s sceptical gaze on him and his genuine grief for his cousin Christian and Chris’s wife, Jane. Miss Tamara Marbeck, his late and unlamented father’s little sister, had turned up on his doorstep with a vast mountain of baggage the day after news of Chris’s death reached her. She glared at Harry as if all this chaos must be his fault, then told him she might have failed him as a boy, but she was damned if she would leave the next generation of Marbeck waifs to men who were always supposed to know better and somehow never did.

  ‘I assume the funeral has taken place,’ Miss Yelverton said, as if she had been searching for the right words while the silence stretched between them and he struggled with his grief and inner demons.

  Any desire to smile faded and he could only nod, because there were no right words. The sight of two coffins in the church, where his cousin Christian married his Jane so joyfully, was burnt into his memory, but he could not talk about it. Chris was buried alongside his wife for eternity and Harry Marbeck had the happiness and welfare of three orphans on his conscience. Nobody was less suited to the task, but somehow he must muddle through until Chris’s children were old enough to run their own lives.

  ‘I am very glad you did not send for Emma as soon as it happened. It has never seemed quite right to me that young children are expected to be trotted out at the wake after losing one parent, let alone two,’ Miss Yelverton added uneasily, alerting him to the fact that it was high time he took on his half of this conversation.

  ‘I refused to subject them to that or the gossip that went with it,’ he said with a grimace for people who picked over the misery of others for their entertainment.

  ‘Quite right, but why did you ask to see me alone, Sir Harry?’

  He had to plead with her headmistress and mentor and explain his errand before the lady admitted it could be the perfect answer to Emma’s need for her home at this tragic time if Miss Yelverton returned to the Cotswolds with them, even if it would leave Miss Thibett short of a valued teacher in the middle of the school year.

  ‘I admit I am surprised Miss Thibett sanctioned this meeting. We have never met before and have nothing in common but your eldest ward,’ Miss Yelverton added with none of the polite shilly-shallying he had expected as she met his bland look.

  ‘Are you aware my late cousin and his wife sent Emma here to stop her being a responsible big sister all the time at home?’ he asked, floundering his way around a task when he most needed to be direct and decisive.

  Confound it, he had not had any problem finding the right things to say to pretty women since he was a scrubby schoolboy, but this one threatened to render him a stuttering and silent buffoon and he did not even know why. Of course, she was very far from the picture he had conjured in his head on his way here, but he had met plenty of lovely women without feeling blown off course by them. Yet this young woman pretending to be older, plainer and more fearsome had him in such a stew of masculine need and contradiction.

  No, he had just won that argument with himself. She was not a young woman—she was a potential governess. She mattered to Emma and that was all he needed to know. He reached for Sir Harry Marbeck’s famous detachment and dash, but the easy words he tried out in his head still felt wrong for this sensually innocent, warily defended female. He stood silent and risked her giving up and going away before he found the right words to persuade her she must help him rebuild the children’s broken lives.

  And to think he had been waiting out here to ruthlessly charm some fussy middle-aged lady into doing whatever he wanted. The girl had certainly knocked the smugness out of him—and serve him right—but being tongue-tied was not a novelty he was enjoying. He frowned at a clump of daffodils innocently blooming in a corner. Emma’s letter in his pocket reminded him he needed Miss Yelverton at Chantry Old Hall, and she was hardly likely to agree if he admitted he was so thrown by the difference between her and the dried-up little sparrow of a woman he had expected that he felt like an overgrown schoolboy at his first grown-up party.

  ‘Yes, Miss Thibett said so when Emma joined my class. I was puzzled as to why such an obviously well-loved child had been sent away from her home,’ she replied with a cautious look, as if to say What of it, Sir Harry Marbeck?

  The sun came back out from behind the swift clouds and lit up a silvery gold curl that had escaped whatever captivity she consigned the rest to when she dressed this morning. He wanted to reach out and touch it to see if it felt as soft, yet full of vitality, as it looked. Had the woman no idea ducking her head and presenting him with the top of a snowy but unadorned cap only intrigued him more? Hiding the rest of her face only highlighted the neat fullness of her mouth and made it even more tempting to dip down and steal a kiss before she had any idea what he was about. Confound it, he was fantasising about kissing the woman now! No, that was not what they were here for—why were they here, then? Ah, yes, Emma, this was all about her—time he put all his energy into getting her what she wanted.

  ‘Emma has always taken life too seriously, and her younger brother and sister take her sweet nature and patience with them for granted. When my cousin and his wife decided to send her here, I knew it was for the best because...but we both know this...’ Harry stopped for a moment and struggled for words to describe the catastrophe that had engulfed the children’s lives and his own. ‘This disaster changes everything,’ he managed to say at last and caught a flicker of sympathy in her cool blue eyes. They were more like the clear spring skies above them now—warm and worryingly inviting for a man who secretly needed comfort after such a cruel blow to the heart.

  ‘Emma was beginning to blossom as her parents hoped, although I believe she missed her home more than she ever told them,’ Miss Yelverton went on, as if she was weighing him up as guardian for children who had lost such excellent parents and finding him wanting.

  Curse the wild reputation he had had so much fun earning, at first to go
ad his arctic father, but lately because he had felt oddly adrift after the old man died; wine, women and song had filled some of the gaps in his life until Christian and Jane died and left one nobody could cover. It wasn’t as if he missed his father, but there was nobody left to infuriate, and that had been one certainty in his younger life—he could always rely on Sir Alfred Marbeck to be disgusted with his only child even when Harry did nothing wrong, so why not do it anyway? But never mind him now; as Harry doubted he was the right man to raise three lost and grieving children, he could hardly blame Miss Yelverton for doing so as well.

  ‘My cousin and his wife put Emma’s welfare before their own and miss her dreadfully,’ he said half defensively, as if she was criticising Chris and Jane’s painful decision to part with their beloved firstborn. Grief tugged at his composure as he heard himself use the present tense for people who were no longer present at all. ‘They were the best people I have ever met, despite their peculiar idea of making me responsible for their children if anything happened to them.’

  ‘Your task will be to prove them right, then, will it not?’ she said, as if she thought it high time he lived up to Chris and Jane’s excellent example.

  She had steel of the right sort and the children needed some in their devastated lives. He could not play the stern parent. His father had been built from cold steel—might have been clamped together by nuts and bolts, for all his son knew—and Harry had sworn not to follow in his inflexible sire’s footsteps at a very young age. He quite liked the idea of the old man rusting away now, instead of turning in his grave because Harry had been trusted with the care of his cousin’s children when he should be the one who came to an untimely end, as the old man always predicted.

  ‘I am hoping for your help with that tricky mission, Miss Yelverton,’ he told her.

  ‘My help? How on earth can I help you?’ she asked, looking genuinely shocked.

  ‘You are perfectly placed to become governess to my wards,’ he forced himself to say blandly, as if it was an obvious solution, which it was; all he had to do now was make her believe it.

  ‘What?’ she asked, as if she could hardly believe her ears. ‘Why on earth would I agree to be anything of the sort?’

  At least she had not said over my dead body, but maybe that came next. ‘I am sure Miss Thibett would have told me if you were deaf or short of understanding,’ he could not resist saying because it seemed as if devils drove him at times, and even now they could not be silent. He thought for a moment she was about to forget her teacher’s dignity and tell him exactly what she thought of him. It was there in her intriguing sky-blue eyes as they shot imaginary thunderbolts at him, and how could he have thought them warm and almost compassionate just now?

  He should definitely walk away and leave her be; forget this whole ridiculous scheme to take on such a deliciously challenging female to teach his three little innocents, or one innocent and two enterprising little devils, if he was being strictly accurate. He shuddered at the idea of Lucy and Bram following in his footsteps one day, so he had to pull off what looked like a minor miracle now. Miss Yelverton was glaring at him as if she could not imagine how he had not been carted off to the local madhouse for the protection of the rest of humanity long ago.

  ‘My apologies, ma’am; I let my tongue run away with me at times. It is a fault you should be eager to correct in my two younger wards before they learn from my bad example. To me, it sounds like a challenge to make a good teacher strain at the bit to start right away.’

  ‘Oddly enough, it is not doing so for me,’ she said severely.

  Hmm, how was it even possible for such an attractive young woman not to know he enjoyed provoking her? He watched her clench her hands into fists behind her back in the reflection of the sparkling glass window to Miss Thibett’s study behind her and wondered what that lady would make of such a giveaway gesture if she was looking up from her letters. Miss Yelverton’s raised chin and clenched teeth said she was furious, even without the storm in her eyes he was glad only he could see. If she gave her true feelings away this easily, perhaps she was not the ideal governess after all, but Emma wanted her and that was that. Until Emma felt less devastated and steadier on her feet, it was his job to move heaven and earth to get Miss Yelverton to Chantry Old Hall with the rest of them.

  ‘Then perhaps you should think again,’ he told her. ‘Emma loves you.’ He paused to let that fact hit home. It seemed to be working because he saw her frown and then soften as she thought of the girl who must already have poured out her grief and devastation to the one person she was sure would listen to her. ‘And I am always going to be a terrible example to a trio of innocents. Just imagine what their lives will be like if you do not agree to provide a better one for them to look up to.’

  He should have left Emma’s forlorn state to do its work with Miss Yelverton, because his genuine fear he might tow Chris’s children’s lives off course sounded facetious even to him. Curse the woman for making him feel such a fool he could not find the easy charm that usually got him what he wanted from females who ought to know better. Trust him to find the one who really did know better at exactly the wrong moment.

  ‘Governesses are not antidotes for an employer’s bad behaviour, Sir Henry,’ she informed him snootily, then looked a little bit shocked by the fierce frown that hated form of his name brought on before he could order himself to stop it.

  He relaxed his knitted brows with an effort of will and offered her an apologetic shrug instead. ‘My late father was the only person who ever used that name for me,’ he admitted gruffly. Surely even she would have heard of the bitter battles father and son fought as soon as Harry was big enough to shout back at the old windbag and defy every paternal order to simply do as he was bid and not argue.

  ‘I am still not a bandage for hurts you need not cause in the first place. Your wards’ well-being should be your main concern from now on, Sir Harry,’ she told him severely.

  He supposed he ought to be grateful she had modified his title to the one he answered to instead of the one he was christened with. ‘Then do it because you love Emma. I know you must because she is a darling and has been ever since she opened her eyes on this bad old world of ours.’

  He was challenging her to lie now and gave her a very direct look. He hoped she would read in it how dear Emma and the other two little monkeys were to him while she was staring back at him like a rabbit mesmerised by a fox. He was not given to showing his true feelings to anyone, let alone a complete stranger, so he hoped his wards would be grateful to him one day. No, he didn’t. He never wanted the sort of guilt and grudge between him and his father to stand between him and Chris and Jane’s children. He wanted the best for them and it was about time he charmed Miss Yelverton into giving it to them.

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Beacon

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  ISBN-13: 9781488066108

  The Maiden and the Mercenary

  Copyright © 2020 by Nicole Locke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, character
s, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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