by Dare, Tessa
Chapter Sixteen
He looked like a wet cat, Alex thought. A wet, angry, ferocious, wild, and very, very large cat. Such as a tiger or a lion or a jaguar or—
“Miss Mountbatten,” he snarled. “Kindly step aside.”
“Wait.” She stretched her arms from the banister to the wall, obstructing his progress. “It wasn’t their fault.”
“Not their fault?” He flung a gesture at the ceiling, spraying her with water. “Are you telling me this is a mystery? That some unknown culprits are at large? Well, let me call in the Bow Street runners.”
Alex retracted her arm barrier and wiped the anger-propelled droplets from her face.
“Rosamund and Daisy were hanging out the window,” he went on. “Holding pails. It was, most assuredly, their fault.”
“Yes, but only partly. I was there, and I didn’t stop them.”
“You didn’t stop them.” He pronounced each word as a separate count in a list of felony charges.
“No, I didn’t. Because I—” Her courage faltered.
Because I was jealous. Irrationally, unspeakably envious in a way that made my toes catch fire.
“Because I believed you deserved it,” she said, lifting her chin. “How dare you conduct your amorous liaisons right under their noses.”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“The children are my concern. Don’t think they don’t know you bring women into that . . . libertine lair.”
“Libertine lair? Oh, that’s a new one.” He brushed past her, stalking down the corridor and disappearing into what she supposed must be his own bedchamber.
After a moment’s hesitation, Alex followed him, charging through the door and shutting it behind her. They were a full two floors below the nursery and at the opposite end of the house—but she lowered her voice anyway. “We’re not finished discussing this.”
“There’s nothing to be discussed. I know I’m a terrible guardian. I know this house is a masonry monument to scandal. That’s why I employed you. You’re meant to teach them proper behavior. Not plague me.”
“Plague you? When have I plagued you?”
“Aside from right now?” He tussled with his waistcoat buttons. “Only every hour of the day and night since you walked through my door.”
“I can’t imagine what you mean.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Really. So all that rolling around on the schoolroom floor and groping in the Tower of London didn’t give you the slightest hint.”
Alex was coming to recognize his strategy—revealing his naked desire in an attempt to hide his heart and soul. She wouldn’t be fooled this time. “You said . . .”
“I know what I said.” Swaggering strides brought him close. “I said the thought of seducing you would never cross my mind.” He swept aside her plaited hair and bent to whisper darkly in her ear. “I lied.”
He retreated. She was rooted to the floor.
“The thought had crossed my mind before I even made you that promise. And since then, so many thoughts have crossed my mind, my brain is the Charing Cross of filth. A riot of lewd fantasies. You’re naked in nearly all of them, and ever since a certain incident in the schoolroom, a fair number feature ropes.”
Well, then.
Alex needed a moment to recover from that.
Perhaps two moments.
Or a year.
But he didn’t allow her another second.
“Why do you think I brought Winifred home? I thought I could purge a certain governess from my mind.” He cursed under his breath. “And see how well that worked. I can’t even muster the decency to drive you from this room.”
Alex’s mind reeled. He’d been thinking about her that much, and in that way? She didn’t dare plumb the meaning behind it. Instead, she said, “This plan of yours doesn’t sound very fair to Winifred.”
“Yes, I realized that.” He flung aside his unbuttoned waistcoat and pulled his damp shirt over his head, tossing it on the heap. “I was on the verge of sending her home when the girls doused me with”—he swept his hands down his muscled, glistening torso—“whatever this is.”
“Leftover bathwater.”
“Whose bathwater?”
She bit her bottom lip at the corner. “Mine.”
He laughed bitterly. “Of course. Of course it would be yours. I knew I smelled orange-flower water.”
Orange-flower water. He knew her scent?
Don’t make anything of it, she told herself. Naturally, he knew her scent. He likely recalled the scent of every woman he encountered, in the same way a wine merchant could taste cherries or lavender in a bordeaux. One of those talents gleaned from vast and varied experience.
“I suppose I now understand how you can be so callous about your wards,” she said. “Given the way you carry on with women, you doubtless have a dozen illegitimate children you’re ignoring, too.”
“You’re wrong. I do not.”
He snagged a towel from the washstand and gave his hair a good rubbing. Alex gawked, transfixed by the way his arm muscles bunched and flexed.
“How could you be certain you have no offspring?”
“Because I am excessively careful not to create any.”
“No sponge or French letter is that effective.”
“Which is why I don’t rely on them. I simply don’t put myself in that position.”
“What position?”
“Any position that requires insertion of my . . .” He waved vaguely toward his loins. “. . . male member.”
“Male member. Are we discussing a Masonic society, or are you referring to the penis?”
He stared at her.
“We are adults. If you’re going to discuss such matters, you may as well use the proper words. I would never have supposed you to be prudish.”
“I’m not prudish. I’m protecting your delicate feminine sensibilities.”
“I never acquired many of those. And considering that it was pressed up against me the other day, I should think we’ve moved beyond euphemisms. So go on, then. We were discussing your penis.”
He set his jaw and stepped toward her. “Since you’re so fond of bold language, we are discussing my cock. And the fact that I never thrust it ballocks-deep in a woman’s tight, wet cunny. That is how I’m certain I have no bastards in the world.”
She was shocked into silence for a moment. Shocking her was, of course, what he’d intended. The entire scene was scandalous in the extreme—a governess, alone with the master of the house, in his bedchamber, while he was bared to the waist—and he knew it. He wanted her to feel intimidated. He wanted to avoid her questions, and possibly his own answers, too.
With a smile and a bow, he crossed to a low cabinet and withdrew a decanter of brandy.
“You—” She shook her head in bemusement. “You can’t mean to say you’re a virgin.”
“No, I don’t mean to say that. I had my share of indiscretions when I was younger.” He paused to pour brandy into a glass. “But not anymore.”
The low timbre of his voice seeped into her bones.
“I live by one rule,” he went on. “No attachments. I don’t keep mistresses. I won’t risk siring bastards. I refuse to make myself a slave to mercury cures, either. Because inevitably, whether I deserve it or not, the Libertine Lair will become the Duke Den. I’m a poor excuse for nobility, but the least I can do is keep the estate unencumbered by bastards or blackmail, and keep myself free of the pox. So I refrain from—”
“Intercourse.”
“Fucking. Yes.” He downed a swallow of brandy. “If you think I’ve taken you into confidence, don’t flatter yourself. My abstention is no secret. Why do you suppose I’m so popular with ladies? I’ve cultivated other talents.”
“What other—” She caught herself, but it was too late. Her ignorance had been exposed. Much like his bare, sculpted chest.
“So, the governess has a few delicate sensibilities after all. There are other ways to g
ive and take pleasure, Alexandra. A great many ways.” His gaze swept her. “Shall I teach you a lesson?”
Without taking his eyes from her, he drained the last of his brandy.
Alexandra found that her reserve of courage was similarly drained. She didn’t know where to look. Her gaze kept landing in the worst possible places. The heap of his discarded clothing. The closed door. The bed.
“Daisy needs spectacles,” she blurted out.
And then she turned and fled.
Chapter Seventeen
“The girl ca—” Daisy stopped and tried again. “The girl cat-cheese . . .”
“Catches,” Alex gently corrected.
“The girl catches the fish.”
“Very good, darling. Go on.”
Now that she’d been fitted for spectacles, Daisy was flying through her primers. Her mind had connected the letters and sounds long ago. She simply hadn’t been able to see them.
The primers had needed a bit of editing. As originally written by a certain Mr. Browne—who suffered an appalling lack of imagination—the boys did everything interesting and the girls never left home.
Nothing that a few snips of the shears and a couple dabs of paste couldn’t manage.
Daisy turned the page. “The boy wa-shes the dish.”
“Excellent.”
Rosamund was making strides, too. Or if not making strides, at least she’d stopped mulishly blocking the road. The girl had already been a voracious reader, and her command of numbers was well beyond her years. She scarcely needed any lessons. What she needed were the sorts of things she’d never ask for and only would occasionally, grudgingly accept. Things like praise and warm pats on the shoulder. Alex was still working up to hugs.
All in all, she was encouraged. There was still a great deal to accomplish by summer’s end, but both Rosamund and Daisy were on their way.
And then there was Chase.
His amorous liaison with Winifred may not have come to fruition, as it were, but it seemed to have had the intended effect. Chase now avoided Alex with unqualified success. Save for the perfunctory morning condolences (scrofula being the latest ailment to claim poor Millicent’s life), she hadn’t seen him in a week.
Therefore, neither had the girls.
Rosamund and Daisy could memorize the encyclopedia, and they still wouldn’t truly be ready to leave for school—not unless they knew they had a loving home to come back to. There was only one person who could give them that. And when that person wasn’t working with Mr. Barrow, he was hammering at something in his Rake Room.
Alex knew they had an undeniable attraction, but she couldn’t be so irresistible as that. Perhaps she could find some way to render herself entirely undesirable. Daisy might have a noxious skin condition to recommend.
“What’s this?” Daisy twisted on Alex’s lap. She plucked at the ribbon tied about Alex’s neck and pulled the beaded cross pendant out from beneath her fichu. “You never take it off.”
“The beads were a gift from my mother.” Alex untied the ribbon from behind her neck. “You may look, if you wish.”
Daisy ran her fingers over the tiny red beads. “Why aren’t they on a proper chain?”
“Governesses can’t afford gold chains.”
Nevertheless, Alex kept them as secure as possible—individually knotted, on a ribbon that she faithfully replaced every three months, lest it fray.
“They’re corales,” she told Daisy. “Red coral beads. Where I was born, mothers make a bracelet of them and tie it around their baby’s wrist.” She reached for Millicent and demonstrated, wrapping the ribbon around the doll’s arm where the carved wooden hand met the batting-stuffed arm. “Like so. It’s for protection.”
“Protection?” This skeptical inquiry came from Rosamund. Apparently, she’d been paying attention from across the room. “Protection from what?”
“From all sorts of terrible things. Sickness. The evil eye. An aswang—that’s a witch. There are all manner of fearsome creatures. Take the manananggal.”
“Magana-what?”
“Manananggal.” Alex made her voice dark and mysterious. “She’s a lady vampire who can cut herself in two. Her legs remain rooted in the ground like a tree stump, and the rest of her flies out into the night. Her intestines unwind like a string behind her, and she goes hunting for mothers and their children. She lies on the roof of a house, and uses her long, long tongue to reach her sleeping prey, probe down their throats, and suck out their blood.”
“I shan’t be frightened of those,” Daisy said. “The intestine is only twenty-six feet long, and the Philippine Islands are much farther away than that. No mana-thinggum could possibly reach us.”
“Perhaps not.”
“I have a necklace from my mother, too.” Daisy scampered to the trunk that served alternately as treasure chest and Millicent’s burial vault. Rosamund looked on, wary, as her sister sifted through the contents and retrieved a small, gilded box inlaid with French motifs painted on porcelain.
Once she’d returned to the bed, Daisy opened the box and drew out a gold pendant on a slender chain. “Here.”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” Alex said.
“It’s a locket,” Daisy said proudly. She picked open the latch to display a painted miniature. “That’s Mama.”
Alex took the pendant in her hand, holding it closer for examination. “How beautiful she was.”
“Oh, yes. She was very beautiful. She was brilliant at singing and cards. And clever, too. She always knew just how to make you feel better, if you had a stomachache or cough.”
“It would have been better if she hadn’t known,” Rosamund said.
“Why would you say that?” Alex asked.
“That’s how she caught her death. She was helping nurse the neighbor’s boy when he was ill with the putrid throat. He got better, but not before making her sick. She wasn’t so very clever after all.”
“She was,” Daisy retorted angrily.
“She ought to have never gone. Anyone could see what would come of it. It was stupid of her.”
“Rosamund,” Alexandra said gently.
Daisy jumped to her feet. “You can’t say that. Take it back.”
“I shan’t take it back.” Rosamund tossed aside her book and stood. “It’s the truth. Mama was stupid and reckless. She cared more about mending the neighbor boy than she cared about staying alive for us.”
“That isn’t so,” Daisy yelled through tears. “You’re mean and spiteful and I hate you.”
“Well, I hate her.” Rosamund tore the necklace from Daisy’s hand and threw it across the room. It bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor. She stood there for a moment, breathing hard and staring at the wall. Obviously struggling not to cry.
Alex approached her gingerly. “Rosamund.”
“Don’t.” The girl flinched, recoiling from the touch. “Don’t touch me. Leave Daisy alone, as well. Don’t pretend to mother her. You’re leaving at the end of the summer. And when you’ve gone, we won’t miss you at all.”
Rosamund ran from the room. Daisy had retreated to a corner, where she curled her knees to her chest, buried her head in her arms, and sobbed.
Alex wanted to soothe them both, but she knew well from her own youth that the loss of parents couldn’t be healed with biscuits or hugs. The girls needed time, and they needed to know they were safe. Safe to rage or shout or cry, without being told to hush. With her, they needn’t pretend they weren’t hurting inside. If nothing else, she could give them that—for a few more weeks, at least.
She found the locket and turned it back and forth in her hands. Thankfully, it appeared undamaged from its disastrous flight across the room. The hinge had been tweaked, but she was able to bend it back in place with a bit of gentle manipulation. After replacing the necklace in the French inlaid box, she returned it to the trunk at the foot of the bed. In digging for her treasure, Daisy had made quite a jumble of the playthings and blankets that filled th
e chest. Alex pulled it all out, planning to fold, sort, and organize the contents as she replaced them.
When she reached the bottom of the trunk, however, she found a mysterious bundle, roughly the size of a teapot. It had been tightly wrapped in oilcloth and bound with a length of twine.
Which was tied with a cat’s-paw knot.
Alexandra ran her fingers over the twine, considering. Children needed privacy, just as adults did. Poking through the girls’ secrets could damage what fragile trust they’d built. She decided to replace the bundle beneath the other contents, close the trunk, and say nothing about it.
And then she changed her mind.
An anxious weight had settled in her stomach, heavy enough to pin her to the floor. She wouldn’t rest easy until she learned what was in the bundle.
With a quick look over her shoulder, she picked apart the knot with her fingernail and carefully unfolded the oilcloth. What she found inside made her heart wrench.
Everything two girls might need, should they wish to run away.
Money, chiefly. Alex did a quick counting, and the total was above ten pounds. That was an impressive number of coins, no doubt pilfered one by one from Chase’s pockets and carefully hoarded over the months.
Oh, Lord. Rosamund was always making quips about her “escape plan,” but Alex had believed her to be joking. The preparation reflected in this bundle was serious indeed.
Aside from the purse, Alex found a tiny book of coaching timetables, maps of London and England, a flint and tinderbox, a pocket knife, a ball of twine, and a compass. The same compass that had gone missing a few weeks ago. Apparently, it hadn’t gone missing at all. It had joined the rest of Rosamund’s cache.
Last, she found a simple sewing kit. Needle book, thread, and a small pair of shears. Her lips curved in a bittersweet smile. At least she’d convinced Rosamund of the value of needlework.
Alex hastily remade the bundle, careful to replace the objects as she’d found them, and tied the twine with an identical knot. She reburied the packet at the bottom of the trunk and closed it.
One thing was clear. She would have to redouble her efforts with Chase. She didn’t want to betray Rosamund’s fragile trust by telling him about the bundle, but there was more at stake here than he knew. Rosamund was capable and determined, and if she decided to take Daisy and run away, no headmistress would be stern enough to prevent them, nor quick enough to track them down. They had squirreled away enough money to take them anywhere in England. Possibly farther.