Good girls don't go snooping where they don't belong.
But Lady Delia Scarborough never claimed to be a good girl.
Lady Delia Scarborough wants her sister back from the grave.
Since that can't happen, she'll settle for the next best thing...
Making...
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Kieran shut his eyes against the pain that was beginning to arch across his skull. It had been a trying few days, and he had barely had any time to spend with Alice and Delia at all. He was nearly ready to set the Marseilles branch of his quarrying company on fire, and it didn't help that the man in charge there did not speak English or even French but some obscure Occitan dialect. All of their conversations took place through a barely literate translator, and the whole thing was finally culminating in an actual headache rather than just a metaphorical one.
It was late by the time he made it back to Brixby Hall, and instead of going to bed, he found himself in his study again. He pulled one of the cut crystal decanters from the alcove in the wall and sipping at the good port, he thought of what had happened the last time he had been in here with Delia.
She had been everything he had hoped for and more when he had hired her on. His daughter seemed to be thriving under her care, and Delia seemed to care for Alice as well, treating her as sweetly and as gently as she would her own child.
Of course, it wasn't Alice that we were thinking about when she was here last.
The memory of their kiss, bright and almost incandescently sensual, came to surprise him from time to time. Sometimes, Kieran thought he would go mad with how vivid that memory was and how it could come to him in the most unsuitable of moments.
She is too good with Alice. I can't risk more of that. She deserves so much better than what I could offer her. She's too fine, too pure for the thoughts that I can't seem to help but entertain when she is around.
Even as he told himself that, however, he wondered. She had felt like pure fire in his arms, and he had known with an instinctive truth that she felt the same thing that he had.
Where does a modest and virtuous governess get that kind of fire anyway?
He took another sip of the port, letting his eyes drift closed. Yes, it was completely beyond the pale to imagine a night like this one, where he was tired to death and where life seemed at its dullest, that he might hear her light step in the hallway and know that she was coming to relieve some of that ache.
Kieran's eyes snapped open. It wasn't his imagination. There were steps in the hallway, and somehow, he knew that it was her. He
made his way to the door, opening it just in time to see her go past.
Delia yelped, her face turning white and then red as she rounded on him.
"What in the world do you think you are doing, Kieran?"
He grinned, liking the roses in her cheeks. "I feel like I should be asking you that same question. I am in my own study having a good drink. You are the governess who is sneaking through the dark halls with only a candle, as if you were hunting for some hidden treasure in a Gothic novel."
