Charlotte whirled toward the dancing master. “May we learn a waltz?” she asked eagerly.
The Italian clicked his tongue. “No, Signorina, not today. First we conquer the quadrille. Next week, perhaps.”
Nick cleared his throat. “I’ll mark it in my diary. If you want me back,” he added as his sister turned to him, beaming with hope.
“I do! It was ever so helpful, truly it was, watching you and Miss Greene. Thank you for agreeing to do it again.”
His hands still tingled. Emilia Greene kept her back to him, paging furiously through the sheet music as if in search of the secrets of immortality. Wisps of hair trailed down her neck, practically begging him to brush them aside and press his lips there, where her shoulder met her neck in a curve of satiny skin. He wondered how many of her undergarments had ruffles, and where they were.
“My pleasure,” he said.
When the dancelesson finally ended, Emilia surprised her pupils by declaring they would rest.
“I’m not tired,” protested Charlotte.
“I didn’t even get to dance,” cried Lucy.
Emilia felt as though she’d run to Richmond and back. Her pulse still raced, and her cheeks still burned. She wasn’t sure her legs would support her much longer. “I’mtired,” she declared. “If you are still energetic, perhaps you could begin copying your French lesson, Lucy, and you may review your history lesson, Charlotte.”
Lucy made a face of agony, which Charlotte mimicked to a lesser degree. “Couldn’t we go to the park instead? It’s sunny out today, and it’s not even noon.”
“No.”
“James could walk with us, if you’re tired—”
“No!”
Such denial was unlike her. Charlotte pushed out her lower lip and Lucy screwed up her face to argue and plead.
“Do your lessons. I’m going to my room to rest,” announced Emilia, to head off all of it, and marched out the door.
Too late she realized that Mr. Dashwood was upstairs, in his bedchamber. Very near to hers. Likely stripping off his clothes for bed right this moment. Unbidden her mind fastened on that thought. She’d seen him in shirtsleeves, his forearms bare. Did he sleep in a nightshirt with a woolen cap on his head? She doubted it. Arabella had told her once that Oliver slept naked, which she’d learned the night his chimney began to smoke and he’d fled into the corridor with only a blanket clutched around his waist. Arabella had laughed and made sport of her then-nineteen-year-old brother’s thin arms and hairless chest, but that was not what Emilia pictured under Mr. Dashwood’s clothes. His arms weren’t thin at all. His hands were large and strong. His shoulders were broad and his chest was solid. And his eyes—
She was nearly running by the time she reached her room and closed the door hard, leaning against it as if she’d escaped something terrible.
If only she could.Shewas what she was trying to escape, her own primal reaction to a man—the worst possible man. Worse still, he knew it, because she hadn’t been able to conceal the longing humming inside her when they danced.
Emilia had long ago given up expecting to fall in love and marry. That had all been tossed out the window when her father betrothed her to one of his own friends. He’d told her it was for her own good, and that she would be glad of it one day, but when Papa died, Emilia broke the engagement the next day. Her uncle had roared in fury, but by then she’d been old enough to defy him and stubborn enough to take herself off to seek employment, rather than submit to what the men in her family chose for her.
Her first position had been as companion to an elderly countess, a friend of Arabella’s grandmother. Lady Watney had been demanding and imperious, but also liberal-minded about many things. She was the one who’d taught Emilia the primary rule of females in service: keep a chary eye on the men of the household, especially the master.A man who pays a woman’s wages,the countess would say,always overestimates what he has purchased.
After a year, Lady Watney told her she was too young and sprightly to be a companion, and suggested she work with children. She’d given Emilia a letter of recommendation to the wife of an admiral, who needed help with her four children while her husband was away at sea for months at a time. Emilia had loved those children, three young ladies and a boy who wrote poems about his father’s ships. Her next charge had been Lady Helen, just making her come-out at age eighteen and in woeful need of guidance, since her mother was preoccupied with six other children and her father, an absent-minded earl, was lost in his botanical studies most of the time.
With Lady Helen’s marriage to Lord Mulworth, Emilia had developed something of a reputation among governesses. She had three offers of employment, but somehow the inquiry from Mr. Bennet, Lord Sydenham’s solicitor, had tugged at her heart. He wrote of a widower seeking a responsible woman to care for his poor, motherless daughter, only seven years old, and he’d named a lovely high salary. Mr. Bennet had brought Lucy to the interview at an inn, and Emilia had lost her heart to the thin, quiet child with big, yearning eyes.
It had seemed entirely respectable. Lady Fairchild, Lady Helen’s mother, had known the late Lady Sydenham and assured Emilia her child must be lovely. Only later did Emilia realize that she’d said nothing of the viscount himself.
She hadn’t even met her employer for two months. Sydenham had turned out to be cruel and petty, and the lovely high salary turned out to be a lie, but by then Emilia had fallen completely in love with Lucy, and she’d waged a pitched battle to keep both of them out of Sydenham’s sight.
And now... Nicholas Dashwood.
After so many years of keeping her distance from men, of being on guard against their attentions and intentions, she’d thought she had grown immune to them.
She’d been wrong.
Slowly she crossed the room to the other door. It led to his private study, Pearce had told her. Emilia rested her cheek against the polished wood, but heard nothing. Lightly she rested her hand on the knob. It didn’t turn—she’d tried it the first day to be certain—but for a moment she wondered what would happen if she could open it.
If shedidopen it.
