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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"All right, that one was worse than the first. Cross her off the list."
"Before I do, exactly what reason can you give for your dislike? She had excellent references, and she wasn't so hard on the eyes either."
Kieran Dearborn, twelfth Duke of Cowanfield, glared at his best friend, who was seated at the secretary with his quill held imperiously over a list with a diminishing number of unrejected names. Hiring a governess was woman's work, but where he could find a woman to do this for him, he had no idea.
"I didn't like the look of her. She looked shifty, as if she might give Alice laudanum on days where she was feeling too tired to deal."
Neil Marsh, the Earl of Cottering, raised an eyebrow. "Really? You've been reading too many of those lurid broadsides. They do that in the slums, not in the finer houses."
"Oh, yes, and I'm sure that all London gentlemen are the pictures of restraint when it comes to the gambling table and all London ladies are as faithful to their husbands as old dogs are to their masters."
Neil laughed. "Well, I suppose that you know something about that, don't you, Cowanfield?"
"Shut your mouth about that. We don't talk about that in front of her."
They both glanced at the divan set alongside the window, where Alice Dearborn slept as deeply as it seemed only a three-year-old could. She had pale blond hair, as unlike Kieran's own dark hair as possible, but the moment he had seen her green eyes, twin to the ones he saw in the mirror every morning, there was no doubt in his mind that she was his.
Along with that realization had come a sudden rush of desperate and protective love unlike anything he had ever felt in his dissipated thirty-two years. She was his; he had to protect her, nurture her, and see her grown... and he had no idea at all how to do it.
The governess had been something that finally occurred to him after Alice had cried herself out on her first night at Brixby Hall, the ancestral home of all Dearborns. The little girl had fallen asleep in a pile of tears and wails, and still, Kieran couldn't leave her alone. He sat in the darkness of the nursery, holding her tiny soft hand, and tried to figure out what to do next.
Neil, when next he spoke, was more sympathetic, but his voice was firm. "She is a child, not some rare and delicate bird from the southern lands that will die if she is splashed with cold water. She needs to be cared for, and unless you are hiding depths of which I have been heretofore unaware, you need to find someone to do it. I suggest that the next woman who comes in, as long as she does not have an obvious affiliation with a London street gang, should do the trick."
Kieran started to snap something that Neil probably did not deserve at all, but they were saved by the butler coming in and announcing the next woman on the list.
Well, she's definitely not affiliated with any London street gangs.
As a matter of fact, she embodied the very spirit of a governess, perfectly erect in carriage, her brown hair scraped back into an unworldly bun and a pinched look to her face as if she never smiled.
