‘Whatever can you want with me, Miss Court?’ Moss asked impatiently later that day, once he’d ghosted into the housekeeper’s room and shut the door very quietly behind him.
‘It’s not a tryst if that’s what you think,’ Nell said defensively.
‘Just as well; they’re supposed to be voluntary,’ the man said grumpily.
Nell immediately wished she hadn’t agreed to this condition of Mrs Winch’s for going along with her scheme to find out what was going on. Faith badly needed to keep her place though, so Nell would tell the brusque, annoying man about the stranger after her secrets without revealing them to him either.
‘It certainly wouldn’t be so on my part,’ she muttered and thought she saw a hint of hurt in the contrary man’s eyes for a moment. ‘And I don’t want to be caught in here with the door shut and only you for company,’ she added for good measure.
‘Then stop wasting time and tell me what you and Mrs Winch think so urgent she got me here under false pretences and shut the door on us like a conspirator in a bad play,’ he replied impatiently. After a militant glare at him for being infuriating, she did what he asked and told him Faith’s odd tale. ‘Have you been through whatever papers and books you have with you and looked for anything that could give a clue to this woman’s purpose?’ he demanded.
‘Not yet. I thought her mad and have had no leisure,’ she said defensively. Four lively girls and a day when cards, dancing and games were frowned upon meant she needed all her ingenuity to keep them from quarrelling and setting the whole household on edge of a Sunday. Bad enough that hers, Mrs Winch’s and Faith’s nerves were stretched tight without everyone else catching the ailment.
‘Then you’d best hand them over to me so I can look at them for you,’ he said as if it was her only logical course of action.
‘Certainly not,’ she snapped, almost overwhelmed with horror at the thought of her letters from Colm and old friends at Miss Thibett’s being combed through and all her secrets revealed.
‘Then how do you expect me to find out what this mysterious woman wants and track her down?’ he demanded impatiently, one eye on the door as if he couldn’t wait to leave her alone again.
‘I don’t; I didn’t want to tell you, but Mrs Winch insisted I must before she would agree to keep Faith on. I don’t want the poor child turned off and her family put out of their house for the sake of a few shillings. In her shoes I’m sure I would have done the same thing if it meant paying off my family’s debts.’
‘Then you would have to be put out as well; what’s the use of a servant who can’t be trusted?’
‘A master or mistress can lie and manipulate, but a girl not much older than my youngest charge must be beyond temptation? What an unjust world you live in.’
‘It’s the same one everyone else inhabits,’ he said with a wry smile that almost disarmed her, until she remembered what he wanted and hardened her heart.
‘That doesn’t mean there’s no room in it for change. If we don’t want riot and rebellion running rife, then the poor should be less poor and their bread cheaper.’
‘Lord Barberry won’t be pleased if you impart such ideas to his wards.’
‘How would he know? No, don’t answer that for I’m quite sure I don’t want to know what you say in your reports to our absentee employer. And please don’t take me for a fool, Mr Moss. I know debutantes are supposed to be blithely ignorant of the state of the nation they live in and I have no intention of setting the Selford girls up for a fall when their lives are difficult enough already. They can still visit the less fortunate of his lordship’s tenants and do their best to see their houses and larders are improved without causing a scandal. Surely even you won’t argue his lordship’s wards should be brought up in ignorance of how privileged they are? I’m sure the Earl would approve of them being grateful for their comfortable lot in life.’
The irony behind that seemingly obedient and governess-like statement wasn’t lost on him. She should remember he was acutely intelligent and might have the ear of their employer, but he’d made her angry with his assumption she’d put radical ideas into her charges’ heads then expect them to flourish in the very limited sphere their sex and birth confined them to. She might privately rail against the fact a young lady must seem docile and almost stupid to make a good catch on the marriage mart, but she did want the Selford girls to be happy and accepted when they got there.
‘As well for you that I’m Moss and not the Earl of Barberry, madam. He is your employer, yet you speak as if you hold him in contempt,’ he said with one of those fearsome frowns that made her search her conscience.
‘Reckless of me if you are devoted to his interests. Would you prefer me to pretend he is a good and diligent guardian and will you report me for refusing to lie, I wonder?’ she asked defiantly.
‘Say what you like about me, I’m not a spy,’ he snapped back, then seemed to think about his own words and shook his head as if he had to deny it all over again.
She had certainly tweaked his temper and she eyed him warily. Was she trying to cover her unease at his order to turn over her secrets for his inspection by going on the attack? Possibly, she decided. ‘I never said you were,’ she said with a weary shake of her own head to admit she might have gone too far. ‘Forgive me, this has been a difficult day. I’m tired and let my tongue run away with me.’
‘Don’t apologise, Miss Court, it’s so rare for you to let your true feelings past the stern guard you put around them. I ought to be honoured.’
‘You don’t look as if you are,’ she said with a wry smile and he chuckled as if she had surprised him yet again.
‘Then looks can be deceptive,’ he said and suddenly the heightened tension between them had nothing to do with his loyalty to their absent employer and her rudeness about the Earl.
‘I’m still not handing you my personal correspondence,’ she warned lightly, using their argument as an excuse to head for the door, because now the air was crackling with possibilities that really were impossible and she had to get out of here fast, before his charm overcame her caution.
‘Love letters?’ he asked, half-joking; almost condemning.
She stopped and turned to eye him warily once more. ‘Certainly not, but they are private and written only to me.’
‘Something you should remember when you’re thinking about the odd events of the day,’ he warned, but their voices were stating facts while their eyes were busy elsewhere.
Nell found time to shiver at the idea of those letters in the hands of some malicious rogue bent on harming Colm or his wife. Maybe it was that too-revealing gesture, or the fact she couldn’t bring herself to break the contact of their eyes that drew Mr Moss to come closer; whatever it was they were suddenly standing toe to toe, studying each other intently. Nothing her sensible everyday self could say would make her back away and turn the doorknob behind her to break a spell she didn’t fully understand. One minute they were about to snarl challenges at each other, on opposite sides of a battle about their noble employer. The next their almost-argument only added to tension of a very different kind. If she was going to be honest with him Nell might admit something new and reckless walked into her life the night she met Moss in the twilit stables, but it was best not to be too truthful when you weren’t exactly who you were pretending to be, wasn’t it?
Moss, how absurd to have to think of him that way when he felt so much closer than a stranger, but it was all he must be, mustn’t it? Whatever he was called by those he loved, he had proved himself physically strong and he had an air of power that seemed natural as breathing. Despite his position as a nobleman’s land steward, nobody owned this man; not even Lord Barberry. She breathed in the outdoor scent of him and wondered why she wasn’t repelled by so much untamed strength and masculine heat so close to her it ought to burn such a respectable governess as Miss Court. For a long moment it felt like waiting for a force of nature to break over them; she was breathless and in awe of whatever was coming, but shivering excitedly about what it might turn out to be at the same time.
‘Kiss me, you idiot,’ she whispered at last and felt his shoulders shake a little as he laughed softly and it seemed to warm the very air between them.
‘Wasp,’ he whispered before he lowered his head and did just that.
Their first contact lip to lip was almost disappointing—gentle and bland—asking what she thought about this and waiting for her to remember Miss Court and Mr Moss, two respectable people supposedly going about their duty. She responded with a silent demand for more and that tidal wave she’d been waiting for hit her with even more force now she’d almost forgotten it was on its way. Oh, it was bliss, she thought, as she was swept under it and didn’t even want to fight. It was rich and powerful and new and she wanted to stay lost in feeling like this for ever. More than mouth to mouth, it felt as if their whole bodies were kissing, exploring, yearning, owning each other between one second and the next. She shifted in his arms; trying to find her way inside his very skin so she would know everything, see all he was right now, feel at one with him. Sensation burned on sensation in a banquet of taste, touch, scent and small gasped sounds that were all either of them could spare. There was something missing; she prodded her sluggish mind to recall it—ah, yes, sight. Opening her dazed eyes was a mighty effort, but there, his were blazing back at her with hot blue fire in his compelling gaze that made him changed and yet so wonderfully the same it didn’t matter who they really were. She felt so alive it was as if anything was possible for them right now. If she sprouted a pair of wings and flew out of a window to soar into hot blue skies with him, as if they were a pair of courting eagles, it would feel almost normal. She gasped a huge breath in and wanted to laugh joyously, to squirm ever closer until they saw through the same eyes, felt with the same touch, learnt one another’s every last breath and sinew.
His long limbs were the only way a man’s limbs should be. The power of the hard muscles under her urgent hands testament to the fact here was no idle beau or nobleman, sitting about his castle in luxury whilst the rest of the world worked to keep him. His rein-callused hands on her soft curves and narrow waist were bliss, but even that wasn’t quite enough for the hungry wanton within. That Nell knew there was more than even this wonder. The everyday one felt the world battering away at her certainty here was her mate, her given man, the one. In protest at this sense not everything was as it should be between them, she explored his jaw line, her hand gliding over supple tanned skin tight on his high cheekbones and down. Who would have thought the feel of a man’s beard about to sprout would be the stuff of fantasies under her fingertips as she ran them back down towards his fascinating lips and padded them against his skin? He opened his mouth and suckled on her index finger and she gasped at the wild heat searing through her as his hot blue eyes held hers with a promise to forget everything but her and him for a long, sensuous moment.
Willing to give him that promise back with interest, she fell back against the nearest support her body could find at short notice and felt the cold brass of the door knob at her back. She flinched away as if someone had stuck a knife in her. Heavens above, but they were kissing like lovers in Mrs Winch’s very respectable sitting room. She, the governess, and Moss, his lordship’s steward, were locked in each other’s arms as if they’d been born to love each other. Except she wasn’t simply Miss Court the governess, was she? And he didn’t love her. Did he? She peered up at him almost fearfully now, unsure if she was delighted or wounded to the heart when he seemed to catch her caution and looked a cool question back at her, despite the sound of his breath coming fast in his labouring lungs and a tremor in his long-fingered hand as he felt the knot in his carelessly elegant cravat for damage.
‘I shall leave you to compose yourself, Miss Court,’ he said, avoiding her gaze altogether, now he’d put that sensual wildness behind him so completely she wondered if she imagined the impassioned lover of a few seconds ago.
‘How can you be so cold, so, so...oh, I don’t know...so careless about kissing me and everything?’ she managed incoherently.
‘Ask me again tomorrow, when we’re further from me throwing myself on you and begging for a night in your arms, Miss Court. Right now I’m not quite safe for you to be around; by then maybe I can be tame and Mr Moss again.’
His voice was hoarse and he looked as if it had cost him a great deal to stand back when he’d felt her jolt of shock and instinctive horror at what they had almost done together without love. She wanted to explain it wasn’t horror they could have been lovers if they hadn’t woken up to where they were in time. Part of her was mortified to say it wasn’t that at all, it was because she wasn’t being honest about herself, or any of the reasons she was still here being Miss Court instead of Miss Hancourt, with her splendid marriage portion and embarrassment of noble connections. It was the huge lie Miss Court was that stopped her tongue and made her shuffle her feet as if they’d be better off on the other side of this confounded door. A confession trembled on her lips, she even opened her mouth to start it, but he got there first.
‘Promise me you will go through your papers as if you are seeing them through the eyes of a stranger as soon as you can? I can’t imagine what you and your family or friends have been up to in order to attract the attention of a felon, but if you don’t find some clue why this idiotic female thinks your correspondence is worth five pounds to her, then I will. I won’t have the Selford girls endangered because you brought a maniac here and refuse to let me see what makes her think she can bribe and corrupt the servants to get hold of it without answering to me.’
‘You won’t have it?’ she asked, startled by the steely purpose in his cold blue eyes now, almost as if she was in league with the woman who wanted to see her letters because she wouldn’t meekly hand them over for him to read.
This was the man who kissed her as if his life depended on it moments ago. His eyes had blazed passion and what she took to be even deeper feelings only moments ago, when he gazed at her as if she was the centre of his world. She probably had been as well, for that fleeting instant. Bitterness blotted out her guilt about deceiving him. He didn’t care for her, so why should she be uneasy about Miss Eleanor Hancourt and her fine fortune and the distance that ought to set her from the Mr Mosses of this world? None of it mattered, because she didn’t matter to him.
‘You won’t let me endanger the girls I spent two years of my life trying to guide and teach to the best of my ability when nobody else cared a snap of their fingers what became of them? You accuse me of putting myself first when you have been here little more than a month and know nothing of the struggle I have had to even persuade them to be civil to each other, let alone learn anything? And you think me capable of some underhand scheme because someone I have never set eyes on has decided she has the right to single me out as quarry for no good reason? Mr Moss; judge and jury of lords and governesses; mentor and protector of my lord’s despised wards and guardian of Berry Brampton’s morals—what a fool I was to think you were a man in your own right. You’re only a puppet dancing to your master’s whims and what a master you chose to caper for; I’d rather sup with the devil than bend the knee to the Earl of Barberry myself,’ she finished and took one last, dismissive look at the tall figure of Moss, Lord Barberry’s faithful estate manager, before opening the door as coolly as if her hands weren’t shaking almost too hard to grip it and stalking out like an offended dowager duchess.
* * *
If only she knew, Fergus thought darkly as he listened to Miss Court’s petticoats rustling stiffly down the corridor and the fading echo of her soft slippers as she climbed the schoolroom stairs.
She was off to her room, alone and on her dignity, and he felt responsible for that and so many other wrong turns he’d made since he met her. He’d arrived almost ready to admit he was the errant Earl of Barberry and it was her fault he’d been diverted. Her fault he was braced like a trooper about to ride into battle at this very moment. She had no idea how harshly a man roared and ached and tore at his tethers for satisfaction of the sort of urgent, desperate need she’d roused in him just now by responding so passionately to his kiss. If she despised the Earl of Barberry, he loathed the man right now. The lord of all this faded splendour would get short shrift from stubborn Miss Court with very good reason. Even if he wasn’t the man standing here needing her so hungrily he wanted to lock them both inside her bedchamber until she admitted she wanted him back, then satisfy them both with infinite pleasure, that lord couldn’t want a governess.
Except he did and how had he let that happen? Fool, he raged at himself. How could he have been furious with her one minute for refusing to let him see her dratted letters, then step into another world of wanting and needing with her the next? It felt almost as if a cliff had dropped away in front of them and he’d grabbed hold of her eagerly as they both plunged off it into thin air together and learnt to fly. He might as well admit he’d been intrigued by her one moment and infuriated the next since he’d got to Berry Brampton and met her in the gloaming now though, hadn’t he? She wasn’t like any other woman he’d ever come across and she certainly wasn’t a beauty. After ten years wandering the earth as Mr Ford, a gentleman of means but not quite fortune, he’d met enough beautiful women to compare Miss Court’s unique features to several patterns of perfection and find it wanting. But it wasn’t about symmetry and classical proportions, was it? Not when the woman you were thinking about was Miss Court, governess to the Earl of Barberry’s wards and a disaster in petticoats.
He told himself her mouth was too big and her nose was pert and her dark brows too strongly marked and they didn’t go with that seductive mass of potentially unruly honey-brown hair she tried to keep under such stern control. The whole shape of her face was wrong as well, he decided, warming to his subject in the hope of breaking the spell she seemed to have him so firmly under right now, beauty or not. Instead of an oval model of classical perfection it was heart-shaped and that firm chin of hers must have been especially formed to defy him—since she’d been raising it to look down her tip-tilted nose at him since the first moment they met. So how was he doing at teaching himself indifference to Miss Court and the delicious feel of her coming vividly alive in his arms when she intrigued him in so many novel ways? Very ill, he decided and began to pace the room like a caged animal as he tried to find a way not to visibly want his wards’ governess. He wasn’t doing well; this need to teach her to gasp out her wildest extremes of passion under him right now felt so desperate it hurt.
Now, where were all those reasons why that couldn’t happen? Ah, yes, there they were; waiting for him to list them and teach himself self-control. One, Brendan was right: he couldn’t make her his mistress. Two, he couldn’t marry her, even if she would have him once she found out who he really was and how badly he’d been deceiving her all this time. Even if he wanted to play king to her beggar maid, she would refuse him and flounce off in an insulted temper because she despised the Earl of Barberry and was almost reckless about making that fact known to his land steward. An almost tender smile tipped up his mouth as he pictured her blaming him for the fact she must find another place because she wouldn’t work for such a charlatan if he offered her ten times her current stipend to stay here. Not that he would, he promised himself faithfully.
Three—or was it four—the only way he could make this right and not ruin her was to find her another position on the other side of the country from Berry Brampton when Moss had to ride away as unexpectedly as he’d arrived. He couldn’t stay here and pretend to be his own estate manager for much longer. It was only ever an impulse he ought to have resisted to pretend he wasn’t really my lord for a little longer. Of course he’d learnt far more about the house and estates than he would have as master of it. Try telling Miss Court that when she found out who he really was; she’d be incensed at his deception and under all her bitter fury would be a deep and abiding hurt. He could picture the mix of contempt and distress in those depthless brown eyes of hers even as he thought about confessing to her who he really was. What a shame he was still too much of a coward to bring this farce to an end right now, before she was hurt even more badly.
And they would both hurt if he didn’t tear himself away very soon. He’d seen his mother hiding her humiliation at the slights and mockery of her so-called betters too many times to delude himself that Miss Court would be accepted as his Countess. Maybe she was a governess and not an actress, but she was still poor, vulnerable and working as a servant. He’d promised himself as a small boy he would never do what his father did and persuade the best woman in Christendom to wed him, then die and leave her to suffer all those sneering comments and slights when he claimed to love her so dearly. It wasn’t a particularly rational way of looking at the world, but the example of that love affair still stood like a stony barrier between him and a woman he might love, if he truly was Moss and not a very reluctant earl indeed. What if he wed her, then got himself killed, so some distant cousin of his could mock and slight his Countess for not producing a son in time to supersede him and grab the title of Dowager Countess for herself when her foolish lord died? It hurt nearly as much to imagine Miss Court refusing to flinch in the face of such contempt as Kitty had every time someone repeated the last Lord Barberry’s spiteful words about her and his own grandfather swore he’d kill her brat before he let him stand in his shoes.
He couldn’t go yet, though—Lord Barberry couldn’t chase down the woman after Miss Court’s papers. He would be too conspicuous as his true self, especially if everyone knew he was here and trying to fit in a place he’d cut himself off from for a decade. He couldn’t leave that thread loose and let Miss Court walk off into the world with a villain on her tail either and wasn’t it absurd he only knew her by her surname? He wondered what her given one was. Was she a simple Jane or Ann or a complex Clarissa or Augusta? Ah now, wasn’t that exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do? No good lingering on her and the fascinating inner self under all the starch. Her odd conundrum had given him a very good reason to be Moss for a little while longer though and wasn’t that a relief? He gave himself a mocking grin in Mrs Winch’s mirror as he mentally seized that excuse with both hands. Brendan could despise him all he liked for cowardice, but at least as Moss he could creep about the estate unchallenged when the Earl or his half-brother would be remarked on and gossiped about. It was his excuse and he was going to stick to it, because Miss Court might suffer a lot more than a bruise to her pride and a little more knowledge of a man’s passions than she wanted if this stranger had good reason to track her down and take her life apart for her own ends.