- -
- 100%
- +
Just then her stomach rumbled so loudly that even the Captain must have heard it, for he looked down at it in surprise, at the exact moment her hands fluttered to her waist. Though she was appalled at such a loss of dignity, she swiftly decided that it had at least gone some way towards dissipating the tension that thrummed between them.
‘There is no point,’ she said with a rueful twist to her lips, ‘trying to pretend that I am not completely famished!’
It was quite true. The nausea that had been roiling in her stomach ever since the night she had learned her father had attempted to auction off her virginity in some noisome gambling hell in a last-ditch attempt to escape his crushing debts had completely vanished the moment she had crossed the threshold of The Lady’s Bower. She had enjoyed every mouthful of that cake, and now she felt as though she could eat a horse.
The ferocity of the Captain’s frown abated by several degrees.
‘Then let us go in,’ he said.
She laid her hand upon his arm, and he led her through a door into a generously proportioned dining room. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a terrace, and thence to grounds that were obscured by the driving rain.
There was an oval table in the centre of the highly polished floor, beautifully set out, with a centrepiece of artistically arranged roses that filled the air with their perfume.
It was only as a servant came to pull out one of the chairs for her that it struck her how odd it was that it was only set for two.
Where was the Captain’s wife?
She darted him one curious glance as he took his own place and signalled for service to begin.
She toyed with her napkin in her lap, as she bit back the thousand-and-one questions she wanted to ask. It was so frustrating, having to constantly remember her place! He would only tell her whatever he thought she needed to know, in his own good time.
He sat stiffly, eating his soup in brooding silence. But it was so delicious that before long she no longer cared that her new employer was turning out to be a bit of an autocrat. A man would not have risen to the rank of Captain, she decided, at such a relatively young age, without having a forceful personality. Nobody would put a man in charge of a fighting ship if he were not extremely capable.
The navy was not run in the same way as the army, where a man could rise through the ranks merely by buying commissions. In the navy, a man had to earn his promotion. Even pass exams in seamanship, she seemed to recall having heard somewhere.
And he definitely looked intelligent. It sparked from that one, steely grey eye. There had been an uncomfortable moment, just before dinner, when she had felt as though he was looking into her very soul. But then, fortunately, her stomach had rumbled. And although that hard mouth had not curved into a smile, she had seen a flash of humour lighten his expression somewhat. And if he was capable of seeing the funny side of things, perhaps he would not turn out to be a complete tyrant.
It was a shame, she mused, about his scars. Because without them, he would be quite handsome. Though even before he had lost that eye, she did not think he would have had the sensuous kind of good looks that had some women practically swooning with desire. No, he would have had … still had, in fact, the rugged features of a man with plenty of character.
She laid her spoon aside, astonished to find she had devoured her soup in complete silence, whilst musing over the Captain’s looks and character.
‘So, you spoke no less than the truth,’ the Captain remarked as the servant whisked her empty bowl away. ‘I do not think I have ever observed any female eat with such gusto.’
Though he looked faintly amused, again, she felt rebuked by his remark. Her mother had taught her better than this! She ought to have sipped at her soup daintily, not revealed she was utterly famished.
She folded her hands in her lap, pulling herself upright as more servants bustled about with dishes containing the next course.
She had not forgotten her table manners entirely, thank goodness. She had not slurped her soup, or grabbed a couple of the rolls and stuffed them into her pocket for later. But she felt as though she might just as well have done.
A lady, her mother had always insisted, should never betray the fact that she was starving. Not even when her clothes hung in rags from her skinny shoulders, and they were obliged to subsist on handouts from friends.
‘Adverse circumstances,’ her mother had been fond of saying, ‘are only a test of character. Never forget you are a Vickery,’ she would say, while her father had rolled his eyes in exasperation at the way she continually reminded Aimée of that side of her heritage. ‘A Vickery will always rise to the occasion.’
Oh, Mama, she thought, a guilty flush heating her cheeks. How I have let things slide, of late! Today, especially. Losing my temper with that innkeeper, and shouting at my employer in the road! Even though he was disguised as a coachman, I had no business letting my emotions get the better of me. I will do better, she vowed. I will rise to the occasion.
‘You are blushing,’ the Captain startled her by observing. ‘Directness of my speech too much for you?’
She turned her head to look directly at him. The pugnacious set of his jaw made her wonder if he was deliberately trying to unsettle her. Perhaps he was. Had she not expected her new employer to want to test her mettle for himself? When a woman was to be put in charge of a man’s children, he would want to be quite sure of her character.
If she really wanted to retain this post, it was past time to swallow her pride and account for her earlier, inappropriate behaviour.
She cleared her throat.
‘I have no objection to speaking directly. So, while we are being direct with one another, I would like to take the opportunity to clear the air between us. There is still some awkwardness, I believe, resulting from my earlier reaction to your appearance.’
If she had thought his face had looked harsh before, it was as nothing to the expression that darkened it now. Hastily, she explained, ‘You see, the first time we met, I was under the impression you were merely a coachman. And I believe I may have been somewhat impolite …’
‘May have been?’ For a moment, he glared at her so intensely she thought she had seriously offended him. But then he flung back his head and barked with laughter.
‘You gave as good as you got, and you damn well know it! Mr Jago promised me he had found me a woman of spirit, and you certainly have that, Miss Peters.’
He took a sip of wine, then added, ‘But you are not too proud to apologise, when you know you are in the wrong, either.’
‘Not quite,’ she agreed with a rueful smile, reflecting how hard it had been to broach the topic of her folly.
‘Ah, you’ll do.’ He leaned back in his chair. And smiled back.
It was amazing how drastically the change of expression altered his appearance. She had already thought he looked like a man used to command. But now there was such a compelling aura about him she could well believe men would follow him slavishly to their deaths.
‘Yes, you’ll do nicely!’ he said again. ‘You really are tough enough to take on the task I chose you for.’
‘Ah, yes!’ Finally, they were going to put aside any personal feelings and discuss her professional role within his household. She had been so nervous during her interview with Mr Jago. She had been too busy looking over her shoulder, at what she was escaping from, to ascertain exactly what he expected from her. She had not asked nearly enough questions. Why, she did not even know how many children she was to take charge of, nor their ages!
‘When will I be meeting the children?’ she asked. ‘And your wife?’
The young man with eyes like a spaniel, who had been carving the duck, dropped the knife on to the table with a muffled clunk.
‘Give me that, Billy,’ Captain Corcoran snapped, getting to his feet, retrieving the knife and setting about skilfully carving the bird himself.
Oh, dear. From the young man’s nervous start, and the Captain’s set jaw, she could tell she had somehow put her foot in it. After rapidly reviewing the events of the day to see if she could work out in what way, it occurred to her that she had seen no sign that any children lived in this house at all. Surely, if they did, the first thing that would have happened, upon her arrival, would have been a visit to the nursery. Though she had been unwell …
‘My wife is dead,’ he bit out, as he placed a slice of duck on to her plate.
‘I am so sorry,’ she gasped, her heart going out to his poor little motherless children. No wonder he had sent as far afield as London to find just the right woman to take charge of them! She would be the primary female influence upon their lives.
‘You need not be,’ he said, pausing in his dissection of the duck for a while, before continuing, in a lighter tone, ‘Since I took up the lease on this house, not a single female had crossed its threshold. Until today. The locals think it a great joke, since it is called The Lady’s Bower.’
From his abrupt change of topic, she deduced that he did not wish to discuss his deceased wife. She completely understood. Though his comment made her wonder if perhaps the landlord of the King’s Arms had not been trying to fleece her after all. He might just have thought that The Lady’s Bower was not the kind of place into which a lone female ought to stray.
She lifted the lid of the tureen that Billy had placed beside her plate and helped herself to a portion of peas.
‘And your children? I take it, they are all boys?’
‘I have no children.’
No children? No children!
She replaced the lid of the tureen carefully and reached for the dish of cauliflower. She was not going to fly into a panic. Just because he had no wife. Or children.
And because she was the only female in the household. The only female who had ever been in this household.
But her will, it seemed, had no control over her heart, which began to stutter uncomfortably in her chest.
‘You need not worry about my men, Miss Peters,’ said the Captain, who was clearly aware how nervous she felt, despite her attempts to conceal it.
‘Not one of them will lay so much as a finger on you. They would not dare.’ His face darkened.
‘I would not have taken a single one of them in if they were not completely loyal to me.’ He gestured with the carving knife to emphasise his next point. ‘Every man jack of them has served under my command at some time or another, and knows I don’t hesitate to flog a man who transgresses.’
When her eyes flew wide, he added, ‘They also know I won’t do so without good reason.’ Abruptly, he tossed the knife aside, sat down and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Not that I need to flog a single one of them to ensure their good behaviour.’ He began to saw away at the meat on his plate. ‘Any infringement of the rules here—’ he impaled a piece of duck on his fork ‘—and they would be back on the streets where I found them. Each of ‘em damn lucky I took him on. No, you need have no worry about being a lone female in a household of men. Besides, it won’t be for long.’ He raised the fork to his mouth and began to chew his meat.
‘Oh?’ She ladled a generous helping of béchamel sauce over the cauliflower on her plate, noting with a detached sense of pride that her hands were scarcely shaking at all.
Though all his talk of flogging was hardly comforting. And what had he meant, it would not be for long?
Unless …
‘Are you intending, perhaps, to marry again?’
He looked up from his plate, a strange smile playing about his lips.
‘You are very perceptive.’
Though it did not fully explain why he had hired a governess … unless his new bride already had children from a former marriage.
Yes, that must be it! She gave a sigh of relief, gripped her knife and fork tightly and forced herself to cut up her vegetables as though she saw nothing bizarre about the whole situation.
There must be a perfectly logical reason for the Captain to have had her brought here. She was being extremely foolish to assign nefarious motives to everything every man did. She had already jumped to far too many wrong conclusions today.
‘We did not get off to a very good start,’ he commented. ‘But I was pleased to see the way you weathered that storm.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, accepting a slice of tongue from the plate the Captain nudged in her direction, along with the compliment.
‘You find me somewhat rough around the edges, I dare say,’ he observed.
‘Not at all,’ she murmured mechanically. It was not her place to comment on her employer’s manners, or lack thereof. Besides, working for somebody who was ‘rough around the edges', as he put it, would be a great improvement on habitually dealing with men who were rotten to the core.
‘Hmmph,’ he grunted, clearly unconvinced by her reply, then went on, in a conversational tone, ‘I have spent most of my life at sea, in the company of men such as Billy and Jago. Not used to females at all.’
She could not help raising just one eyebrow as she lifted another forkful of food to her mouth. With the kind of rugged good looks he still possessed, in spite of the scarring round his empty eye socket, she was sure he must have had his flings. She knew what sailors were like when they got shore leave. Particularly the young officers, who got more liberty when a ship was in dock than did the ratings. Besides, he had been married!
‘At least, not society females,’ he amended, confirming her opinion that a man as brim full of vitality as him would have had plenty of experience with women.
‘Not that I ever really understood my wife, either, and she was merely a chandler’s daughter. She did not mind … did not seem to mind my ways. I thought she saw marrying a lieutenant as a step up the social ladder.’ He frowned. ‘I know better now. Once bitten, twice shy. Besides which, my needs now are nothing like the expectations I had when I was a callow youth. And I’ve a sight too much self-respect, at my age, to try to play the suitor to a succession of society beauties in Almack’s or some such place. I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to go down that route.’
Though Aimée was somewhat baffled by the turn the conversation was taking, she smiled politely, and took a sip of her wine.
‘But Mr Jago said you would suit me down to the ground. You have lived much harder than most gently born ladies, have you not?’
Her eyes flickered back to him uncertainly. When she had been a little girl, her mother had shielded her from knowing about their constant financial hardships. Living within the orbit of Lady Aurora Vickery was like being on a grand adventure. She had even managed to make fleeing lodgings where the rent was overdue, at the dead of night, into a game. A game of hide-and-seek, she smiled sadly, that had been played out over an entire continent, from an ever-increasing army of creditors. It was only once she had died that reality had set in with a vengeance. Her father had always been a little too fond of drinking and gambling, but without her mother’s restraining influence, he shed any veneer of decency. Then the man she had called father had progressively crumbled away, until even Aimée had been forced to admit there was nothing left of the man who had inspired her mother to elope with him.
So it was pointless to quibble about how she regarded her past. She just nodded her head, murmuring, ‘Yes.’
‘Then it is about time we came to terms,’ he said.
‘T-terms?’
He shifted position, as though his chair had suddenly become very uncomfortable. ‘Yes, terms. I was not planning to lay my cards on the table quite this soon, but you have already guessed that I got you here under false pretences, have you not? I knew, of course, that a woman applying for a job as a governess would have a certain level of education, but you really do have a quick mind, Miss Peters. I admire that about you.’
He looked her over, in a way that made her very aware of her body.
‘As well as being every bit as pretty as Mr Jago told me. I could not find,’ he said, with evident satisfaction, ‘a woman more suitable for my purposes if I were to trawl society ballrooms for a month.’
She bent her head over her plate, carrying on eating as though nothing troubled her. Thank heavens she had already reminded herself of what her mother would have expected of her, and buckled her manners in place like armour!
She had begun to suspect the Captain was up to something when she had discovered he had no wife or children here. Really, she ought to have been put on the alert by the fact he had been so coy about revealing his identity until after she was already committed to travelling up here. No wonder the interview had been so cursory. Captain Corcoran did not need a governess for his fictitious children!
No, now he was freely admitting that he had lured her to this isolated spot under false pretences. And had then gone on to tell her that he found her pretty. Put that together with the way he had said he admired her spirit, but was relieved to see she was not too proud … She felt the soup curdling in her stomach. Even though he had no desire to remarry, and he was discerning enough in his tastes now to want a well-born, intelligent woman to warm his bed whilst he was ashore, it was not the least bit flattering to hear that he was so delighted with her that he could not wait to offer her carte blanche.
‘Miss Peters, I am, nowadays, such a wealthy man that you can have as many fancy clothes and jewels as you wish,’ he said, confirming her worst fears. ‘And servants. Though I will not have you trying to lay off any of the men who have served under my command at sea,’ he warned her sternly. ‘Apart from that one proviso, you may have a free hand. Yes, a completely free hand.’ He sat back and regarded her expectantly.
She laid her knife and fork down with precision, reaching for her wine glass and taking a ladylike sip. Thank heavens she had grown so adept at remaining outwardly calm. That she had so many years’ practice in keeping up appearances, no matter how severe the strain she endured.
Even if, as now, real fear was gripping her.
‘Well, what is your answer?’ Captain Corcoran said impatiently after she had remained silent for several moments. ‘Surely you must see the advantages of the position I am offering you? It is not as though you can have anything to go back to London for, or you would not have applied for work as a governess in the first place!’
No, nothing awaited her in London except certain degradation. For her father’s career there had followed the same path as it had in every other city they had ever visited. An initial flourish to persuade the citizens he was wealthy, entrée into several of the less select gaming clubs, and then the rapid descent into horrendous debt. Only this time, her father had been so lost to any sense of decency, he had attempted to sell her to some … lecher.
Had sold her!
Lord Matthison had sent his servant to her lodgings with the money, and instructions that she was to deal with him directly in future. So much money, there was no mistaking his intent.
It had been the last straw. The final outrage that had made her sever all ties from her scandalous father for ever.
She had vowed then and there that she would never trust a man again.
How right she had been. She lifted her head and regarded Captain Corcoran coldly. She had escaped from London’s sewers, only to fall into the clutches of another such as Lord Matthison.
In fact, worse. At least Lord Matthison had been completely open about his intentions. This man had as good as kidnapped her, then taken pains to inform her that all his staff were utterly loyal to him. And that he would have them flogged and dismissed should any of them take pity on her, and help her escape!
Her heart beating fast, she patted her lips with her napkin. She was not going to let him see how scared she was. That would be fatal. She had learned long ago, given the numerous precarious positions to which her father had so frequently exposed her, that nothing inflamed a potential predator more than the knowledge his victim was afraid.
‘Your proposition has taken me by surprise,’ she said, proud of the even tone of her voice. ‘May I have some time to think about it?’
When he frowned, her heart beat so fast that she began to go light-headed. If he was the type of man who was not averse to using violence in his dealings with women, her appeal would go unheeded. He could swing her over his shoulder, heave her upstairs to one of his bedrooms, and …
She flinched from picturing the awful deed. She had to fill her mind with something other than the fear that threatened to blot out all ability to reason. Think, Aimée, think! How on earth was she to get out of this?
She took a deep breath, reminded herself she had escaped from sticky situations before. Ever since her shape had first started to change from that of a girl to a woman, she’d had to evade the groping hands of the drunken lecherous men who made up her father’s coterie.
Though the Captain was not drunk. Nor was he simply an opportunist, trying to make sport of a defenceless girl who had strayed into his path. No, he had coldly, calmly, planned this seduction!
But his mistake would be the same as all other men made: in underestimating her determination to thwart his vile schemes.
‘Very well,’ he grudgingly conceded. ‘You may have until the morning. But no longer. I have no time to waste.’
Outwardly calm, she got to her feet. Captain Corcoran did so too. Aping the gentleman, she mentally sneered.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ she said graciously, inclining her head as though she fully intended to think about his disgusting proposition.
The moment she left the dining room, she saw her way to the front door barred by Nelson. Lounging against the far wall, his arms folded across his chest, he no longer looked like the amiable, salt-of-the-earth character with whom she had fleetingly felt a connection. His stance, and then the over-familiar grin he bestowed upon her, put her in mind of the kind of men employed to guard the doors at brothels.
And he insisted on escorting her upstairs.
But she refused to give him any indication that she resented him guarding her, and her ruse was so successful that, the moment she was inside the room with the door shut, she heard him go straight back downstairs.
Probably to report back to his master, she thought, opening the door a crack, and peeping out. But the Captain did not hold all the cards. She could still employ the element of surprise.
Since nobody else seemed to be about, she darted out of her room and leaned over the banister rail to check that the downstairs hall was clear. It was! Now or never, Aimée, she told herself, her heart pounding with terror of discovery. And she ran swiftly back down the stairs and straight to the front door.
She had no need to waste time collecting anything from her room. Long before leaving London, she had sewn most of the banknotes Lord Matthison had sent to her into her stays. And the hem of her petticoat was weighted down with guineas. She could buy anything she needed later. If only she could get well away from her captors!
To her intense relief, when she clawed at the handle, she found the front door was neither bolted, nor locked, and it swung open easily on well-oiled hinges.
The cold wet air that gusted into the hall made her gasp. But she did not regret the lack of a coat. Retaining just enough presence of mind to shut the door quietly behind her, to prevent her flight being detected for as long as possible, she slipped out into the rain and ran. And ran.