Page 52 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
‘I don’t... Thank you. Thank you.’
‘Mary, you could stay.’
It was a reckless thing to say.
He was never reckless. And yet now he was.
‘I can’t. I can’t, and you want to know that. I... I am your employee, Your Grace. And it has never been in the best interest of a woman to go from governess to whore. I certainly will not be taking that step.’
She turned away from him and fled. And this time she didn’t even close the door behind her. She left it open.
He cursed, leaning against the bookshelf, his cock raging.
He wanted her.
He wanted her beyond the telling of it. And he knew full well that he couldn’t have her.
He knew. Because he had rules, and wanting a woman was no excuse to violate them. How was he any different from Pelham?
How was he any different from his own father?
Everything in its place, until the minute he wanted something else.
Perhaps he was so bloody good because he had never been tested.
She tested him. And he was failing.
No. The Duke of Westmere did not fail.
He would not fail.
Chapter Eleven
After his correspondence in the morning he took his horse out riding and sought fiercely to erase the interaction he’d had with Miss Mary Smith from his mind.
He had not intended to play that game with her, and yet there was something in the way she had looked down when he stood.
Whether she knew it or not, she was sending him a signal. Letting him know what kind of lover she was.
Perhaps she did know.
It would be laughable, truly, if after her speech about how seducing him would be much simpler than becoming a governess in an attempt to con money from him, she was in fact attempting to seduce him.
It would not beimpossiblefor her to have come armed with the knowledge of his tastes.
While he had not practised them during his marriage—he had been a faithful husband, for all the good it had done him—his reputation in the clubs of London stretched back years.
In his twenties, he had rather exhausted the supply of harlots interested in his favoured forms of power exchange.
And married women.
It would not be impossible to find out exactly how to appeal to him.
And yet he doubted it. There was something untried in the way she had reacted. Not innocent, but not calculated either.
But this was yet another thing he kept ruthlessly contained in its channel.
He could remember, very clearly, his uncle speaking to him sternly after the death of his father.
