Page 63 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
‘The babe. The babe who does not have a name.’
‘You will not speak to me of such things.’
His voice held a bite that resonated inside of her.
His commands were infuriating, but at the same time they made something foreign echo within her.
She did not understand the magic he possessed. The thing in him that called to something in her that was long dead.
Whispering to her that he could resurrect something she had never been allowed to fully understand.
And it was a temptation.
Yet she suddenly felt undone by it.
She had never considered herself a blushing maiden. She was not one, after all. She had felt wizened and world-weary by comparison to her contemporaries, and yet he made her feel innocent again. He made her want something she had no name for.
It was not the simple, sweet yearning of a blushing innocent, that much she knew. And she could not fully form an image in her head of what she desired of this man.
It was frightening and compelling all at once. It was like the first blush of something that she had never been allowed to truly have. And she wasn’t sure what she should do about it. If she should move closer to him or flee.
You definitely should not move closer. There is no justification for that. If you want stability. If you want to stay here, to stay with the children...
The children.
Perhaps she should not have shared with them about Scotland. But they were so entranced by it. It gave them something new to think about. Something beyond simply lessons.
And she could feel their sadness like a cloak around them, and she wanted so badly to do something to ease that sadness. Their mother had died. And there would be no easy way to fix that sort of sorrow.
But she wanted to introduce happiness into their lives again. And she had remembered better things about Scotland than she had for years. Her mind had already been brought back to the lowest points multiple times since she had come to this place. But something about that had allowed her to remember the good.
The beauty of the mountains. The way it had felt to run free with her brothers over the fields. To look for food in the forest. To sit and eat in the waning sunlight, away from their parents.
Every moment had not been dark.
It was the magic of childhood.
The way that you focused on the sun and the freedom, and the wilderness around you, even when there were many great and terrible things.
She wanted to give them the sunlight.
There was something horrid in having your innocence ripped from you.
And what had become of her was only one way that could happen. Death, grief, anything that destroyed the magic of the world could bring you to that place. There was something about trying to give it to them that brought out the sun in her own mind. Her own memory.
It was magical in a way nothing had been for a very long time.
She couldn’t leave.
She looked at him, his stern expression, the strong line of his jaw. She begged him in her heart to stay away from her.
Because he must understand. He must know. And he seemed like a man who obeyed the rules...except he had called her pretty.
Their eyes met then, and she wondered.
If they were both lost.
The idea terrified her.
