Page 69 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
So damned weak.
‘You make me feel...’ She shook her head. ‘It is not right. It isn’t right. I have worked so hard to build myself a sterling reputation, something beyond reproach, and the moment that I walked into your home you questioned me. You doubted me, you...’
‘I did.’
‘Yousawme,’ she said, as if it was the worst offence that he could have ever devised against her.
‘I did, and I do. I see your need for me and your eyes as well. Is it not reflected in mine?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. She held the babe now like a shield. ‘But the cost would be too great. For me, it would be too great.’
He knew she was correct. It would cost her. It wouldn’t cost him anything—it couldn’t. He was an unmarried man of great status, and he had nothing to lose by beginning an affair with her. She was his children’s governess, but that was surmountable.
In society there might be talk, but talk of this kind was nothing to a duke. To admit his wife had birthed a bastard was one thing...but to dally with a woman in his household? Worthy of the sort of disapproval that rose in a whispered wave when he entered a room, but nothing more than that. Nothing more than whispers.
The only thing he had to lose was his honour. The centre of all that he’d made himself to be.
And already it was compromised. Already, with the way that he had failed Jane...
He had loved her. But his love was wrong.
Try as he might to be the caregiver, to do the best he could do, to be the best that he could be, he had failed her. She had sought out another man because he had not been able to love her in the way that she needed.
He could satisfy a woman. He knew that. He had satisfied her. But it hadn’t been enough.
And he could feel it. He had always been able to feel it. It was as if his deepest emotions were buried beneath a rock fortress. And he had no idea how to let them out, let alone did he desire to let them out.
No. Because he did not know the line. He did not know how a man went from being passionate to being selfish. A pleasure-seeker. His father. His damned father.
That was what he did not know, and he did not know how to create those lines inside himself if they were not definitive, if they were not perfect in their delineations, and so he had done so.
He was the caregiver. The provider. He had chosen to become those thingsrelentlessly.
But he had not been fun, and he had not been unrestrained, and he had not been her friend, and in the end perhaps that was all she had wanted. But he had never asked.
So perhaps it would not cost him. In the way that she meant. In society.
But it would cost everything that he had built himself to be.
And that was far too much.
‘You may not understand this, but it is against everything that I believe in to take one of my household staff to bed. It would cost me. All that I am.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I suppose I understand it in the same way as I understand what it means for myself.
‘Yes, there would be a cost to me. But if no one were to ever know... I am not a lady. I am never going to marry. My reputation matters not, except as a governess. And no, no wife would hire me, young as I am, if they thought I was going to take their husband as a lover, but I told you from the beginning that if I wanted to be a mistress, I could be one. I have never had that desire.’
‘You did say.’
‘I did.’
And he felt like the last vestiges of the day, the warmth of the sun, and the smell of the earth, were slowly fading away.
As if reality was creeping in, cold and distant.
‘There will be a new wet nurse soon.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good.’
