Page 21 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
Chapter Five
Her heart was thundering hard when she left the study. She did not know what passed between them when they spoke, but it felt like something more than the words that they spoke, and she could not understand why.
Could not understand what. And yet it made her skin feel flushed, and her heart thunder.
It made her want to fight him. And she was aware that she crossed lines whenever she spoke to him, and yet she could not find a way to...
She could not find her shield. The icy governess was a worthy façade to hide behind, and yet with him it became something else. She had tried, just yesterday, to think of him as one of her charges, but it was not so simple. He was not a child.
He was a man.
And he was a man quite unlike any other she had dealt with. So she could not fall back on her designated ways of handling him.
It was distressing. Appalling.
She went up the stairs, her heart thundering heavily, and then she heard it. The sound of the infant crying.
She stopped.
It had been said to her that if the child needed care, it may occasionally fall to her.
She stood there. Her heart had already been beating far too fast, and now it was beginning to make her feel dizzy. Ill.
The babe...
She could not hold the bairn.
She had never held a bairn.
Never.
The wet nurse would come. She would.
And then she saw the woman racing down the hall, and did wonder why she had not been in residence with the child, but it was not her place to ask.
‘Sorry, miss,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to him.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, feeling frozen and stiff.
The woman disappeared into the nursery, and on numb feet Mary continued down the hall.
She walked into the chamber, undoubtedly the most beautiful room that had ever been hers. The bed was large, with silk brocade curtains around the outside. She liked them. They made her feel secure.
Slowly, she undressed, and as she did she thought of...
His blue eyes.
For some reason, she thought of them now. It made her skin feel hot, prickly.
She squeezed her eyes shut fiercely, stopped the movements of her hands, because her own hands made her think of his.
She had been afraid of men before. In the years since she had left Scotland. But she had never been afraid of herself. Of her own thoughts. But it was as if he had taken residence in her mind, it was as if he had done something to her, and she did not know how to get dominion of her own thoughts on her own body back.
Breathing hard, she stripped down the rest of the way and put on her nightdress, and then she got into bed, the curtains closed firmly around her. Enclosed in the dark box, one that should make her feel secure. But he was still there.
I am Westmere.
His voice echoed in her head and through her body, deep and affecting. It was the truth. He was in every brick, every stone statue, every dab of paint on canvas, he was in the air she breathed. He was all-consuming, all-encompassing in this home that might well have been his own personal kingdom.
