Rules for a Proper Governess (12 page)

The gaslight, dimmed for night, burnished the gold of Sinclair’s hair as he turned his head. He studied her hand a moment, caressing the back of it with his thumb. Heat streaked down Bertie’s arm, straight to her heart.

Sinclair straightened her forefinger and brought it to his lips. He kissed the tip of her finger, then as Bertie had done to him, closed his teeth around it.

Bertie let out a faint cry, more of a gasp by the time it reached the air. Sinclair nibbled a moment, before he closed his eyes and drew her finger all the way into his mouth.

Fire poured through her body in a molten stream. She’d never felt anything like it, and Sinclair was barely doing anything—sucking on her finger, that was all. But the heat of his tongue, the pull of his lips, stoked the fires inside her. Her breasts felt heavy, pushing against the tightness of her corset.

Sinclair’s lashes, like his hair, were light, stark lines on his sunburned skin. Bertie wanted to draw him to her, smooth his hair, rub the back of his neck, soothe away all his lines of pain. But she was afraid to touch him, afraid to break the spell.

Sinclair stepped all the way against her, the space for the breeze vanishing.

He might claim he needed warmth, but Sinclair was plenty warm himself. He let go of Bertie’s other hand to brace himself against the wall, while he licked her forefinger and then pulled a second finger into his mouth.

Bertie’s gasp was louder this time, echoing around the high hall and the carved frieze at the ceiling. Sinclair made not a sound as his body pressed hers, his mouth working.

The strength of his tongue, the tug on her fingers, turned Bertie’s body incandescent. She knew she ought to jerk away and tell him to stop—she’d die if he didn’t. But then he might stop.

Her blood felt thick. Nothing else existed, nothing in the world but herself and this stern, strong man, pressed against her in the upper halls of his beautiful house.

Bertie couldn’t keep from reaching for him. Her fingers contacted the warm sleekness of his hair, and she caressed it, trailing her touch to the back of his neck. Sinclair made a noise in his throat and pushed closer to her.

He lifted his head, his eyes half-closed, and drew his tongue up Bertie’s first two fingers. Then he took a third one into his mouth. His suckling grew fiercer, as though Sinclair strove to imbibe her warmth.

Bertie’s back was tight against the wall, his weight keeping her there. His mouth was a hot place, tongue caressing, teeth lightly scraping.

It was sensual, erotic, wicked, and yet they were both fully clothed, both standing upright, nowhere near a bed. Nothing improper about it at all. But Bertie’s knees were weak, her insides shaking.

She would fall, but Sinclair would fall with her, and he’d stretch on top of her on the floor. All the while, his glorious mouth would squeeze her fingers with heat and not-pain.

His warmth seeped into her, and nothing else mattered . . .

“Papa?”

Sinclair stilled. Everything in the hall stilled with him, as though the moment froze into a crystal shape, captured, unmoving.

After a silent, very long moment, Sinclair slid Bertie’s hand away from his mouth, lifted his head, and looked to Caitriona standing outside the nursery door, her braid of dark hair over her shoulder, her doll clutched to her chest.

Between one heartbeat to the next, Sinclair changed from the sensual man taking his time with a woman to the empty shell Bertie had watched him become for the first time in the courtroom. The warmth he’d taken from Bertie dissipated into the darkness.

Sinclair cleared his throat. “Caitriona. I thought you were asleep.”

“I had dreams.” Caitriona held her doll closer, her serious gaze taking in her father, Bertie close to him, and Bertie’s scalding face. “I miss Mama.”

“Damn it,” Sinclair whispered so softly Bertie barely heard it. Sinclair’s hand tightened on the wallpaper, and he lowered it, straightening up to his full height.

He left Bertie’s side as though he didn’t notice her there. Bertie leaned back against the wall, the only thing holding her up. Her legs surely weren’t—they were shaking like stalks of tender flowers in the wind.

Sinclair approached Caitriona and reached for her hand. “I miss her too, Cat.”

Caitriona pulled back from him. “I want Bertie.”

Sinclair’s chest rose with a hard breath and the hand that he’d held out to her clenched. For another frozen moment, no one in the hall moved.

Then Sinclair turned stiffly toward the stairs, not looking at either of them. “Bertie, get her to bed,” he said in a hard voice, and he started down, his footsteps heavy in the silence. Bertie and Cat heard him open the door to his study; then the slamming of it echoed up and down the stairwell.

Bertie swallowed, her throat hurting. She made herself push away from the wall and go to Cat. “Come, sweetheart,” she said, holding out her hand.

Bertie took Caitriona back to her bed and tucked her in. Cat reached for Bertie as she made to turn away, and something in the child’s eyes made Bertie stop. This little girl, since Bertie’s arrival, had shown almost no emotions at all—the opposite of Andrew, who could change moods in a flash. Cat only watched everyone else, as though she waited for something, maybe had done so for so long that she’d forgotten what she waited for.

Right now, though, Cat’s eyes held fear. Whatever the dream had been, she didn’t say, but it was clear she didn’t want Bertie to go.

Bertie gave her a smile, unwound herself from Caitriona’s grip to pull the armchair to the bed, and reached for the mending basket.

Bertie’s hands shook as she started again with the needle, the fingers that Sinclair had taken into his mouth burning like bands of fire.

“Bertie.” The word came out cracked, and Sinclair cleared his throat. “Miss Frasier.”

Bertie stood in front of Sinclair’s desk in his study the next morning, her heart thumping. Sinclair was on his feet on the other side of it. He’d barely glanced up at her from the papers he was reading, or tidying, or whatever he was doing when she came in, and now she waited, her chest tight, for him to continue.

The desk was a solid barrier between them, like Hadrian’s Wall, built to keep ancient Scots—Sinclair’s ancestors—from overrunning England. At least, that’s what the book Bertie had been reading to Andrew and Cat said Hadrian’s Wall was about. Sinclair wasn’t coming out from behind it, and the desk blocked her way to him.

Bertie’s head ached, almost as much as her heart did. Her left hand was stiff, because she’d clenched it in her sleep. Once Cat had been sleeping deeply, not moving in dreams, Bertie had gone to bed, only to lie awake herself. Whenever she did drop off, she dreamed of Sinclair’s mouth on her fingers, the warm firmness of his lips, the heat of his tongue. When she woke this morning, she found her hand curled into her palm so hard she’d had to pry it open and rub away the stiffness.

Bertie had emerged from her bedroom, dressed but sandy-eyed, only to be told by Aoife that Mr. McBride wanted a word.

“Did ya want to say something to me?” Bertie asked, not bothering to smooth her speech. Mrs. Hill had been teaching her to talk more properly, but Bertie was in no mood to try this morning. “Aoife said you wanted a dickey bird.”

“I do.” Sinclair finally looked at her. He had a pen in his hand, but he held it so tightly it might snap in two any moment. “Miss Frasier. My children are fond of you, but I will understand if you would like to go.”

“Go?” Bertie asked in sudden panic. The world seemed to drop out from beneath her feet. “Go where?”

Sinclair’s eyes flickered, the warmth that had filled them last night gone. “I mean resign. Give notice. Take yourself elsewhere.”

Bertie took a step toward the desk. “Ya want me to
leave
?”

Sinclair studied her for a long time, the mouth that had felt so sinful on his finger tightening. “I’d have thought you would want to go.”

“Why?” The word burst out before she could stop it. Bertie’s throat was dry, not helping her aching head. “Because I twitted you about your lady, and then threw myself at you?”

The pen fell. Sinclair’s fists balled, then he opened them, as though he’d had to force himself to, and cleared his throat again. “No, because I behaved . . . improperly toward you.”

Bertie’s eyes widened. Improperly? He thought
he’d
been improper? That was a laugh. “You were much more improper with the widow.”

A crease appeared between his brows. Why did he not leap around the desk and start shouting at her, instead of holding it in until he cracked? His large body, trapped under layers of his pristine suit, swayed a little, as though he kept himself in place with great effort. “Miss Frasier . . .”

So formal. No longer
Bertie
, but
Miss Frasier
, as though she truly were the governess. “Really,” she said. “What you did with me—it weren’t nothing.”

“It
wasn’t
nothing, that’s the point.” His voice grew a little louder.

“Eh?” Bertie stared at him until his meaning trickled through her numb brain. “No, what I mean to say is . . . I didn’t mind.”

The crease between his brows deepened. “But you should mind.”

“Well, I didn’t, and maybe you think that means I’m a tart, like I said that widow was, but—” Bertie cut off her words with effort, no idea why she was babbling. “You didn’t do nothing—
anything—
wrong. Didn’t
even kiss me.” But the way Sinclair had suckled her fingers, the way he’d leaned into her, had been stronger than kissing. The encounter had been about bodily passion, a desire she’d never known. She wanted to know it again, and more.

“I’m your employer,” Sinclair said in his hard voice. “I consider myself an honorable man, which means I shouldn’t have my way with everyone in my house, from the cook to the second housemaid.”

“Ooh, I’d like to see you try that with Mrs. Hill.” Imagining Sinclair acting like a besotted swain with the coldly haughty housekeeper made a hysterical laugh bubble from Bertie’s mouth.

“This isn’t funny,” Sinclair said, the growl returning to his voice.

“Yes, it is.” Bertie took a step toward the desk. “My pal Ruthie told me about a place where she was kitchen maid a long time ago—the man of the house dipped his wick in whichever maid he wanted, and a couple of the footmen too. He never got around to Ruthie, because she told her mum, and her mum took her right out of there.”

“Bertie.” Sinclair raised his hands. “
Stop
.”

Bertie’s tongue tripped on. “Point is, you ain’t like that. What’s between you and me is . . . between you and me. But if you want me to go, I’ll go.” She had to swallow on the last words. Her throat hurt so much—maybe she was coming down with a cold.

“I don’t.” The words came out quickly. Sinclair clenched his fists again, his hands brushing the desk.

Bertie remembered the scar on his wrist his rising shirtsleeve had showed her last night, and resisted the urge to go to him and push up his sleeve now. She’d lift his tanned wrist to her lips and kiss the scar, maybe lick it. She wondered what he’d taste like.

Bertie felt her breasts tighten, and she tried to banish the vision. She’d never think straight if she imagined such things. “Why’d you ask me to go, then?”

Sinclair let out an exasperated breath. “Damn it, Bertie, I’m trying to be noble.”

“Well, don’t. It don’t suit you. Are you finished? I’ve got lessons to give.”

He rested his fists on the desk, keeping Hadrian’s Wall between them. “Yes, yes. Go,” he said in annoyance, as though Bertie had come to bother him instead of him sending for
her
.

Bertie made for the door, knowing a dismissal when she heard one, but she lingered, her hand on the porcelain doorknob. “You off to your chambers now?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Bertie tried to think of more to say, so she could stay in this room and speak to him longer, but she came up with nothing. “Well, you have a fine day, then.”

“Thank you,” Sinclair said. His gray eyes pierced her from all the way across the room. He wanted her gone, no mistake.

Bertie felt as though she should curtsy or something before leaving his presence, but he wasn’t a king or duke. Only a man—a tall, handsome, lonely gentleman with a warm and wonderful voice—and she was governess to his children.

How nice it would be if she could hand him his valise in the mornings, wish him a good day, and give him a kiss good-bye. And welcome him back home again with another kiss, he enfolding her in his arms and saying how glad he was to be there.

Bertie had to settle for giving Sinclair a brief nod and gliding out the door, her heart hammering. Sinclair said nothing at all, the session over.

Bertie ran up the stairs, back to her own room, where she had to pace the floor for a time before she calmed herself enough to make her way to the nursery and the lively children waiting for her there.

“What is it now?” Sinclair snapped at the clerk who put his head around his door. He looked up from another of the blasted anonymous letters that he’d received this morning, no longer interested in the day-to-day running of the common courts.

“Your meeting with his lordship,” his junior clerk Henry said. “If you don’t look sharpish, sir, you’ll be late.”

“Bloody hell.”

Sinclair shoved aside the letter that burned his fingers and made himself get to his feet. His entire body felt wrong, his legs stiff.
Not the only thing that’s been stiff
. Sinclair had lain awake hard and furious all night and decided it best to send Bertie away. Only way he’d regain any sanity. He either had to take her to his bed and ease his need for her or send her off.

But when he’d summoned Bertie to dismiss her, the sensible thing to do, she’d stood resolutely in front of his desk and looked at him as though he were a fool. She didn’t want to leave, and Sinclair didn’t want her to go.

She had nowhere to go, in any case, and they both knew it. Her choices were the slums of the East End or another house of some aristocrat who exercised his power over the staff, as her friend had described. Damned if Sinclair would let that happen. Also, Richards had told him what Eleanor’s coachman had told
him
, about the dank rooms and Bertie’s bully of a father who’d been ready to hold her back when she wanted to leave. Sinclair would never send her back to that.

But he had to do
something
. He couldn’t lie awake all night and still be able to give attention to his cases. He couldn’t stand up in front of a judge and tell him in the politest possible terms that his lordship was an ass when he was daydreaming about unbuttoning Bertie’s new and prim governess gowns.

He could always stay overnight at chambers, Sinclair thought as he snatched up his robes and followed Henry out. He never had, always wanting to return home to his young family, but knowing Bertie slept so near him every night was going to drive him mad.

Henry helped Sinclair settle his robes and look respectable before he strode from Essex Court across the way to Middle Temple Hall. The brown brick building, its white corner trim and windows soot-stained, stood like a cathedral on the green of the gardens, an imposing edifice of the law. The walls told the outside world that here was an important place of learning and weighty decisions. If Sinclair hadn’t known many of the men inside it so well, he might believe it.

His lordship, Sir Percival
Montague, whom Sinclair had enjoyed confounding over the case of Ruth Baxter, didn’t rise when Sinclair entered the room he’d commandeered for this meeting. Sir Percival, Old Monty to both friends and detractors, had a cadaverous look, though Sinclair knew he was fond of meat and drink. He had watery blue eyes in a sunken face, thin lips, grayish skin, and wisps of hair across the top of his balding head.

Sir Percival snapped his fingers at a lackey waiting nearby and signaled him to pour two glasses of sherry. “I’m sorry I have no Scots whiskey,” Old Monty said, not looking one bit sorry. “But I like a bit of sherry in the morning. Settles the digestion.”

Sinclair thought sherry overly sweet and cloying, but he politely accepted a glass.

“You know why we’re meeting,” Sir Percival said. He drained his glass and held it up for the lackey to pour more.

“Either you want to admonish me for switching from prosecution to defense in the case of Ruth Baxter,” Sinclair said calmly, “or you are measuring my backside for a place on the bench.”

Old Monty looked pained. “You always have a blunt way of putting things, McBride. This endears you to some of my colleagues who find you rustic and amusing, but not to me. Take care to remember that. You were perfectly right, of course, in the Baxter case—the man taken in arrest has confessed to all and should shortly meet his maker, or else the bleakness of Dartmoor. But there is no secret that you are moving swiftly in your profession. You’re young for a silk, aren’t you?”

Sinclair was in his thirties. “I worked hard. Not much else to do, is there?”

“Not really.” Monty drank his sherry and held the glass up again to his footman. “I like to see a barrister take keen interest in his work. You’re a family man? Married, are you?”

Sinclair had known this man since his arrival at the Temple, but Old Monty was notorious for remembering no detail of anyone else’s life, barely even of his own. “I have two children,” Sinclair said. “My wife . . .” He stopped, and swallowed.
Forgive me, Maggie.
“My wife passed on seven years ago.”

“Ah? Well, I am sorry to hear it.”

Whether that was sympathy or he was sorry to hear that Sinclair was no longer married, Sinclair couldn’t say. “Thank you,” he managed.

“I like to see a barrister settled. A wife keeps a man at home and out of mischief, doesn’t she?”

Sinclair decided to nod. Sinclair hadn’t always been a dull man confined to his job, as Bertie had implied this morning. Andrew’s antics had been inherited—both Sinclair and Elliot had been the wild McBride boys, impossible to tame. Patrick had despaired of them but felt better when they’d each joined the army—Elliot going to India, Sinclair to Africa.

Sinclair had done well as an officer, but he’d retained his wild streak off duty. After Maggie had taken him in hand, Sinclair had given up such enjoyments as filling an obnoxious English officer’s tent with goats. Actually, she’d laughed uproariously when Sinclair had told her the tale. The English officer in question had cruelly beaten one of the Egyptian boys assigned to help him. Sinclair had made sure the goats created the worst possible mess, then took the English captain a little way from camp and explained his feelings, with his fists.

“You’re young, as I observed,” Monty said. “You can always remarry.”

Sinclair’s anger stirred.
Of course.
When one wife goes, uproot her and replant another in her place. Choose one that looks well and goes with the furniture.

“Perhaps,” Sinclair said without inflection.

“You take my advice, my boy. The committees like to see a man settled. They want no fear of a judge getting into scandal. If you don’t mind me saying so, your name is already associated with enough scandal as it is.”

Sinclair blinked. “Is it?” He led a model life, at least these days. His liaisons in the last few years had been conducted with utmost discretion.

“Your brothers and sister.” Monty put his fingers together, now seeming to remember every detail of Sinclair’s life. “One nearly mad, hiding himself in the wilds of Scotland. Then there was your youngest brother and that scandal he recently caused with the Duchess of Southdown. And your sister, of course, marrying into the notorious Mackenzie family. Lord Cameron Mackenzie has a terrible reputation, rumored to have killed his first wife, and there was your sister—a lady-in-waiting to the queen, no less—eloping with him.” Monty shook his head. “Some of us on the bench were not keen to even consider you, but there are those who persuaded me to give you a chance.”