The Tutor (26 page)

Richard reached out a hand to both of us and pulled us to our feet.

“Can we swim when we get to the seashore?” Whit asked. “Will there be shells?”

He’d been asking the same questions ever since he learned about the holiday we were about to embark on.

“It’s too cold. You know that,” Clive said as he came to join us. “We won’t be

able to go in at all. But maybe we can take a boat ride?” He looked hopefully at his father.

“I’m certain we may.” Richard smiled at Clive, at both of the boys, and then gave

me a wink. “We’ll find plenty of ways to enjoy our time by the sea.”

“After that, we go home to our London house,” Whit confirmed.

“That’s right. We’ll spend a lot of time together going to parks and museums and

the botanical gardens.”

“We’ll see the Egyptian mummies,” Whit declared at the same time Clive said,

“The Royal Academy. I want to see the paintings.”

“All the museums,” Richard assured them. “And if you’d like to take classes in

some special interest such as painting or archeology, we can arrange that.”

Clive caught hold of my hand. “Mr. Cowrie can teach us. We don’t want him to

go away.”

Richard exchanged a look with me over their heads. “No. We wouldn’t want to

lose a valuable man like Mr. Cowrie. He’ll continue to teach the basic subjects. When you finally go to school, I believe he’ll stay on as my personal secretary. I can always use help with…correspondence and such.”

“I do write a beautiful hand,” I said with a smile.

“We should leave today instead of tomorrow,” Clive said. “I don’t want to wait.”

I wondered if the boy had any recollection of what had happened, his possession.

We’d given him every opportunity to talk about it—no more secrets or keeping mum—

but neither he nor Whit seemed to remember. Either the twins had blocked those

memories, or they’d been mentally elsewhere during that horrible ordeal in the tower room. At any rate, it seemed all of us had had enough of dwelling in the past and only wanted to focus on a much brighter future.

Richard considered the tasks he still needed to accomplish on the estate before he left, but nodded. “It’s a little late in the day to start out, but we should be able to take the last train to Scarborough and travel the next day to Whitby and our rental by the sea.”

“We never have to come here again?” Whitney asked.

“Never again,” his father promised.

The seashore in a North Country winter is hardly inviting. Slate-gray water

capped with white froth crashes against the stony strand, and the wind cuts like a blade.

Definitely too cold to wade in that thick, icy water, but the boys enjoyed roaming the shore, picking up broken shells and ocean-smoothed stones. Richard and I enjoyed watching them explore as we strolled a short distance behind.

There were no holiday crowds, very few people at all that time of year.

Sometimes we’d watch fishermen coming in with full nets or unloading their catch on the wharf. Sometimes we’d be forced to seek shelter indoors, and we’d eat hot meat pies or seafood dishes at the local tavern. Other times we’d stay at our rental house and play card games in the parlor or read aloud a Robin Hood tale.

When the boys were occupied with their own books or games, Richard and I

might take a moment to “search for something we needed” in his room or mine. Richard did quite a lot of groveling to show how sorry he was for nearly letting me go, though we had no opportunity to do
all
the things we would’ve liked. A few snatched moments of kissing and touching merely stoked desire, like feeding tiny bits of coal to a blazing fire.

Even at night we didn’t feel comfortable sneaking into each other’s beds—not in this small house with the twins so nearby.

But I comforted myself with the knowledge that once we were ensconced in the

Kensington house, we’d create an arrangement that suited our needs while keeping our behavior beyond reproach for the sake of the staff.

“We should rent a flat,” Richard mentioned one day in his room after he’d kissed

warmth back into my chapped lips. “A place we can go where no one will ask questions and we can do as we please.”

“Mm,” I murmured, too sated with kissing to give a proper reply. But part of me

recalled the last time I’d been set up in an apartment and how awful I’d felt when that relationship ended.

I stroked my palm along Richard’s rough cheek and rested it on his throat, feeling his heartbeats in my hand. “That would be nice, though I should rather feel like a kept man.”

“And you would be. I would keep you
always
. Sharing a bedroom in my house if I could, claiming you as mine in front of the world. But since that’s not possible, this is the only alternative I can come up with.” He smoothed my shirt, which had gotten quite rumpled from our grappling embrace. “You would live in our house, acting the part of tutor or personal secretary, but we would be able to use the apartment whenever we chose.”

“That would be nice,” I repeated.

He searched my eyes with his dark gaze. “Are you afraid I would behave like that

Leighton, who so foolishly tossed you away? That will
never
happen, I swear. My feelings for you will only grow deeper with time. I will be loyal to you in the way I would have devoted myself to Lavinia—if only I could have loved her the way she deserved to be loved. Loyalty is one good quality I’ll admit to possessing.”

I smiled. I shouldn’t have needed to hear his promise, but I did. It was hard for me to trust those I loved would remain as enamored of me. I’d lost my father—although admittedly through no fault of his own—and then my mother when she’d chosen her lover over her own children. Leighton’s abandonment had been the last straw, and I hadn’t put out my trusting heart to be trampled again.

Until Richard.

“I believe you,” I said at last. “I should be honored to share your house
and
your flat for the rest of our natural lives.”

And beyond, if such was the way of the supernatural world.

THE END

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historicals, m
any co-written with Summer Devon.

Coming in September from Devon/Dee is The Shepherd and the Solicitor.

When a storm is brewing, taking shelter could be the most dangerous move of all.

One careless, public sign of affection cost Daniel Pierce’s lover his life at the

hands of a hate-filled mob. Grief-stricken, Daniel retreated from society to a sheep farm in the wilds of the north. Years later, Gregory Tobin erupts into his solitary life.

Sent to confirm the existence—or the death—of the Pierce family’s lost heir,

Tobin isn’t sure he’s found the right man. The gruff, shaggy hermit calling himself Jacob Bennet bears little resemblance to photographs of the younger Pierce. Tobin needs more time to study his quarry.

With lambing season in full swing, Daniel grudgingly admits he could use an

extra hand. Through a long, exhausting night, they parry back and forth as Tobin probes closer and closer to the truth. And something beyond casual attraction simmers between them.

They come together in a crash of desire, but ultimately Daniel must overcome the

terrors of the past to reconcile the man he was with the man he’s becoming—a man

capable of loving again.

Excerpt: The road circled far around the field and would add on several more miles.

Tobin elected to cut across the broad tract of land instead. He made his stiff-legged way to the stone wall, clambered over—it was taller than it looked—and began the long hike to the Bennet farm, wondering if the farmer would turn out to be Daniel Pierce or just another dead end.

The landscape wasn’t as flat as he’d thought when looking across the field. Tobin

trudged up and down rises and falls of land—mostly up—with a hard wind pushing him along like a hand to his back. Tobin glanced up at the swirling gray clouds that stretched across the horizon and wondered if he’d make it to shelter before the looming storm broke and drenched him. The house and outbuildings didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

He was so focused on his destination that he didn’t notice the stalking beast

coming up behind him until it made him jump nearly out of his skin with a loud
baaah
.

Tobin whirled to face a large sheep with dirty gray wool and a black face. It gazed at him curiously and bleated again.

Tobin clapped his hands at the thing, trying to drive it away. “Go on. Go home.”

But the adorable farm creature didn’t run away like Alfie the horse. Instead, it

crunched a mouthful of grass between surprisingly large teeth and moved closer. At the same time, a crowd of its brethren crested the low hill. One sheep might be rather charming and pastoral, but an entire herd of them was entirely too much. Tobin had never spent any time around animals, other than his great aunt’s ill-tempered poodle. He wasn’t comfortable with the way the black-faced sheep all stared at him and headed directly toward him.

He clapped his hands again. “Go on now. Run away.” But the beasts seemed

merely intrigued by his clapping. Perhaps they thought he was a dinner bell calling them to food. They swarmed toward him in a great baaing bundle.

Rather than turning and running, Tobin made the mistake of moving backward.

His foot caught on a hummock of grass, or perhaps a badger hole, and he lost his balance, falling hard on his arse for the second time that day. The flock stampeded toward him, their combined weight shaking the ground and the noise of their infernal bleating deafening. He would be crushed by at least a hundred great fluffy tubs of wool!

Tobin threw his arms around his head, opened his mouth and screamed at the top

of his lungs.

But instead of sharp hooves and heavy woolly bodies stomping him to a pulp, he

felt something grab him by the coat collar and drag him upright. Then two strong bands of iron pulled him tight against a slab of warm living granite, away from the rush of bleating sheep.

He opened his tight-squeezed eyes and blinked away grit and dust. Staring back at

him was a pair of eyes as green as the grassy meadow set in a face that could have been hewn from the same granite as that body—it was that hard and unyielding. This man was nothing like the slender and rather unformed young man pictured in the Pierce family photographs.

Except that underneath the hard muscles and shapeless jumper, perhaps the grim

farmer’s build was the same. And the hair, although longer than that in the photograph, was equally fair. That heavy beard and moustache might hide full lips and a rounded chin. The photos were in black-and-white, but the family had described the missing heir as having “emerald-green” eyes.

These eyes were certainly that bright and luminescent.

Before Tobin could clear his throat and introduce himself, the man in the grubby

boots thrust him away with a shove. “Who are you, and what are you doing on my land?”

Daniel Pierce the gentleman would never in his life have treated a visitor so

roughly. That civilized young man had been soft-spoken, pleasant, agreeable to a fault and utterly incapable of rudeness. But Jacob Bennet said and did whatever he pleased without any consideration for people’s feelings. He was a coarse fellow who spoke with a bit of a Yorkshire accent after living four years in the North Country. Daniel had rarely been outside of a city and had considered a walk through the park exercise. Jacob enjoyed hiking miles over windswept moors when he wasn’t striding across his own field rescuing strange men from marauding sheep.

Daniel liked the freedom being Jacob Bennet gave him. Now that he was Bennet,

he’d almost lost his fear of the world.

He glared at the dirt-streaked, sweating man who had wandered off some city’s

streets. The fellow looked as if he’d started the day starched and pressed, but now his white shirt collar was grimy, and streaks of mud, or worse, marked his trousers. His tie was askew, and his face was almost as red as his bright hair. He had the extremely pale, freckled skin that so often went with coppery hair. Even his eyebrows and lashes were golden-red. Blue eyes stared back at Bennet as if this man somehow knew him.

He grew too aware of the other man—and did not need that part of his nature

awakened.

“I’m sorry for trespassing. The horse I rented threw me, and rather than walk the

long way around by road, I thought I could cut across to your house.” The man

straightened, including his tie, and held out a hand toward Bennet. “My name is Mr.