Love Affairs. Louise Allen

a bowl of fruit on the table.

      ‘Yes, ma’am, this way if you please.’

      It was an unexceptional way of exploring, although, disappointingly, all the inner doors off the hall were closed. The girl led her through to a small room with a water closet on one side and a washstand on the other and left her. Laura lingered over cleaning her hands, working up a froth of lavender-scented soap, trickling the cool water through her fingers.

      A fantasy was forming in her mind. She would write to her solicitor, her steward, everyone, and explain she was going abroad for an indefinite period. Then she would tell Avery that she would become Alice’s governess. He could not deny that the child liked her, responded well to her. He trusted her enough to ask her opinion, he knew from conversation that she was educated, cultured. A lady.

      Laura blotted the wetness on a linen towel, watched the fabric grow darker, limp with the water from her hands. It seemed very important to focus on getting every inch of skin quite dry while her mind scrabbled at that fantasy like an overexcited child tearing the wrappings from a present.

      And then, as though she had opened the gift and found not the expected doll or sweetmeats, but a book of sermons, acrid as dust, her hands were dry and her mind clear. She could not do it. How long could she live so close to Alice and not betray herself? She would be a servant in her own daughter’s home, someone with no real power, no control. Sooner or later Avery would find her out and then she would have to leave and Alice would lose someone she might have grown very fond of. It was too painful to think the word love.

      Avery was crossing the hall when she emerged, her hair smooth, her expression calm, even the trace of a blush from that kiss subdued by cool water and willpower.

      ‘What do you think?’ He handed her a sheet of paper. ‘Will you look at it now in the study, before Alice comes down?’

      * * *

      He watched Laura as she stood, head bent over the draft. Her hair was rigorously tidy, each strand disciplined back into a severe chignon. It did not look like hair that relished control, it looked as though it wanted to be loose, waving, its colours catching the sun in shades from blonde to soft brown. Her cheeks were smooth, pale with less than the natural colour of health in them and none of the blush that had stained them when she had thrown that challenge at him in the shrubbery.

      Her lips moved slightly, parted, and her tongue emerged just to touch the centre of her upper lip. He guessed it was a habitual sign of concentration, but it sent the blood straight to his groin. Those lips under his, smooth and warm. They had clung for a moment against his while he had wrestled with the urge to possess, feel her open under him, to taste her. He was confusing her and he wished he understood why.

      ‘You state that the person appointed must be willing to travel.’

      ‘Yes, that is essential. I expect to be sent abroad again before the year is out and I will take Alice with me.’

      ‘You had best say it means to the Continent, then, and not simply on a tour of the Lakes.’ Her lips quivered into a slight smile and were serious again.

      Avery fought with temptation and yielded to it. ‘I was wondering... I know you said Alice would benefit from a younger governess, but I wondered about a widow.’

      A shiver went through Caroline, so faint he saw it merely in the movement of her pearl earbobs. He held his breath. Was he being too obvious? And what, in blazes, was he thinking of in any case?

       Chapter Six

      What could he tell from Caroline’s stillness? The downcast lids did not lift, nor the dark lashes move. Perhaps he had imagined that shiver, perhaps she had no notion he was talking about her. ‘Not all widows are middle-aged,’ she pointed out after a moment.

      ‘No, indeed. Such as yourself.’ Avery wondered just how old she was. The ageing effect of her black clothes, and the paleness of her skin, made it difficult to tell, but he doubted she could be much over twenty-five. ‘I was just wondering if someone with more experience of children would be better.’

      ‘And not all widows have had children,’ Caroline said, her voice so lacking in expression it might as well have been a scream.

      Hell and damnation. She told you she had lost a child. Get your great boot out of your mouth, Falconer, and stop daydreaming. It had been a nice little fantasy about Caroline Jordan as Alice’s governess, but what did that make him, lusting after his daughter’s teacher, a woman who would be under his protection in his house? A lecher, that’s what, Avery told himself. He despised men who took advantage of their female dependants.

      ‘You see how much I need you to stop me wandering off at tangents,’ he said.

      ‘It seems strange that a man who can steer the fate of nations at the conference table finds it hard to advertise for a governess.’ Caroline sounded faintly amused, thank heavens.

      ‘The devil’s in the details,’ he said, snatching at a cliché in desperation. He had told the Duke of Wellington to stop interfering before now. He had faced down the most powerful of the Emperor Alexander’s ministers and he could negotiate in five languages, but this one woman, with her emotional buttons done up so tightly over whatever was going on in her bosom, had him in knots.

      And that’s because when you are dealing with Wellington you aren’t thinking with the parts of your anatomy that are giving you hell now. Although it isn’t simply desire.

      ‘Papa! Aunt Caroline! Luncheon is ready and I am starving.’

      ‘Coming, Alice.’ Avery lowered his voice as he took the paper from Caroline. ‘Do you suppose a governess will be able to stop her stampeding about like a herd of goats and shouting at the top of her voice?’

      ‘Oh, I hope not.’ Mrs Jordan’s smile was curiously tender. ‘Not all the time.’

      * * *

      Avery watched Caroline during the meal and Caroline watched Alice. Not him. Which meant he had either so comprehensively embarrassed her that she did not dare risk catching his eye or that she was completely indifferent to him. And yet his reckless remark about desire had discomforted her to the extent that she had challenged him about it this morning. She had neither screamed, nor slapped his face when he had kissed her, but she had given him no encouragement either.

      So...not a merry window or even one sophisticated enough to contemplate an irregular liaison. He suspected she was not mourning her husband in anything but the outward show of black clothing and quiet living. There was a mystery there.

      ‘Was your husband a landowner, Mrs Jordan?’

      ‘In a small way. He was a military man.’ She prepared an apple for Alice, scarcely glancing at him as she controlled the peel that curled from her knife.

      ‘From this part of the world?’

      ‘We lived in London when we were together.’ Her hand was quite steady with the sharp blade. ‘There, Alice. Now, I was careful to get it all off in one piece, which is very important for this magic to work. If you hold up the peel, very high, and drop it, it will make the initial of your husband-to-be.’

      Alice giggled. ‘That can’t be right, Aunt Caroline. You peeled it, so you will have to drop it.’

      ‘I have no intention of marrying again.’

      ‘Please?’

      Avery watched, amused that the wide-eyed green stare, combined with the faint tremble of the lower lip, worked just as well on Mrs Jordan as it did on him. He shuddered to think of the impact on young men when Alice was old enough to make her come-out. He would have to carry a shotgun at all times.

      ‘Oh, very well. It will come out with a Z or an X or something improbable.’ Caroline held up the peel and dropped it. She and Alice studied it with all the care of scientists with a lens. ‘I cannot make anything