Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (Scandalous Seasons #4)(13)

“Do you know how to handle a needle, Miss Marshville?”

She cocked her head. “A needle?”

He waved a hand. “A needle. As in embroider.”

“I’m proficient at needlework,” she said, confusion in her eyes.

“How about the pianoforte? Are you an accomplished songstress?”

Miss Marshville’s brow wrinkled even further. “I am an adequate singer,” she replied, a guarded caution in her eyes, as though she spied a neat snare laid out before her, and gauged the best way to tip-toe around it.

“And watercolors?”

She hesitated a moment, and then nodded. “Why do—?”

He held a hand up. “What if I assured you that I had a place for you, a place that would find you free of your brother’s hold, which is what I imagine you seek. I’ll not even delve into the desperation that brought you out this evening, and in return you’ll do something for me?”

She brought her arm back and he caught the delicate wrist before she could slap him a second time. He turned it over and studied the cream white smoothness of her palm. Palms such as these were not made for slapping a gentleman.

Jonathan raised her hand to his mouth and placed his lips along the skin on the inside portion of her wrist. “I’d like to hire you as a governess, Miss Marshville.”





Chapter 4


Juliet shook her head once. Then twice. And a third time for good measure. Her efforts proved futile. The Earl of Sinclair’s words came as if down a long, muffled corridor. “A governess,” she repeated in a bid to make sense of his last words.

As he’d lowered his smooth, baritone voice, a breathless anticipation of his indecent offer had both tantalized her senses and outraged her sensibilities. She’d be so very certain the offer he intended to make her had been the same Lord Williams had earlier yesterday afternoon.

She should be solely focused on the words he’d floated into the air, his outlandish request to make her a governess, but he ran his lips along the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist, and such delicious shivers shot up her arm and somehow fanned all the way to her belly.

He picked his gaze up from his tender ministrations and grinned like he knew all her darkest, most wicked thoughts, and God help her, she wanted to divulge all those wicked thoughts to him. “Yes, Miss Marshville. I’d like to offer you employment as a governess.”

The spell he’d cast upon her loosened. “A governess?” she blurted. She knew she must sound like the lack-wit he’d accused her of being a short while ago, but for all the sketchpads and charcoal in the world, she could not make sense of his offer.

He placed one more kiss on the inside of her wrist, and then released her. “Yes.”

A governess. His governess.

“For who?” she eyed him skeptically.

“My sisters. I’ve four altogether, but one has already made her Come Out, so you’d have three charges. My mother charged me with the task of finding them a suitable governess.”

Juliet continued to eye him with a wary skepticism. “You would hire me, a stranger who found you outside your gaming hell, who entered your carriage, demanded her cottage returned—?”

“My cottage,” he interjected.

“And slapped you once—”

“Nearly twice,” he pointed out.

“Nearly twice,” she amended. “You’d ask that woman to care for your sisters?”

“I would.”

Between Albert and Lord Williams, she’d come to expect nefarious intentions from most gentlemen.

She’d prepared for him to offer her a spot in his bed and not this respectable offer of governess to his sisters.

She continued to study him, knowing intuitively there was more to his decent proposal. “You must be either mad or desperate to offer a woman you’ve only just met the post of governess to your sisters. Why…why, I could be a violent woman.”

The right corner of his lips tugged up in a smile. With his unfashionably long crop of loose dark curls, and the wicked grin on his lips, he had the look of a marauding pirate, and certainly not that of a respectable nobleman.

“You don’t strike me as a violent young lady, Miss Marshville, with of course the exception of the slap,”

“Nearly two,” she felt inclined to remind him.

“Nearly two,” he repeated with a grin. “Are you interested in the post, then?”

Juliet sat back and folded her arms across her chest. She shook her head. Mad. He is as mad as one bound for Bedlam.

She continued to eye him skeptically. She knew next to nothing about the earl beyond what the papers reported. He kept membership at White’s and Brooke’s and gambled heavily in his clubs and won there. He had scores of mistresses as her brother had pointed out.

Now the gentleman spoke of three, nay four sisters and a mother. Yes, even irredeemable rogues such as the Earl of Sinclair had families. They didn’t simply spring from the soil with the summer’s greens.

Odd, the thought of it somehow made him seem more real, and less…less…of a coldhearted monster who’d ruthlessly won her cottage in a game of cards.

“Well, Miss Marshville,” he murmured, freeing her from her silent thoughts. “What say you?”

“I say you’re mad,” she blurted.