She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the polished shine of his leather boots, refusing to look up.
Know your place.
“Miss Lewis,” Ambrose replied, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that seemed to travel straight down her spine.
She felt impossibly cold, so tethered to her past and unsure of the future that lay before her in this place. The man in front of her looked every inch the untouchable aristocrat, his face a maskof iron-clad composure. It was as if she imagined the moment that they dared not speak of.
He didn’t look at her either. She could feel the averted gaze deep in her chest. He turned his full attention to the boys, his expression softening only slightly at the edges.
“Arthur. Philip,” he said, nodding to each. “I trust you are heading outdoors. The air is quite brisk today, but good for the constitution.”
“We were already outside, Uncle!” Arthur shouted. “Miss Lewis said it was time to come in, though, and that we should have hot cocoa and finish our reading. Did you know that even the bravest explorers must read their books?”
Ambrose reached out, his hand hovering for a second before he patted Arthur’s shoulder with a stiff squeeze. “A wise sentiment. Ensure you listen to her. She is… most diligent, my nephews.”
“We always listen to Miss Lewis,” Philip added, looking up at his uncle with wide, searching eyes. “She isn’t mean like the other governesses we used to have! She’s grand!”
A flicker of something passed over Ambrose’s azure eyes. “I am aware,” he murmured.
Imogen watched him as he stepped aside, pressing his back against the cool stone of a pillar to allow them to pass. As Imogen walked by, the scent of him, pine, old paper, and a hintof the crisp air she came from, washed over her, making her breath catch in her throat.
She didn’t turn. She did not falter. She kept her gaze forward, her shoulders held high with the dignity he had told her she deserved.
I have fared much worse, and just next door. I can deal with this Duke.
“Come along, Masters Lockhart,” she said, her voice clear and unwavering, despite the tremor in her hands. “Virgil won’t read itself.”
Ambrose remained pinned against the pillar. He stared at the empty space where she had been, his thumb tracing the deep, jagged crease he had just crushed into a fifty-page legal contract he had spent days scrutinizing. He didn’t move until the sound of the boys’ laughter was swallowed by the wind outside, leaving him alone with the suffocating scent of her lavender soap lingering in the drafty hall. As much as he tried to ignore it, it intoxicated him more than the absinthe he had indulged in as a bachelor.
Those days have long passed, he thought to himself as he remembered the shadow of a man he once was, chasing widows and drink.
The heavy silence Ambrose had been cultivating was shattered not by a scream or a crash, but by a sound far more alarming. It was the rhythmic, wetthwack-slapof something hitting the mahogany floorboards of the foyer.
Those boys will be the destruction of this townhouse!
Ambrose bounded around the corner and down to the foyer to see what the matter was, his brow furrowed. He was surprised to find Mr. Jennings, the normally unflappable valet, standing over a massive, salt-stained wooden crate. Beside him stood a bewildered footman and a courier who looked as though he had just survived a shipwreck, dabbing his brow with a dirty handkerchief as he made a hasty exit.
“A delivery, Your Grace,” Jennings said. His voice was steady, but his eyebrows had migrated dangerously close to his receding hairline. “From His Grace, The Duke of Kirkhammer. He insisted it be delivered ‘with haste and extreme dampness.’”
Ambrose stepped closer. The crate was stenciled with the words:
PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL ADMIRALTY – PERISHABLE.
“Morgan is in Cornwall,” Ambrose muttered, eyeing a suspicious trail of seawater leaking onto the Persian rug. “What could he possibly have sent from the coast?”
At that moment, the schoolroom door upstairs creaked open. The boys, clearly sensing a disturbance in the force of theiraristocratic home, came thundering down the stairs. Imogen trailed behind, breathless and wary.
“Boys! You cannot run in the house!”
“Is it a cannon?” Arthur shouted, skidding to a halt in front of Ambrose. “Did Uncle Morgan send us a cannon?”
“It’s leaking,” Philip noted with concern. “Cannons don’t leak. At least usually. Do they leak, Miss Lewis?”
“Not that I know of,” she replied as she stepped closer to the crate.
Jennings took a crowbar to the lid. With a screech of protest from the wood, the top popped off easily enough. Thankfully, there was no gunpowder.
Instead, nestled in a bed of seaweed and melting ice, sat two of the most enormous, prehistoric-looking lobsters Ambrose had ever seen. They were the size of small terriers, their claws bound with thick twine, waving their antennae with a slow, vengeful majesty.
