“My apologies, Captain.” Still standing in the middle of the mess, Miss Rowe bent to begin scraping all the detritus within arm’s reach into a pile. “We lost track of time.” Her cheeks had colored in obvious embarrassment, and he couldn’t help thinking that her embarrassment was the least he was due when she should be mortified to have been caught red-handed. Ashamed at her lack of control in his classroom. Utterly repentant that she had clearly fallen at the first hurdle and wasn’t much of a governess at all and that he had indeed been hoodwinked into hiring her!
“We went hunting for bugs!” Grace threw herself at him, waving a piece of paper. “Do you like my bee, Uncle Harry? I’ve called him Boris. Boris the Bee.”
He gave the picture a cursory glance, conscious that his current displeasure had nothing to do with the little girl who really wasn’t to blame for any of this anarchy. “It’s very… nice.” Except poor, sensitive Grace shriveled at his frigid tone and took two wary stepsback, her big eyes blinking rapidly as she tried to comprehend his uncharacteristically cold response.
“We’ve had a splendid afternoon, Uncle Harry.” Sensing his disapproval, Felix decided to defend the indefensible. “The best we’ve had since we’ve got here.”
“That I can see.” He had to clench his jaw to stop the furious bellow which wanted to escape. Clearly aware that Harry’s temper was barely controlled, Norbert’s ears drooped before he maneuvered his big body behind Felix’s in the hope that it would render him invisible. “It looks as if somebody has tossed a grenade in here.” He had seen shipwrecks in a better state than his morning room.
“It’s only a little bit of mess, Uncle Harry.” Marianne brushed it all away with a theatrical flick of her wrist. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” To prove that, she set about helping Miss Rowe scoop goodness knew what off his once clean and seasoned oak floor, and with a pointed look at her two siblings, snapped them into doing exactly the same.
“Your supper is ready, children.” He tried to infuse less anger into that choked, staccato sentence because he didn’t want them to hate him. “You had best run along while it is still warm and before Mrs. Rigsby has a conniption that all her hard work on your behalf has been in vain.” Which, in a nutshell, was precisely what Harry wanted to do. For surely this… pandemonium deserved nothing less than a full-blown conniption at the very least. This—this—willful, disrespectful, ungrateful mayhem felt like a betrayal. “Miss Rowe can fix it.”
“Yes. Run along.” With a sunny smile for them and a breeziness that bordered on arrogance for him, Miss Rowe took control. “It is entirely my fault we are late. We were all having far too much fun.” Her eyes flicked to his defiantly as if she genuinely considered fun tobe more her remit than discipline and real learning. “So be sure to give Mrs. Rigsby my apologies for yourslighttardiness this evening.” There were no apologies for him, he noted, and the dismissiveness of her tone and flagrant disregard of all his efforts to accommodate her classroom inhisspace almost sent steam shooting from his ears.
He waited until they were gone before he allowed the anger to vent and was about to give her a piece of his mind when she preempted him, her expression more condescending than contrite.
“I am sure, to you, this all appears as if we have wasted an entire afternoon on triviality. However, I can assure you that nothing could be further than the truth.” She didn’t even do him the courtesy of stopping what she was doing or acknowledging the mess that had occurred on her watch. “My first three hours with the children wereveryproductive andmostenlightening.”
Harry couldn’t wait to hear whatever codswallop she came up with to explain away her negligence. “Really?” Because his arms wanted to wave about in abject fury while his feet wanted to pace, he folded them and leaned against the doorframe to anchor them in place. “Do tell?”
“Well, for a start, I discovered that the children have no experience of traditional education at all.”
Of course they hadn’t! That was because blasted Flora was in charge of it. “You don’t say?”
Miss Rowe frowned at his sarcasm. “If you already knew that, Captain, it would have been helpful to have informed me of it before today. That would have saved me from having to scrap all my plans for our first lessons and avoided me having to think on my feet.”
She called this—this vandalism—thinking on her feet! “I suppose I should be reassured that there were some plans, albeit short-lived ones, before they descended into chaos.” Harry allowed his gaze to scan the untidy room again in disgust. “Although I am intriguedto understand how you thoughtthisamount of chaos was a fitting educational substitute for a valuable afternoon of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Only it doesn’t appear to me that you managed much of that in the three hours you had for lessons but wasted onfun.”
Rather than wither under his righteous indignation, she did quite the opposite. “As you are a man who appreciates quotes, Captain, my favorite comes from Confucius. Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember,involve meand I will understand.”
“And your labored point is?”
She went for a smile, which flattened when he failed to do anything but frown back. “That there are better ways of learning than sitting behind a desk. I learned more in your garden about the children in a single afternoon than I ever could have in the formal confines of a classroom in a week.”
When he failed to look anything but unimpressed at that convenient excuse, she sighed as if he were the one who had gotten this afternoon’s shambles so spectacularly wrong, preferring to focus on collecting up the buttons instead of him as she spoke.
“Both Felix and Marianne can read at a level one would expect of children several years older. Both can spell difficult words with ease, likely because they have read, and been read to, extensively from a young age. Thanks to his love of insects and the Romans and Greeks, your nephew has an impressive grasp of Latin. Marianne prefers Marlow, Fielding, and Shakespeare to Cicero and Homer, and I suspect she knows every word ofA Midsummer Night’s Dreamby heart. She can certainly recite all of Byron’sShe Walks in Beauty, in both English and in French, which I am not sure is appropriate for a girl so young. Although that’s more to do with my personal reservations about Lord Byron in general than his poem, so I shall reserve my judgment because I do approve of poetry in the main.”
All the buttons now collected, she rose to return them to a boxwithout glancing his way. Harry had no idea if it was the right box, or if she even cared that there was a right box as she did not bother consulting his alphabetized list on the front of it. “Marianne also has an excellent head for figures”—she bent to unravel the clump of string wrapped around the legs of the blackboard—“which is probably why she dances so well. But then again, it is often the case that those that are musical make the best mathematicians. She knows all of her multiplication tables—and byknow, I mean your niece can use them rather than regurgitating them simply from memory. Grace knows her two-, five-, and ten-times tables, can count to at least two hundred, can do better than simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication in her head or on her fingers; however, she struggles a little with division. But as that is always the trickiest mathematical skill to master before one hits the horrors of algebra, I am not the least bit concerned about it at this stage.”
She gave up on the string and grabbed a handful of feathers instead. They briskly made their way into the same box as the buttons, proving that she had abandoned his meticulous, alphabetical list of contents with the same lack of respect as she had the location of all the new classroom furniture he had been forced to pay double for at such short notice. “Felix, on the other hand, is an expert at avoiding all mathematical problems. I am yet to discover if that is because he finds everything else more interesting or if, as I suspect, he struggles with numbers as much as little Grace seems to struggle with her letters. He draws with impressive aplomb, though.” She snatched up a piece of paper and turned as she held it up. The accomplished sketch of an insect was as impressive as it was detailed. “As thisAcanthosoma haemorrhoidale—or the common hawthorn shield bug to the rest of us who aren’t as entomologically well informed as your nephew—is testament. His talent and his eye transcends whatis expected from a child of ten. Young Felix is an artist to his core. Perhaps even a budding prodigy in the discipline.”
“Well… er…” Where he had expected blatant cluelessness, she had given him a thorough summary of the children’s educational prowess, which surprised him, as he had no idea that the theatrical Marianne was a mathematician or that Felix could draw better than most adults. Or that blasted Flora had taught them anything of any substance at all. But what surprised him more, and horrified him tohiscore, was that the waning late afternoon sunlight did delectable things to her copper hair, which fascinated him. It warmed it from within and made it shimmer as if the kiss of sunset was all it took to give it actual life, highlighting the flecks of gold, bronze, and ruby woven in her curls. Colors so vibrant against the beguiling curve of her alabaster neck and so seductive they put all of Titian’s efforts to distill a redhead’s hair to shame. Worse, his fingers itched to touch it, so badly Harry had to uncross his arms and clasp his hands tightly behind his back in case they did. “Um…”
Good heavens above, what was the matter with him!
He hadn’t been so effortlessly beguiled by a woman since his unfaithful former fiancée taught Harry the important lesson that losing his head only ever resulted in catastrophe. He had learned it so well, or so he had thought, that his sensible, logical head hadn’t once been inclined to get itself lost in all the years since. It might turn occasionally, because he was a hot-blooded man in his prime and not a monk, but even if he dallied, it still stayed firmly screwed in place. It was easy to keep it so, too, because aside from the fact that he was still nowhere near to achieving the lofty career heights he had been groomed for, he hadn’t particularly liked himself when he had fancied himself head over heels in love with Elizabeth.
The blinkered and bewitched Harry who had fallen too fastand too hard had been a blithering idiot who had completely lost interest in the navy. Convinced—or more likely bewitched—that his destiny suddenly lay elsewhere, he had messed so many things up while they were together that he hadn’t only lost his first ship—he almost scuppered his entire career. Worse, he hadn’t been in control of either himself or the situation during those heady few months of what turned out to be nothing more than a short-lived affair. He had abdicated all the power and control to Elizabeth for the duration, however, and lived to rue the day.
Once he had recovered from the body blow of her betrayal, regrouped, and refocused on what really mattered, he went, cap in hand, to the admiral to ask for help to resurrect his tainted career from the ashes. That hadn’t been an easy time either. The old man had warned him repeatedly that he was making a huge mistake to even contemplate marriage so young. The admiral had been living proof that naval marriages didn’t work and had always drilled into Harry the need to avoid such permanent entanglements until he was at least a vice admiral and the bulk of his sailing career was done. He had taken his grandson’s foolish decision to fall in love as a personal slight and never ceased to remind him of his stupidity forever after.
In fairness to the admiral, once Harry’s heart had mended and he was levelheaded enough to analyze everything that had transpired with Elizabeth dispassionately, he was relieved to rediscover that he was a much better officer and gentleman without all that destructive yearning and pining nonsense cluttering his life. He preferred order over chaos and always had, still had a mountain of rigging to climb in his career and so, with hindsight, also knew without a shadow of a doubt that the beguiling, charming, fickle, but oh-so-passionate Elizabeth had ultimately done him a favor when she replaced him in her bed.
Exactly as the admiral had predicted from the outset.
Elizabeth would have made his ordered life a living hell if she’d have waited that short month until he’d sailed home to marry her. Marrying her would have been a mistake he would doubtless have regretted every single blasted minute since those rose-tinted, self-destructive, lust-fogged blinkers came off. When he next risked his heart, which wouldn’t be until he was at least a vice admiral, it would be his head and not his emotions which pragmatically chose his mate, and he would go in levelheaded or not at all.
