However, his unwelcome, fanciful, and unpalatable reaction to Miss Rowe just now had felt dangerously similar to the way he had always reacted to Elizabeth from the very first moment he had set eyes on the fair-weather temptress. His usually focused attention had always wandered when the sun had caught her hair just so too. His nerve endings had always fizzed whenever she was near, exactly as they were currently doing so close to his useless governess. Then his body inevitably got ideas that would consume him and he would lose sight of the truth. Just as he had with Elizabeth when his foolish, misguided heart got overexcited and over-romantic. He’d overlooked all her flaws and all the overabundant warnings everyone else saw, and then catastrophically overruled every single rational thought that existed in his head.
Although he was buggered if he knew why Miss Rowe, of all women, possessed the eerily similar Elizabeth-like power over him when the two women were in no way alike. Elizabeth had been a tall, willowy blonde. A traditional beauty who knew it and never failed to use it to her advantage. All easy charm and easy grace and the single most flirtatious creature he had ever met. Whereas Miss Rowe was curvaceous and petite. Freckled and, truth be told, slightly awkward in her skin. There was also a primness about her. She was dashedpretty, of course, with those sultry, green, intelligent eyes and all that scandalously tactile copper hair—but she was the complete opposite of flirtatious. Where Elizabeth’s expression always suggested “come hither,” Miss Rowe’s reliably radiated “get lost.” She was prickly, sarcastic, disdainful, standoffish, and… disrespectful… and therefore should be nothing but unappealing.
Except she wasn’t. She called to him—to all of him—and that was frankly unacceptable.
He wrenched his wayward eyeballs away and forced them to behold the carnage around him in the hope that it would reignite his anger enough that her outrageous hair, like the woman who owned it, would irritate him rather than bewitch him. It didn’t, and that just rubbed salt into the still-gaping wound. “I am glad to hear the afternoon gleaned some minuscule educational benefit.”
His eyes wandered to her hair again. Drank in the glorious sight of it while his imagination tried to consider what it would all look like unbound. In a sizzling contrast against her soft, smooth, ivory skin. Against his will, exactly as it had always done with the unworthy siren Elizabeth, his mind began to mentally undress her. To peel away all the layers until nothing but her lightly freckled flesh remained. It was torture, made worse by the regrettable fact that she had her back to him, so his stupid mind flatly refused to show him anything more titillating than its concocted image of her naked back. The merest flashes of skin poking through her riotous tumble of improper hair, which his suddenly uncooperative imagination decided ended too far below her sweet peach of a bottom for him to discern much of either rounded cheek—
“More importantly…” Her sanctimonious voice snapped him out of his terrifying reverie—thank goodness! Just in the nick of time because she sighed again as she placed the lid on the box before she spun to face him, forcing his rampant, possessed mind and his wayward eyeballs to quickly behave. “I got to know the children this afternoon, Captain Kincaid, and they got to know me.” Her chin tilted, defiant, making her pretty green eyes sparkle in the most disconcerting fashion as they locked with his. “Furthermore, thanks to our ‘splendid’ afternoon, I now have a clear idea of where to start with them.”
Thankfully, she gestured to the mess still to be tidied, breaking the hypnotic hold her gaze had on his, leaving him oddly shaken by the experience. Shaken and ashamed and still so hideously beguiled he could barely think straight. “So you see, while I appreciate that this all looks as if no learning has occurred here today, I can assure you that in the midst of chaos, there is always opportunity.”
Did she just quote Sun Tzu?His mind was so cluttered that he wasn’t entirely sure what she had just said. It wasn’tsorry, though. For bewitching him. For the mess. For her lackadaisical attitude to teaching or her flagrant lack of respect for him.
That he did know without a doubt.
The gall of the woman was staggering. How dare she treat him and his property as if neither mattered? How dare she… get under his skin and heat it until he could barely string two cohesive thoughts together? And without even trying. It infuriated him when he thought he had conquered that unfortunate, reckless, irrational part of himself.
“I can also assure you that not all of our lessons will look like this, so there really is no need to worry.” There was a flippancy to her tone now that just added insult to injury. “I am a protégé of Miss Prentice, after all, so youcantrust me to do a good job.”
His temporary and uncharacteristic lapse of gentlemanly thoughts aside, he was damned if he was going to leave it at that. Not whenthere was chalk and string and detritus everywhere and he could see no evidence, for all her canny insights, that the children had done any meaningful schoolwork at all.
The tail did not wag the dog.
The tailneverwagged the dog. Not while he was around! Exactly who the blazes did this minx think she was? Half a day on the job—and half a day doing a very bad job, to boot—did not give her any right to tell him to mind his own bloody business. Because this was his business, damn it! His family! His house! And his bloody rules!
“I am pleased to hear it, however…” Harry was about to elaborate by outlining his expectations for tomorrow after this afternoon’s debacle, but she didn’t give him a chance.
“If you will excuse me, I have a great deal of planning and preparation to do before tomorrow’s lessons, where I can assure you a great deal of valuable reading, writing, and arithmeticwilltake place.” She sailed out the door herself—as if she owned the place—effectively dismissing him and laughing at him in the process. “But first, I must fetch a mop toswab this deck. Enjoy your supper, Captain. And the rest of your evening.”
Then all at once, she was gone and he was left with the mess and the intoxicating waft of her perfume, which was apparently all it took to send his usually level head twisting toward the unthinkable all over again.
ChapterSEVEN
All the theory in the world wasn’t much use without the means to put it into practice effectively, and no matter how much it might chafe, Georgie desperately needed proper experience and a good reference if she was ever going to get another position as a governess. Those were two of the three cast-iron conclusions she had come to after a fitful first night in her temporary bedchamber. The third and most unpleasant one was that she had foolishly allowed Captain Kincaid’s first impressions of her to be bad. Which meant that her temporary position here beneath his roof could well be cut short if she didn’t do a better job of appearing to be the sort of governess he wanted. If he dismissed her, then she would be not only the only protégé who could not impress at an interview, but one of those who failed to impress on the job too.
The utter humiliation of holding those two accolades, on top of the dubious honor of being the oldest protégé to ever find gainful employment after graduating, filled her with dread. So much of it, she wouldn’t feel able to show her face at Miss Prentice’s school again if she made a hash of this.
Especially in her first week!
The shame would be so unbearable she would have to move to the wilds of the Pennines to avoid bumping into anyone she knew. Or the Outer Hebrides. Or better yet, remove herself to the Antipodes and live in exile for all eternity with the convicts.
She absolutely could not let that happen!
Which meant that she had to find a way to convince him that she was the right woman for the position. A task that might be easier said than done after yesterday’s debacle with the dog and the string.
The expression of complete horror and disappointment etched into the captain’s handsome face the second he entered her classroom had haunted her ever since. Even as she had rebelled against his pompous, authoritarian tone with all the bravado of one who had grown up under the constant and crushing disapproval of the colonel, she had been hideously embarrassed to have been found so wanting and clueless after so short an acquaintance.
And she did not doubt for a second that the captain thought her clueless because the tension in every sinew of his body announced that better than any words possibly could. Not that the words he did choose to use contradicted his blatant disgust at her methods in any way. No, indeed. Sarcasm had positively dripped off every clipped consonant as he had surveyed the untidy floor.
I am intrigued to 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.
Could he have issued a more damning indictment of her teaching abilities than that? He thought she had not only wasted time, but thatshewas a complete waste of time too.
With hindsight, destroying all the order and effort he had put into her classroom once they had come in from the garden had not been the most sensible way to convince her employer that she was a governesspar excellence.
Instead of alienating him from the outset with her modern and collaborative approach to education, she and the children could have spent a few minutes collecting some specimens in the garden. Then drawn those insects at their desks while she gently probed them with questions. What had possessed her to dispense with the desks entirely on her first day, she still couldn’t fathom, especially when the captain had been so proud of them.
