Page 30 of An Unexpected Pleasure

Two more Moreland siblings were present this evening—a tall redheaded beauty named Kyria and a small, much quieter woman, Olivia, with soft brown hair and large, lambent brown eyes. They were accompanied by their husbands. Olivia was married to the handsome, dark-haired Lord St. Leger, who greeted Megan politely and with a sympathetic look. The other man, Kyria’s spouse, was wickedly good-looking, possessed of compelling blue eyes, sunstreaked light brown hair and a flashing grin that Megan was sure could charm the birds out of the trees. His name was Rafe McIntyre, she was told, and, the duchess added with a pleased smile, as if she were handing Megan a real treat, he was an American.

Megan froze, her eyes flying to the man’s piercing blue gaze, and her heart set up a galloping beat. She had not counted on meeting another American.

“Where are you from, Mr. McIntyre?” she asked, hoping that her trepidation did not show. It wasn’t likely, she told herself, that he would know anything about the schools or made-up people whom she had given in her credentials to the duchess. But she could not help feeling that an American was more likely to trip her up in her lies.

“The West, Miss Henderson,” McIntyre said, the warmth of his smile not quite reaching his cool blue eyes. “Before that, Virginia.”

“But Rafe and I more recently resided in New York,” Kyria put in, smiling at Megan.

Megan’s heart sank, though she managed to keep a smile on her face. New York was a huge city, she reminded herself, and Lady Kyria would not have moved in the same circles as a lowly newspaper reporter. Even if, by some stretch of the imagination, the couple had read articles written by Megan Mulcahey in the newspaper, there was no reason to connect that woman with Megan Henderson, the tutor sitting in their dining room in England.

“It’s a lovely city, New York,” Lady Kyria went on.

“Yes, my lady, I have always thought so myself,” Megan replied somewhat stiffly.

Megan wished she had thought to pretend that she was from some city other than New York. It had seemed best at the time, one less thing she would have to lie about, but in retrospect, it struck her as foolish. What if by some strange chance one of the McIntyres had read her articles? What if the mere fact that they were talking about the city reminded Theo that it was where the man he had killed came from? What if Dennis had at some time mentioned his sister Megan?

She glanced over at Theo, who was sitting almost directly across the table from her. His eyes were on her already, their bright green color dark in the candlelight. She was aware, as she was every time their eyes met, of a sizzle along her nerves. Megan flushed and looked quickly back toward Kyria.

Kyria’s gaze went from Megan to Theo speculatively, but she said nothing.

Beside Kyria, Rafe asked casually, “How did you happen to apply for the position of tutor for the Terrible Two?”

“Rafe! We aren’t!” Con and Alex chorused in mock indignation, and Rafe grinned, sending the boys a wink.

“Well, I did not consider it at first, of course,” Megan replied, aware of McIntyre’s cool blue eyes studying her as she talked. “I assumed that no one would hire a woman as a tutor for two boys. But I had heard that the Duchess of Broughton was different, that she believed in the equality of the sexes, so I thought I would apply to her. I wanted to prove that I could handle the job as well as a man.”

“Well done, Miss Henderson,” the duchess put in warmly from her end of the table.

The conversation moved on as Theo asked Rafe a question about a horse he had bought a few days before, and Megan relaxed, grateful that the attention had been taken off her.

Olivia St. Leger, who sat on one side of Megan, leaned in closer and murmured, “I hope we are not overwhelming you.”

“Oh, no!” Megan replied honestly.

While Rafe McIntyre and the fact that he and Kyria had lived in New York had raised a certain unease in her, she had otherwise thoroughly enjoyed the dinner conversation. The Moreland family was a trifle odd, but she found their eccentricities charming. None of them seemed to be snobbish in the slightest degree. Everyone, indeed, had gone out of his or her way to place Megan at ease.

She felt a flash of guilt at the way she was deceiving them all. She thought of how they would feel when she revealed the truth about what Theo had done, and she hated to think of how it would pain them. They would, she knew, despise her.

When the meal was over and Megan was leaving the dining room behind the twins, it was Theo who caught up to her and bent near her to ask a similar question. “Ready to pack it in after a night of the ‘mad Morelands’?”

“No, of course not,” Megan replied, firmly quelling the traitorous twist of warmth that ran through her abdomen at the touch of his breath against her ear. “Who would dare to call your family that?”

“Oh, a number of people,” Theo replied carelessly. “I fear that most of English society finds us distinctly odd.”

“There are some,” Megan responded, “who would say that they find all of English society distinctly odd.”

He chuckled. “And they would probably be right.” He paused, then went on, “Yet my mother says that you are interested in all things British.”

“What?” Megan glanced up at him, puzzled, before she remembered, with a start, the lie she had told the duchess to explain why she had come to work in England. “Oh! Oh, yes, I am, of course.”

She had spent hardly any time with him, and already he had caught her out in a lie! Megan reminded herself that she was going to have do much better than this or she would not last long enough here to find out the slightest thing about him or the secret of what had happened long ago with her brother.

“I have long been very fond of English poets,” she went on, hoping to cover her mistake. “I wanted to see firsthand where they lived.”

She all but winced at how syrupy her words sounded.

“Of course,” Theo murmured.