The Governess Was Wicked Read online

  “I can’t imagine that you’d do anything that would earn reproach.”

  But didn’t he see that she would for him? How could he not know that every time he walked into a room her cheeks heated? Without her even realizing it, her body would lean toward him like a flower stretching for the sun. She’d watch him as he administered to the girls, memorizing the way that his hair whorled just at the base of his skull where it looked the softest.

  And then there were late nights in her room. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep because her thoughts of him distracted her too much, she’d reach down between the sheets and slip her hands between her legs. She’d touch herself where instinct told her she wanted his fingers, groaning into her pillow as the heat of her desire grew almost unbearable until it broke over her in waves.

  These weren’t the thoughts or actions of a decent woman. They were wanton, foolish, and delicious, and instead of making her ashamed, they made her want to be bold. When she lay blissful in her bed, she’d tell herself that one day she might be able to grab the good doctor by the front of his jacket and press her body to his as she kissed him wildly. That was the truth that burned inside her. That was what no one could know. Not Mrs. Norton, not Crane, not Dr. Fellows. No one.

  “No one is above reproach,” she said quietly. “I simply have to make the world believe that I am.”

  “It’s an unfair burden to ask of anyone,” he said.

  “It comes with being a governess, Dr. Fellows. Now, if you don’t mind the informality, we’ll need to use the servants’ stairs to reach the kitchen.”

  They were nearly silent the rest of the way, with Elizabeth murmuring a thanks only when he would stop to open a door and let her pass through. If life was fair, she would’ve been dressed in her best gown with her hair swept up. Instead she was bundled in her night things, no doubt still smelling faintly of Juliana’s vomit.

  This wasn’t a romantic errand. She and Dr. Fellows were about to go rooting in the kitchen cabinets trying to figure out how a child had made herself sick. There was no reason to believe that he’d whip her around and back her up against the kitchen’s massive table, his hips pinning hers as he pushed his fingers through her hair. And he certainly would not finally well and truly kiss her.

  Still, she was alone with a handsome bachelor, and the very thought of that was thrilling, for governesses were never alone with strange men. Ever. Their reputations mattered too much to ever risk such scandal. This little act of bravery—a direct defiance of Miss Carrington’s wretched book—made her feel very daring.

  In the empty kitchen, she held her candle up to a tall cabinet. “If Miss Norton got into anything, it’s likely in here.”

  “Well then”—he rubbed his hands together—“let’s see what we find.”

  They worked quietly for a few minutes, the nearness of him setting Elizabeth on high alert. More than once she had to remind herself to breathe. Once he moved too close, the sleeve of his jacket brushing her arm. She nearly gasped as heat pooled between her legs with an immediacy that shocked her.

  “My apologies, Miss Porter,” he murmured.

  She peered up at him through her lashes, and she could have sworn she saw his light brown irises darken. She should have been ashamed. Instead she wanted to repeat that little moment of intimacy so she could be sure never to forget it.

  “That’s quite all right, Dr. Fellows.”

  His lips tightened as though he were fighting some sort of internal battle. She could have sworn his fingers twitched as though instinctively reaching for her, but in a flash his attention was on the cabinet again and the moment was lost.

  Years ago, she’d tasted the possibility of adventure. She’d spent the one joyful, carefree month of her debut dancing at the assembly rooms in town while her father stood on the edge of the dance floor with his fellow officers waiting, waiting, waiting for the call to fight that never came. And then, with one trick of fate, all of that disappeared. Her father’s death had deprived her of any hope of a blissful youth. Gone was the chance to be led out onto a terrace by a dashing gentleman and kissed under the moonlight. She’d never flirt behind a rapidly fluttering fan before stealing away to a darkened alcove. No. This night spent downstairs searching for a bottle of sick-making medicine was as much excitement as she was likely to see with a man.

  Elizabeth squinted at a promising brown bottle only to find that the peeling label read Peppermint Extract. As she set it back down, she noticed a clean circle in the faint dust on a low shelf. “I think I’ve found where the ipecac was stored.”

  Dr. Fellows, who easily stood a head taller than she, crouched down to take a look. “So we have a location, but no bottle. A mystery Mr. Poe would admire.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Are you a reader of Mr. Poe?”

  He actually looked sheepish. “Oh, well . . . I enjoy a ripping good yarn as much as anyone else.”

  Her whole body lit up with the knowledge that he’d shared this little detail of himself. It was as though he’d opened the door to his soul just a little wider, letting her see not the physician or the scientist, but the man underneath. It charmed her more than it should.

  “I’d think that physicians spend all of their time reading great medical tomes,” she said, toying with the top of a bottle labeled Rosemary Oil.

  Dr. Fellows barked a laugh that she felt from the top of her head straight to her toes. “It’s funny you should mention that. My friend Henry Gray asked me to look over a manuscript he’s compiling. It’s an anatomy, and I can’t imagine anything more tedious after a day of doctoring than more doctoring.”

  “It’s a what?” she asked with a furrowed brow.

  “An anatomy. He’s taken every part of the human body and catalogued it with drawings.”

  Her heart thumped hard. Every part?

  “That sounds quite scandalous.” She shouldn’t have said anything, but she couldn’t help it. It was just such a . . . thrilling thought.

  He grinned, bouncing on his toes in that way she’d become so familiar with. “It will be a revolution, but there are some who will not be happy to see it published. It does catalogue some parts of the body that aren’t spoken of in polite company, but what those critics don’t seem to understand is that the human body is an incredible thing. We’ve only just begun to discover how it all works together.”

  “How exciting. I suppose that’s why you’ll be studying the blood in New York rather than taking in the sights.”

  His gleeful expression fell, and she wondered if she’d somehow said the wrong thing.

  “Yes, well, it won’t just be the blood,” he said, some of the enthusiasm leaving him. “It will also be the heart and the entire vascular system.”

  She was losing him. She could tell by the way his eyes wandered across the bottles in the cabinet rather than fixing on her. Desperate to pull his attention back, she asked, “But when do you find the time to read Mr. Poe’s writing?”

  “Late at night I prefer more stimulating literature.”

  A man who professed to read novels and not just history and philosophy? That rare quality was attractive, indeed.

  “Of course, Mrs. Mitchell, my housekeeper, would prefer it if I was out every night,” he said, cracking a small smile.

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “She thinks it’s time I find a wife. I don’t have a mother to nag me any longer, so she feels the responsibility falls on her.”

  A wife. Of course it would be only natural for him to look for one at some point—most men did eventually—and a successful, respected physician living in style in Chelsea would make many women a good husband.

  “Mrs. Mitchell must wonder why a woman hasn’t set her cap at you yet,” she said, picking up the bottle of peppermint extract so there was something for her to focus on other than his gaze.

  “She’s implied a
s much.”

  So why don’t you marry? She wanted to blurt out the question, but she pursed her lips tight to keep it inside. It was none of her business.

  “I’m not sure that I’ve that much to offer,” he said, reading her mind with no problem at all.

  He was wrong. He was exactly the right sort of man. She’d known it from the moment she’d met him three years before. Funny, kind, and brilliant, he’d set her dangerously active imagination working after their first meeting. She’d never been so grateful to Mrs. Norton as when the woman decided him fashionable enough to retain his services. It meant guaranteed meetings that left her trembling with her contained desire—even more so during the last three weeks when she closed her eyes at night. She’d imagined him skimming his hands over the swell of her breasts and along the dip of her waist. No man had ever touched her like that before, but she wanted him to do those things and more. She wanted to know what it would be like to feel the weight of him on top of her, and the plunge of his tongue into her mouth. To kiss her lips, her neck, her breast, and lower, lower until he kissed away the ache between her thighs.

  “Any woman would be lucky to call you her husband,” she said quietly.

  “Miss Porter . . .”

  She looked up to find a smolder in his eyes that contrasted with the tightness in his jaw, as though he were holding himself back from doing something he knew he shouldn’t.

  “Yes?” she asked, wishing that he’d just once act without thinking and not let another one of these long, fraught, lingering moments go by.

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I know that you’re a gentleman who has done nothing but treat me with respect.”

  “Except that sometimes I don’t want to play the gentleman,” he said, his voice taking on a gruff quality she’d never heard before. “Sometimes I think about doing things I shouldn’t.”

  His words hung in the air, warming her blood and quickening her breath. It was deliciously wrong. It didn’t help that it would take just a half step for him to tower over her, her unbound breasts brushing his chest through her nightclothes.

  She was so tired of stuffing herself into a little box and closing the lid. Everyone thought they saw Elizabeth Porter, but all they saw was the careful mask she’d adopted to survive. Somehow Dr. Fellows and all of his noble intentions had weakened her defenses. She wanted to let him in, to connect with him. After nine solitary years, she suddenly couldn’t control the impulse any longer.

  “You should turn around and walk out of this kitchen,” he said quietly. “Go back upstairs and forget all about this, Miss Porter. A lady like you shouldn’t be compromised.”

  A lady? Perhaps once she’d thought of herself as such, but no longer. Ladies were like Mrs. Norton—delicate, finicky things who spent their time making and receiving calls and planning what to wear to the next in an endless string of balls and suppers. Elizabeth was the unfortunate daughter of a reckless army captain and a woman who had died in childbirth. She was a girl forced into taking a position. She had no claim on the word. Not anymore.

  “I’m not a lady, I’m a governess.”

  “You’re more of a lady than anyone I know,” he said, fierceness lacing his words. “I admire you, Miss Porter. You’re intelligent and beautiful in a way I would never be able to put into words, and I fear you’ve bewitched me.”

  They were just words—a collection of letters strung together to form the simplest sentences—but to Elizabeth they were everything. Before she knew what she was doing, her hands were in the doctor’s hair, and her lips were on his. He froze but overcame his apparent shock quickly, for his mouth slid over hers, angling to drink in her kiss.

  He held her fast against him in strong arms, pulling her onto her tiptoes so that she pressed along the hard length of his body. All of her qualms about respectability seemed to melt away. She could forget anything as long as she had his kiss.

  Desperate to make the most of the insanity gripping her, she slid her tongue over his lips. His mouth gasped open and his tongue greedily tasted hers. Her hands slipped and dug into the nape of his neck.

  Elizabeth moaned as he kissed her jaw and then her throat. He drew a line down her neck until he reached the edge of the night rail that poked out of the top of her dressing gown. She held on as he worked the lapels loose so that the garment gaped open. Delicately, he pressed a kiss to the valley between her breasts before leaning his forehead there and stopping.

  Panting, she looked down at the man whose arms still circled her waist.

  “We could be caught,” he murmured into her chest.

  Her knees went weak, and this time it had nothing to do with his kiss. Elizabeth had just put everything at risk. A smart woman would never have cast caution aside and given in to her desires. The Nortons might be more concerned with who sat at their table than the children in their nursery, but they were in every other sense moral and proper people. They would never stand for their governess kissing a man in their kitchen, and if they threw her out without a letter of reference, she would be more desperate than the day her father died.

  Slowly, she took a step back. “You’re right.”

  He huffed out a breath. “Of course. I apologize for—”

  “Please don’t.” Hearing that he was sorry for that kiss would be too much for her to bear.

  “But I—”

  “Don’t you see? I enjoyed it,” she whispered before walking out of the kitchen and into the darkness.

  Dr. Fellows followed at a respectful distance as she made her way to the nursery. They hadn’t spoken a word since she’d confessed that she relished his kiss, but the silence seemed to help. Somehow it restored the balance between them, although Elizabeth could still sense a touch of tension in the air.

  Upstairs, she found the ipecac bottle stuffed behind Juliana’s pillow along with four hot water bottles lining her bed. She held it up triumphantly as Dr. Fellows explained the feverish sweats that the girl had been able to reproduce without, in fact, being sick at all.

  He left shortly after, escorted to the front door by Crane just as the tall hallway clock struck four. Elizabeth watched him step into a hansom cab from the nursery window and then collapsed into bed, tucking her feet around her cooling water bottle. With only a few hours of night left, she tried her very best not to dream of Dr. Fellows’s kiss. She tossed and turned until dawn.

  The next day she taught a contrite Juliana and an inquisitive Cassandra their lessons before luncheon. Then, fully intending to take advantage of her half day, she donned her navy blue coat and hat and made her way to Mrs. Salver’s Tea Shop to meet the only two true friends she had in London.

  “I don’t understand why Miss Norton is having these spells,” said Jane Ephram between sips of strong oolong.

  Mary Woodward, who sat to Elizabeth’s left, snorted. “If it’s not jealousy, I’ll give up my next month’s wages.”

  “I hate to admit it, but Mary’s right,” she said.

  “Why ‘hate to admit it’?” asked her friend.

  “Because the ‘Fairy Godmother of Belgravia’ can’t be right all the time,” she teased, using Mary’s well-deserved nickname. Her friend had earned it after fourteen years of teaching particularly difficult young women, guiding them through their first seasons from the shadows, and miraculously marrying them off in unusually happy matches.

  Jane shook her head, sending her knot of blond ringlets bouncing. “I still don’t understand why Miss Norton would make herself so ill just for attention.”

  “Master George was born six months ago,” said Elizabeth, remembering all too well the days before the balance in the nursery had been upset. “That’s just about the time Miss Norton began acting out.”

  Mary nodded as she spread clotted cream on a scone. “I saw a plea for attention like that in the last house I lived in.”

  “T
he Merriweathers?” Jane asked.

  “That’s right. The eldest was a girl who was spoiled rotten, but when an heir came along . . .” Mary shrugged as though that was all that could be said about that.

  “But to take syrup of ipecac.” Jane shuddered.

  “It isn’t a pleasant way to fake an illness, but it was quite effective,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll have to replace those slippers.”

  “At least I know what to get you for Christmas this year. So if Miss Norton was sick, does that mean the handsome Dr. Fellows was in attendance?” Mary asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Nothing could stop the fierce blush that colored her from the base of her throat to the top of her forehead. “I should never have told you that the man’s handsome,” she muttered into her teacup.

  Mary laughed. “Quite the contrary. I’ve been trying to convince Lord Radnor to take him on as the family physician, but he’s stubbornly loyal to Dr. Bennett.”

  “You’ve done nothing of the sort,” she said.

  That earned her a wicked grin. “You’re right. I’ve thought about it though.”

  “You do know what Elizabeth’s little book would say about that, don’t you?” Jane asked with mock severity.

  Mary rolled her eyes, her hatred for Miss Carrington’s Guide for Governesses unmistakable. “Miss Carrington can take her book and hang. I don’t know why you kept that drivel.”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “The agency gives the book to every woman on their list.”

  She’d always thought the guide was a little ridiculous—and certainly too stringent to be practical—but Mary’s horrified expression when Elizabeth produced it at tea one day was too good to forget. They’d taken turns reading aloud from the more self-righteous passages and dissolving into laughter. Most of the advice written by Miss Beatrice Carrington was thinly veiled hand-wringing. It was a stunning collection of all the ways a governess had to avoid sin.

  Although given that she’d kissed Dr. Fellows in front of a medicine cabinet around four that morning, perhaps some of the cautionary tales were warranted.