“The lascivious manner, sir.” She turned toward him, and he noted the remarkable striations in her eyes. Flecks of gold ornamented the wide discs of her pupils. “Do not think to play your seducer’s games with me, Mr. Sutton. I have no wish for trouble.”
“But you have already found a great lot of it, have you not?” He rubbed his jaw, considering her. “All that mayhem with Lady Octavia must have left you ill at ease. And then what happened between us…”
Which remained a mystery on his part.
“Perhaps we should agree never to speak of that awful night again,” she suggested coolly.
“Eight!”
Blast. The girls were over halfway through their paces.
“There is one thing I cannot understand, Miss Wren. Who would have drugged Jasper’s bingo, and why?”
“Bingo?” She blinked, her lashes glinting with gold in the afternoon light.
“Brandy,” he explained.
This conundrum had him so flummoxed that he had failed to suppress the cant from his speech. Or perhaps it was not the conundrum, but rather, the woman.
“Surely you had partaken before your arrival,” she said.
A sudden memory hit him, of pacing up and down the thick woolen carpets, the brandy abandoned atop a table at his back. He had turned, worried over his sister-in-law, who had been slashed by a blade, and there had been Miss Wren, hovering near his glass. She had moved swiftly, away from it.
“You,” he said, stunned.
“What of me?” she asked, her tone as calm as ever.
But he did not miss her sudden pallor.
“You are the one who drugged me, Miss Wren,” he said, knowing it was true when he spied the flash of fear in her gaze.
But he still had no notion why.
Why would this proper, elegant governess he had only met for the first time two days ago have drugged his brandy? What possible purpose had it served?
“Eleven!” Elizabeth’s triumphant call severed the moment.
Rafe discovered he had been so absorbed in his dialogue with Miss Wren that he had failed to hear the girls call out nine and ten.
“That is quite enough locomotion, Anne and Elizabeth!” The governess returned her attention to his nieces swiftly, the snap of authority ringing in her voice. “We must return to our lessons.”
“But we haven’t reached fifteen,” Anne said, pouting.
What the devil?
Miss Wren was hurrying away from him now, moving toward the garden and the girls. He followed in her wake, confusion and anger swirling and fogging up his mind. The cunning wench had drugged him. And now she was fleeing as if she were a thief who had been caught pilfering the silver. Just who was Miss Wren, anyway?
“We have not finished our discussion,” he warned grimly.
“Yes we have.” She cast a glance at him over her shoulder, and he did not miss the fear in her expression. “You are playing a dangerous game, and I want no part of it, Mr. Sutton. I need this position, and I shall not allow you to ruin it with your spurious delusions.”
Spurious delusions indeed.
The wench was dicked in the nob, and she was looking after his nieces.
He was going to have to tell Jasper about this.
But how?