Chapter 13
By the time a week had passed since she’d taken her pleasure atop her employer’s lap (which was difficult to think about) then left him hard and wanting (worse to think about) and received a letter from the last man she ever wanted to hear again, Letitia’s nerves were so frayed that she was worried that a strong puff of wind might send her directly into hysterics.
Naturally, this was the point when Ezra stopped having the good sense to avoid her.
“Good morning, Iris,” he said warmly as he came out into the sun-kissed garden where the little girl was gamboling merrily with Hermes. It was hard to say which of them had taken more cheery tumbles into the grass, and Iris’ frock was an utter disaster of stains. “And to you, Miss Knightley.”
“Your Grace,” she replied politely, trying and failing to remain cool and collected as she sat on a picnic blanket. It was not the most dignified of positions in which to meet a man with whom one had—
She pushed the thought away with a vicious mental shove.
“Uncle Ezra!” Iris cried, twirling in a circle.
Letty blinked. She had not known Iris to use that name for the duke before, and she quickly glanced at him, worried he might dismiss the child.
But, if anything, he looked even more gentle and soft as he watched Iris than he had a moment ago.
“Hermes and I are fighting the dreadful Titans,” Iris explained, executing a vicious kick at the air that had her tumbling straight onto her bottom. Before either duke or governess could make a single move toward her, she had popped back up onto her feet, clearly unharmed.
“The Titans?” Ezra asked, lowering himself onto the blanket, his gaze never leaving the little girl.
There was plenty of space between them, but still, Letitia froze like a rabbit who knew it had been scented by the fox.
“Oh, yes,” Iris said eagerly. “They were very bad people who were always troubling the old gods, like Hermes. Very naughty,” she said, her voice going low to impress the seriousness of this upon her guardian.
“I see,” Ezra said, nodding. “Is Miss Knightley teaching you about these myths?”
He spared a glance at Letty, who shook her head. She knew her myths, of course, and knew them to be popular with children, but she had not taught Iris any of them.
“Oh, no,” Iris said. There was a pause, and when she spoke again, her voice held a tinge of sadness. “It was Mama who told me.”
In unison, Ezra and Letitia went still.
“Did she?” Ezra asked after a beat, with an impressive show of nonchalance. “She must have been a very good storyteller.”
Iris smiled and nodded, but that sorrowful air still hovered around her.
“I miss my mama,” she said, her words faint and heartbreaking.
And then, to Letitia’s never-ending surprise, Ezra opened his arms to the girl. And Iris threw herself into them.
“I know, darling,” she heard him murmur into Iris’ hair. “I am sorry.”
Hermes nipped at Iris’ hem, seemingly able to tell she needed comfort and distraction, and the little girl’s face brightened again, even though her eyes were still red with unshed tears.
Letitia waited until Iris was back out of earshot, happily explaining to the dog what she was sniffing—rocks, mostly, but also some tree roots and grass—before she spoke to Ezra.
“You suspect something,” she accused.
He was still watching Iris, and she could not quite tell if it was a relief or not that he didn’t look at her. Any distance between them… It was sensible. But it felt wrong.
“Something,” he confirmed vaguely.
She had the sneaking suspicion that he knew that she would find this answer irritating.
It was bizarre that she could read a gentleman—a duke, no less—so easily.
Dukes should be inscrutable. She was so far beneath them that she should not be able to see him, let alone sense his thoughts as if he was shouting them directly into her ear.
“And you don’t plan to tell me what it is,” she said, not certain if it was a question.
The corner of his mouth ticked up, a recognition but not quite an apology.
“Not yet,” he said. “Has Iris mentioned the myths before?”
Letitia blinked at this sudden shift in topic.
“Well, yes,” she said. “The dog—she named the dog Hermes. It’s hardly a name she would have heard around your average village, is it?”
“And you didn’t think to tell me this?” he demanded.
He still wasn’t looking at her, so she indulged herself in a robust eyeroll.
“Half the children in England know those stories,” she pointed out. And, yes, I assumed her mother had told her, but she had not precisely said as much.”
This time, she was the one who didn’t meet his gaze. She could feel him turn toward her, could feel the burning intensity of his gaze.
“You cannot keep secrets from me, Letitia,” he said softly, and the sound of him using her given name went through her like a jolt.
“I wasn’t keeping it a secret,” she protested. “I just didn’t think to—”
“Not the stories, Letty,” he interrupted, and if hearing her Christian name had been a shock, it was nothing compared to how she felt upon hearing her diminutive, the name only those closest to her ever used. He must have heard Sarah say it, and it felt like a caress coming from his lips.
But any warmth that had blossomed in her at the sound of it turned to ice when he spoke again.
“What other secrets are you keeping?”
Her head whipped around so quickly that she felt a jerk of pain in her neck. His dark gray eyes were like thunderclouds, as intense as a summer storm. It seemed frighteningly possible that he could see right through her, that he could read every single one of her thoughts.
She had burned Dugley’s letter on the same day that it had arrived.
Even though she had not seen any signs of anyone snooping in her room, she knew that nothing was truly private in a household with so many staff moving in and out of the rooms. Besides, she had not wanted any trace of that man, not even his handwriting, in her new life.
She could not bear that. She could not bear Ezra knowing—could not bear him thinking—
“Letty,” he said quietly when her silence stretched on far too long. “You know, you can tell me anything.”
She could not, though. She really, really could not. Not without ruining everything.
“Letty, are you out here? I can’t find that frock of Iris’ that needs mend—Oh. Oh, excuse me, Your Grace, I didn’t know you were here.”
Sarah stumbled into the clearing, and Letitia had never been more relieved to see her friend in her entire life.
“I was just leaving, Sarah,” Ezra said politely, rising to his feet with leonine grace and dusting off invisible grime from his immaculate clothing.
“Goodness knows I dare not stand in the way of mending Iris’ frocks, not with the rate that she seems to rip them.
I will speak with you later, Miss Knightley. ”
Ha! Not if she had anything to say about it. She was about to become the most invisible little ghost the world had ever seen.
And maybe he could read her as easily as she could read him, because he bent to pick his hat up from the picnic blanket.
“This isn’t over,” he whispered, quietly enough that Sarah wouldn’t be able to hear him.
And then he popped his hat back on his head and went back toward the house, a visible pep in his step.
“What in the world was that about?” Sarah demanded.
Letty just flopped back on the blanket with a groan.
* * *
Ezra wasn’t a fool. He knew that the sweet-faced little governess had no intention of sharing her secrets. And she’d proven shockingly adept at avoiding him.
So he waited until everyone had gone to bed, until the house was quiet except for the nighttime staff.
And then he went and knocked on her door.
She must have worried it was Iris or Sarah, because Letitia opened the door almost immediately after he knocked, with an open, expectant look on her face. That look disappeared the moment she registered his presence.
“No,” she said flatly.
“Come on, Letitia,” he cajoled. “You don’t want to have this conversation out in the hallway where everyone can hear it, can you?”
For a moment, she looked as though she was about to tell him to go to hell—and while he would have found that just as amusing as all her little outbursts of temper, he truly needed to know what she was hiding from him.
He chose not to delve too deeply into wondering why he needed to know it.
Whatever she was keeping from him, it had not affected her work.
Nobody could deny that Iris had made enormous strides in the few short weeks since Letty had arrived.
And he didn’t truly believe it was anything likely to bring danger to his household.
So, really, it was none of his business.
Except he needed to know.
“I don’t want to have this conversation at all,” she retorted, but she stepped aside, allowing him entrance. “A true gentleman would respect that, you realize.”
“Let’s not start with insults,” he said in his most charming, polished tone, the one that had never worked on her.
She grumbled something about too many to choose from under her breath, and, if not for the seriousness of what he wanted to discuss, he would have grinned.
When she closed the door and turned to face him, arms crossed, without making any move to invite him to the small sitting area by the fire, he launched his first volley.
“Letitia,” he said. “Why did you not return to Belgium with the Lightholders?”
Unless the woman had even more secrets than he’d ever imagined, she must have guessed the question. Still, her face turned bone white, and her body became almost alarmingly still.
“I didn’t care to,” she said, not at all convincingly. “I spent most of my life there, and now I want to remain in England.”
“Bollocks,” he accused, relieved when her irritation made itself known in a bright flush on her cheeks. She’d been looking far too pale. “What’s the real reason?”
It struck him in a sudden wave of horror that he did not deserve to feel, that she might have left a lover behind. Or, oh God—a husband? Surely not.
“It is not any of your business,” she said archly. “It isn’t as though you aren’t keeping secrets. So, it’s clear that neither of us is revealing everything.”
This was fair, a fact which Ezra found exceedingly irksome.
“Fine,” he said. “Do you want to know what I didn’t say? That I have been trying to figure out how Iris is associated with my family. I have determined that it’s not any of the current dukes—”
“Yes, yes, they are all utterly besotted,” Letty muttered, not entirely making it sound like a compliment, and he felt so oddly pleased that she always seemed to understand.
“So, it must have been one of the uncles,” he said.
“If not my grandfather himself. Whichever one it was, he dallied with some woman—whoever Iris’ grandmother might have been—then produced her mother.
As far as I can tell, Iris wasn’t born on the right side of the blanket, either.
Or maybe she was, and the mother just clung to the aristocratic connection—no matter how many generations ago it happened on the Lightholder side. ”
“Well, that does rather stand to reason, if we assume that Iris’ mother was telling the truth about her parentage—which I am not saying we absolutely can, but if we do. So, why the secrecy?”
Ezra's words slipped out before he even knew he was going to say them.
“I need to know if someone is going to try to come take Iris from me,” he said, feeling their truth as they left his lips. “Because I need to know what threads to pull to stop that.”
Everything in her softened. “Oh, Ezra,” she said, and he wondered if she even realized that she had used his given name. He wondered if she could possibly understand how lovely it felt to hear it.
“Someone left her with me,” he said quietly. “She’s safe here. She’s happy here, I think. And I will not let any of my bloody cousins and their goddamned ‘family loyalty’ try to interfere with that. This is her home. And I intend for it to stay that way. I want to protect her.”
There was an unmistakably fond look on the governess’s face. He had seen it before—directed at Sarah, directed at Iris—but never toward him.
Ezra wasn’t the kind of man who looked down his nose at a good opportunity. He seized his moment.
“And I will protect you, too, Letty—if only you tell me what it is that you are hiding from.”