1. Chapter 1- Lily
After dithering in front of the polished door for as long as possible, Lily finally gained the courage to reach up and knock on it.
Three raps: the first one too soft, the second too loud from nerves, and the third just right.
Her fingers clenched with the awkwardness of what she was about to do, but at the crinkling of parchment, she relaxed her hands and remembered that she clutched a letter.
“Enter.” The voice was low, masculine; the word was clipped.
She had written the letter in case Lord Hayes was not in his study, but of course he was. He was always in his study. Now the folded parchment she clutched was redundant. Lily grimaced and turned the knob, stepping in hesitantly.
Lord Hayes sat behind a massive wooden desk. He glanced up at her in a frowning sort of way, then stared back down at his ledgers. The continued scratching of his pen declared her a nuisance nearly as effectively as words would have.
Lily guessed that her employer was about thirty years of age.
After all, Lord Hayes’s dark hair was still thick, with no grey strands at the temples.
Even so, he wasn’t in the habit of letting it grow and flop over his forehead, as some men his age did.
He kept it trimmed at the sides with an almost military precision.
His face was clean-shaven, his brown eyes shrewd, and there was a small bump on the ridge of his nose that clearly stated it had once been broken.
Lily wondered, not for the first time, what Lord Hayes might have looked like if he weren’t always serious. She supposed there was no point in wondering—she’d never seen him smile, not once.
When she’d first moved in, she’d thought that perhaps his foul moods were due to some sort of financial problem. The idea had worried her so much that Lily checked with the housekeeper to ensure that her wages would be paid.
After all, money was the only thing that had incentivized Lily to travel to the far-flung reaches of Northumberland in the first place.
It had taken nearly a week to travel from London to the coastal town of Blyth, and another four hours to travel to Ballam Hall, the family seat of the Viscount Hayes.
Though it had been four months ago, Lily still remembered that journey vividly—it was hard to forget being pressed between the stinking populace, much like a flower between the pages of a reeking book.
Then, as now, she’d worn one of the faded brocade gowns she’d procured to look the part of an unfashionable but respectable governess.
For months, Lily’s ruse worked. Her wages had been sent directly back to London to help offset the massive debt that their eldest brother had sunk the family into—debts that Lily thought the new Lord Cavendish had ignored right along with his sisters.
Except Lily knew now that hadn’t been the truth of things.
Apparently her brother William had been blissfully ignorant of the dire straits his sisters were navigating alone.
He hadn’t even known that their brother Richard had died.
The letter she’d received that morning explained everything.
William was sending a trusted steward to retrieve Lily; she was to meet the man in Blyth tomorrow morning.
Everything had changed overnight.
“Miss Hughes,” Lord Hayes prompted.
Lily realized that she had been dithering in front of his desk, the same way she had dithered before the door.
Now Lord Hayes’s dark brown eyes were focused on her in that keen stare of his.
For the months she’d known him, he’d exhibited two primary expressions—a frown or a piercing look that threatened to strip her to the bone.
Unfortunately, neither expression made him any less handsome in her eyes. Very inconvenient, that.
She swallowed deeply and nodded. “I beg your pardon, Lord Hayes. I’ve come to…” She trailed off.
The truth was, Lily knew even less about offering a resignation than she did about being a governess.
Besides, she didn’t want to go. Not because Lord Hayes had been so kind, for he had been standoffish at best, and at some points, very grumpy indeed.
But she dearly loved Lord Hayes’s daughter, Rebecca—and she didn’t want to tell the little girl goodbye.
Lily repeated the same truth to herself that she had ever since the letter had arrived: this wasn’t about her, not really. It was about her duty to her sisters, her brother, her family. It was that duty that had prompted her to earn wages in the first place—she could hardly switch loyalties now.
“I’m very sorry,” Lily began again, “but I’m afraid I have to leave.”
“Leave?” The viscount’s frown intensified.
Lily remembered the first instance those dark brown eyes had met hers as if it were yesterday. The housekeeper had presented her to Lord Hayes on the first day of her employment. His eyes had widened ever so slightly, and then his face grew angrier by the moment.
She had smoothed her brocade skirts and tucked imaginary wisps of her ash-brown hair back into her bun, wondering what he found so offensive about her appearance—she was as neat as a pin.
Lily wished she’d felt the same disapproval when looking at him.
In fact, she’d felt rather like she’d sat too close to the fire—overwarm and flushed and like the only way to find relief would be to stick her head in the nearest rain barrel.
However, the housekeeper, Mrs. Clark, hadn’t seemed to notice anything amiss with either of them. So Lily had done her best to ignore it as well.
Since then, Lord Hayes’s expression had differed from a stern stare or scowl only a few times. Lily didn’t wish to examine why she’d catalogued each instance so carefully, but memorize them she had.
Once, when Lily had been reading a bedtime story to Rebecca, she’d felt a presence and glanced up to find Lord Hayes leaning in the open doorway, an expression on his face that she could not read—something that could have been mistaken for softness. He’d turned and left immediately.
Another instance occurred during the nightly dinners they’d shared—a stipulation of Lily’s employment, which Mrs. Clark had only informed her of once she’d arrived.
Lily had learned to look forward to her evenings with a strange mixture of emotions that felt like three parts apprehension and one part anticipation.
Lord Hayes used the dinners to pepper Lily with questions about Rebecca’s rearing. Lily understood—traditionally, parents and a governess worked closely to ensure the proper raising of a child.
Yet the questioning across the massive polished table only ever started about Rebecca. For after Lily had answered the questions about Lord Hayes’s daughter, the man would pepper Lily with questions about her.
For a short time, Lily lived with a residing thrill of fear that Lord Hayes suspected she wasn’t who she claimed to be.
At first, he’d quizzed her about her upbringing.
Lily had found herself in the difficult position of wanting to be as truthful as possible but being unable to do so.
She’d remedied the situation by casting her siblings as the motley group of cousins who lived next door and thereby was able to share more of her true self than she’d ever expected.
The questioning had quickly moved on from Lily’s personal history to easier subjects—her opinions on literature and the arts.
Perhaps if one squinted, one could have viewed their interactions through the lens of a governess and the master of the house.
A father had every right to know the lady raising his daughter.
But to Lily, those dinners with Lord Hayes had begun to feel a bit like friendship—an exceedingly proper, standoffish friendship, but friendship all the same.
Adding to her confusion was the fact that the dinners were the only time Lily felt she had a taste of what she’d started to call her former life.
That is, the one where she was a member of nobility, not a servant.
For during that nightly meal, Lord Hayes treated her as an equal.
It was during one of those evenings that Lily had inadvertently splashed a drop of soup on the front of that day’s hideous brocade dress—burgundy and tan—and had dabbed at it quickly with her napkin, praying Lord Hayes hadn’t seen.
She peeked under her lashes at him and found him very nearly smiling.
Of course, she’d responded by promptly dropping her spoon into the bowl, splattering the soup everywhere.
Lord Hayes hadn’t requested her presence at dinner for three days after that.
But though it was rare, every time he’d looked at her with something other than a frown, something in her midsection swooped with an emotion that felt like fragile hope—a wounded bird trying to take flight.
When he frowned or stared at her with deep focus—as he did now—her stomach twisted as if she’d earned his disapproval.
She’d never been certain what he thought she’d done wrong.
Lily supposed that Lord Hayes might have been very handsome indeed if he’d ever truly smiled.
As it was, his foreboding expression couldn’t quite dispel the striking appearance of his dark hair and eyebrows, the tan he managed to keep despite the fog and clouds that continuously rolled over the horizon, and his strong jaw.
Not that he was the classically handsome sort—the fine young ladies wouldn’t turn into a flock of giggling ninnies the way they did when some men of the ton paraded past. No—Lord Hayes would look completely out of place amongst the gilded ballrooms of St. James.
He belonged here, amongst the rough crags and the swooping swells of uninterrupted Northumberland landscape.
“Miss Hughes,” Lord Hayes demanded, jerking Lily from her reverie. “What do you mean, leave?” he demanded.
“My brother has returned—” Lily’s voice quavered. She swallowed and nearly choked, then tried again. “My brother has returned from India. He requires my presence.” She held out the folded parchment to him.