Eugenia rolled her eyes. “I might prostrate myself before a freshly baked crumpet, but never a man.”
Susan took herself away, and a moment later the door opened again. “Mr. Reeve,” Ruby announced.
The man who strode into the room was tall, with thick brandy-brown hair and darker eyebrows, the color of tarnished brass.
He had a lean rangy look, but something about the way his coat fit across his upper arms made Eugenia suspect he was muscled. What’s more, his nose had been broken in the past.
This was not the sort of person who typically appeared in Snowe’s refined drawing room. He breathed a different kind of air than did the mothers she dealt with daily.
Abruptly, Eugenia realized that she was staring, her thoughts straying in directions they hadn’t gone for years.
Since Andrew’s death.
She didn’t give a damn what Mr. Reeve’s thighs looked like!
And she would do well to keep it in mind. He was a client, for goodness’ sake. Did she see . . .
No she didn’t.
And she didn’t want to, either.
Chapter Three
Ward entered Mrs. Snowe’s office and checked in his stride.
No governess he’d ever seen had hair that was a curly, swirly mess of red caught up on her head, a delectably curved figure, and lips several shades darker than her hair. Her lips were lush, even erotic, despite being pressed together into a hyphen.
Ward paid little attention to women’s clothing, but he remembered his governesses in gray and black, like dingy crows.
Mrs. Snowe was wearing a pale yellow gown that celebrated her breasts. Her absurdly wonderful breasts.
A delicate jaw, a straight nose . . . Their eyes met.
There was the look he remembered from governesses of old.
She was cross as the dickens, likely because he’d dismissed Miss Lumley. Under her controlled façade, she was practically vibrating with exasperation.
Mrs. Snowe was a former governess, all right, and she’d already summed him up and found him lacking.
He bit back a grin. The governesses he’d chased from the house as a boy hadn’t cared for him either. It was strangely comforting to realize that at least one type of woman was absolutely honest in her assessment of a man.
Eugenia took a deep breath and pasted a smile on her face. No matter how foolish Mr. Reeve had been to sack one of her governesses, it wasn’t his fault that she was irritated by her unexpectedly desirous reaction to his appearance.
She began to walk toward Mr. Reeve, but before she could take more than a step, his long legs had carried him across the room.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Snowe.” He extended his hand with an unhurried confidence that Eugenia recognized.
She ought to: she had grown up with it. It meant that Mr. Reeve, like her father, generally found himself the most intelligent man in the room.
She touched his fingers, thinking to withdraw her hand immediately and drop a curtsy. A good part of the allure of Snowe’s was that she was a member of the peerage. No one ever forgot that.
His large hand closed around hers and he shook it briskly.
Unless they had no idea.
Now he was nodding to her with all the detached civility with which one greets an upper servant. A housekeeper. Or, more to the point, a governess.
It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t know who she was. They’d never met, but their fathers were friends. Though she had a vague memory that he’d spent years abroad . . . perhaps at university?
“How do you do?” she asked, withdrawing her hand. Her accent usually informed even the most bumptious father that in the current social hierarchy, she belonged at the top.
No such recognition seemed to occur to Mr. Reeve. He glanced about the room with lazy curiosity.
“Very well, thank you,” he said, bending over to look more closely at a small Cellini bronze that stood on a side table. “I wonder if we could come straight to the point, Mrs. Snowe.”
Eugenia’s registry was situated in a small but beautifully proportioned house in the most fashionable area of London. The chairs were Hepplewhite and the rug Aubusson. The wallpaper had been hand-painted in Paris in an exquisite lattice pattern of violet and cerulean blue.
The chamber was so elegant that its atmosphere served as a correction to clients deluded enough to think that they were bestowing a favor on Snowe’s by seeking a governess. Moreover, it had a dampening effect on reprobates in pursuit of her person or her fortune.
Mr. Reeve was obviously as unaffected by his surroundings as by her person.
“May I offer you a cup of tea?” Eugenia asked, forgetting that she had intended to push him out the door without ceremony.
He straightened and turned, and the pure masculine force of him went through her like a lightning bolt.