Seven Minutes in Heaven(8)

By way of reply, he gave her another wicked smile. The sort that made a woman likely to give in to whatever he asked. “May I first tell you about the children?”

Eugenia spared an incredulous thought for the woman who had jilted him. She must have been as chaste as an icicle to reach the altar without succumbing to that smile. Yet there was no question but that his fiancée had held him off.

This man would never let a woman go after he had made love to her. Eugenia was certain of it.

She drew in a soundless breath. What on earth was getting into her today? She must be having a reaction to being cooped up in the office for the last few weeks. She needed fresh air.

“Lizzie is nine,” Mr. Reeve was saying. “I would describe her as excessively dramatic and unnaturally morbid.”

“What form does her morbidity take?” Eugenia asked.

“She wears a black veil, for one thing,” Mr. Reeve said.

Even after years of hearing about children’s eccentricities, that was new.

“I have the idea that only widows wear mourning veils,” Mr. Reeve continued, “but most nine-year-olds don’t make their governess faint by dissecting a rabbit on the nursery table, either.”

“Dissecting, as in, cutting to pieces?”

“Exactly. Though I think Miss Lumley found Lizzie’s attempted conjuration of the rabbit’s ghost more disturbing,” Mr. Reeve added, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.

“I see,” Eugenia said. “I gather the conjuration was unsuccessful?”

Mr. Reeve’s sudden grin kindled a hot cinder in her stomach. “No phantom rabbit appeared, if that’s what you mean. Lizzie’s brother Otis is eight, and far more conventional. He’ll go to Eton in the fall, but since neither of them has had any schooling, he has to catch up first.”

Eugenia was thinking about ghostly rabbits, but her attention snapped back to him. “No schooling?”

What? Had they been raised by wolves? Mr. Reeve’s initial letter had only said that he needed a governess, not that he needed a miracle worker.

“No formal schooling,” he amended. “They both know how to read. Otis seems to be quite good at mathematics. A few days ago he opened a betting book in the stables, offering proper odds.”

“What bets are involved?”

“The question of which horse would produce the most dung collected ha’pennies from every stable boy.”

A gentleman never mentioned excrement before a lady but, of course, Mr. Reeve didn’t think she was a lady.

“Until it was discovered that Otis had gifted his chosen steed with fistfuls of carrots in the middle of the night. The bets were returned,” Mr. Reeve added.

“My uncle is a member of the Thames River Police,” Eugenia said. “I could arrange to have him give Otis a stern talking-to. Has your brother been informed that gentlemen do not take money from stable boys, no matter how interesting the wager?”

“That’s a very good point,” Mr. Reeve agreed. “Perhaps I should explain that our mother spent the last decade of her life in a traveling theater troupe.”

Oh, for goodness’ sake.

She had known—all polite society knew—that Mr. Reeve was the illegitimate son of an earl. But the information that his mother was an actress had been concealed.

Once people learned about his mother, Mr. Reeve would never receive another invitation. He clearly didn’t care—which explained why she had never met him, and why he had apparently never heard gossip about the widowed lady who opened a registry office.

In fact, she’d guess that Reeve was so arrogant that he didn’t give a damn what society thought of him.

No, “arrogant” implied that he had an inflated sense of his own abilities. Eugenia had a shrewd feeling that he judged himself in relation to other men without exaggeration.

“Do Snowe’s governesses tutor only the children of the rich and titled?” he asked. A note in his voice made Eugenia’s nerves flare in a primitive response, like a rabbit cornered by a fox.

She was no rabbit.

She gave him her frostiest look. “Certainly not. My governesses can be found in more than one irregular household; the Duke of Clarence’s five children share three Snowe’s governesses at Bushy Park.”

Amusement lit his eyes and the air of danger about him evaporated. “I am far more proper than Clarence. There is no counterpart to the lovely Dorothea in my household.”

Her heart skipped a beat at his lazily flirtatious reference to the royal duke’s mistress.

“Do you expect commiseration for your household deficiencies?” It was a feeble answer, but all she could come up with.