Kieran shut his eyes against the pain that was beginning to arch across his skull. It had been a trying few days, and he had barely had any time to spend with Alice and Delia at all. He was nearly ready to set the Marseilles branch of his quarrying company on fire, and it didn't help that the man in charge there did not speak English or even French but some obscure Occitan dialect. All of their conversations took place through a barely literate translator, and the whole thing was finally culminating in an actual headache rather than just a metaphorical one.
It was late by the time he made it back to Brixby Hall, and instead of going to bed, he found himself in his study again. He pulled one of the cut crystal decanters from the alcove in the wall and sipping at the good port, he thought of what had happened the last time he had been in here with Delia.
She had been everything he had hoped for and more when he had hired her on. His daughter seemed to be thriving under her care, and Delia seemed to care for Alice as well, treating her as sweetly and as gently as she would her own child.
Of course, it wasn't Alice that we were thinking about when she was here last.
The memory of their kiss, bright and almost incandescently sensual, came to surprise him from time to time. Sometimes, Kieran thought he would go mad with how vivid that memory was and how it could come to him in the most unsuitable of moments.
She is too good with Alice. I can't risk more of that. She deserves so much better than what I could offer her. She's too fine, too pure for the thoughts that I can't seem to help but entertain when she is around.
Even as he told himself that, however, he wondered. She had felt like pure fire in his arms, and he had known with an instinctive truth that she felt the same thing that he had.
Where does a modest and virtuous governess get that kind of fire anyway?
He took another sip of the port, letting his eyes drift closed. Yes, it was completely beyond the pale to imagine a night like this one, where he was tired to death and where life seemed at its dullest, that he might hear her light step in the hallway and know that she was coming to relieve some of that ache.
Kieran's eyes snapped open. It wasn't his imagination. There were steps in the hallway, and somehow, he knew that it was her. He
made his way to the door, opening it just in time to see her go past.
Delia yelped, her face turning white and then red as she rounded on him.
"What in the world do you think you are doing, Kieran?"
He grinned, liking the roses in her cheeks. "I feel like I should be asking you that same question. I am in my own study having a good drink. You are the governess who is sneaking through the dark halls with only a candle, as if you were hunting for some hidden treasure in a Gothic novel."
She scowled at him. "You nearly scared the life out of me."
"Would you prefer I go the Gothic route and creep up on you in the darkness? I could wrap my arms around you from behind and whisper some dire prophecy in your ear before I disappear into the mists."
"No, I would certainly not rather you do that! And if you are going to be reading Gothics, please do not mention them around Alice. She has a vivid enough imagination without having you fill it full of ghosts and monsters."
"If I promise I won't, will you come and sit with me for a moment?"
She hesitated. He could almost see her consulting some inner catalog of proper governess behavior, and he guessed that the answer should absolutely be a no when the lord of the manor asked her in for a private audience in the middle of the night. To his surprised pleasure, she nodded and stepped into the study.
"You're wearing a wrap tonight over your shift. Did you decide that our last meeting here was too chilly?"
"I decided that I had apparently better protect my virtue when I was going to get some water in the middle of the night, yes."
Kieran laughed at her arch words. "Believe me, if I had designs on your virtue, that wrap would not be a sufficient barrier to much of anything."
Delia turned even redder, but she lifted her chin in what was certainly a very un-governess-like defiance. "I am not here to discuss virtue, Kieran. What was it you wanted?"
Kieran clutched his heart as if she had wounded him to the core. "Harsh, Delia. I suppose I just wanted to ask after you to see how you are doing. You have been at this posting for some few weeks now. Is it what you were hoping it would be?"
Delia hesitated. At that moment, he felt from her a kind of reticence, a kind of inward thought that felt oddly clouded to him. It could simply be a servant's reluctance to speak truthfully to her master, but he wondered if that was all there was.
"It is... surprisingly good. I feel as if I fit here at Brixby Hall, and I did not expect that. Alice is charming and surely the sweetest child I have ever had the opportunity to teach."
"But still something troubles you?"
She lifted her head, her gray eyes flashing to silver behind her spectacles. "The only thing that troubles me is this."
"This?"
"You and me. Like this. Surely, this is closer than a servant and her lord should be."
"And yet you came into my study of your own free will, didn't you?"
He had no idea what he would do if she said no, die of shame most likely.
Instead, she lowered her eyes.
"I did."
Kieran laid his port aside and leaned back against his desk, his long legs spread in front of him and braced on the floor. "Will you come here, Delia?"
At that moment, he would wager Brixby Hall itself that there was no coercion there. Delia came of her own free will, and when she hesitated just a little beyond him, he gestured her closer until she was standing between his legs.
"If you need me to stop, tell me so. But Delia, until you do, I will not."
She opened her mouth, perhaps to protest, perhaps to question, but then she was pulled against his body, her hands coming up to his shoulders to pull him closer, her head thrown back.
She might have been wearing a wrap, but he could feel her warmth right through the fabric, as warm and soft as a summer night, and he had no idea where they might stop if she didn't halt things. All that mattered was the sweetness of her lips, the softness of her body, the quiet and incredibly needy sounds she made as she pressed against him for more.
There were no words there, nothing necessary beyond their mouths so hungry for each other. Delia made a soft sound as his mouth moved from hers to the point of her jaw and then to the soft tender skin of her throat. Kieran pressed his lips against the vein there that throbbed with life and heat.
She's so beautiful. So perfectly alive and here with me.
The thought sent a kind of warmth through him that had absolutely nothing to do with the sensuality of the moment.
Delia made a soft broken sound that seemed to go straight through him, but instead of pulling away as he thought she might, she pressed closer. He knew that she could feel the arousal of his body now, feel how much he wanted her, how much he needed her, but at the bottom of it all, there was this incredible feeling of care and sweetness.
It wasn't until his mouth pulled from her throat, seeking the sensitive skin of her ear, that Delia gasped. She pulled back, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were wide.
"Delia..."
"We cannot do this. We should not do this."
Kieran knew he had said he would let her go if she asked to be released, but there was something in her voice that made him pause.
"Do you want me?"
Her eyes were stormy. "Of course, I do. But this cannot be. This will not be. I am going to my room now."
She turned on her heel and walked away, closing the door behind her with a final click.
Kieran let out a breath and a curse.
She was right. He knew she was right. That fact did not lessen the pain of it, however, nor did it quiet the passion that roared through him, wanting nothing more than Delia next to him again, so close to him that it seemed as if they must become one.
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