Page 36 of An Unexpected Pleasure

Now what the devil was the twins’ tutor doing trying to steal the key to his father’s collection room? And what the bloody hell was he going to do about it?

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MEGAN RAN DOWN THE HALL and up the main stairs, heedless of the noise she might make. She rushed into her room and closed the door behind her, leaning back against it as though to hold it against all intruders.

What in the name of all that was holy had she done? She could not understand how she could have been so lost to sense, so disloyal to her brother and family. Her heart twisted as she thought of how she had betrayed him, kissing the man who had killed him, and not just kissing him, but thoroughly enjoying it—indeed, not wanting it to end. A few more minutes, she thought miserably, and she would have been loosening her clothes to the man!

With a groan, Megan threw herself onto her bed, burying her face in the cool sheets. She lay there, berating herself, wishing she could cry…wishing she could stop the heat that still coursed through her veins and throbbed in her loins.

He had caught her by surprise, she told herself. And he was so devilishly handsome!

Megan had never considered herself weak. No other man’s blandishments had ever turned her head. Why, Timothy Doyle, who had the face of an angel and owned half the girls’ hearts in St. Anthony’s parish, had kissed her once when they were alone in her parlor, and she had felt little more than a pleasant tingling. She would have said that she was immune to seducers, and she had always held a certain contempt for women who were so weak they gave in to such men.

And then tonight, the man she hated most in the world had turned her into a trembling, quivering, helpless female, exactly the sort of woman she despised.

Megan knew that she had had no control over herself or the situation. Indeed, she had not even been the one who had called a halt to their kisses. It was Theo who had stopped!

With a sigh, she flopped over onto her back and stared up at the tester above her bed. As if the fact that she had kissed Theo Moreland was not bad enough, she had to face the fact that she had failed to do what she had set out to do. She had not gotten inside the duke’s collection room.

It was then that she remembered she still had the key to the room. With a little cry, she sat up. Her thoughts raced. She could still get into the room—she just had to find another time to do it. However, there was a definite risk in keeping the key. The duke was bound to want to get into the room sometime soon, and when he went to his desk, he would find the key gone.

She did not think that Theo would say anything to his father about finding Megan in his study. He didn’t know why she was there; she felt sure he had not seen her take the key from the desk, because he had said nothing about it. And he wouldn’t want to say anything to his mother or the kindly duke that would lead to their finding out that their son was in the habit of kissing the servants. But if Broughton told him that his key was missing from his desk, then Theo was likely to guess why she had been in his father’s study, and he would tell the duke. And she would very soon find herself out on the street, without having exposed Dennis’s killer.

Megan knew that the only way she could save herself was to put the key back into the desk where it belonged without the duke noticing. She probably should not even risk waiting until she had searched the room to do it.

She slipped her hand into her pocket, feeling for the key.

There was nothing there!

Megan paused, unwilling to believe. She stood up and dug into her pocket, pulling until it was completely turned inside out. On the chance that she had put it in the other pocket—though she was certain she had not—she searched the other pocket in her skirt and found it equally empty.

She had lost the key!

Megan let out a groan. Somehow it had slipped out of her pocket.

Anxiously, she backtracked over her path from the door to her bed, but she found no sign of a key. Just to make sure, she lit a candle and went over the same path, bending over to light the area with the candle’s glow. There was no glint of metal.

It was lost.

And she was in trouble.

CHAPTER 8

Theo was sitting on a bench at the edge of the garden, waiting for the twins to come barreling past, heading for Thisbe and Desmond’s workshop at the back of the property. He had noticed that they did so every afternoon. Thisbe had happily told him that their new tutor was letting her teach the boys science.

It made sense, he knew. Thisbe and her husband knew far more about chemistry, biology and physics than any tutor they could hire. But no tutor before had been willing to turn over even part of their job to someone else. What Theo wondered was whether Miss Henderson was wise enough not to let pride stand in the way of the boys’ education—or was using Thisbe’s willingness to help as a way to hide the fact that she was not a tutor.

Theo had found it difficult from the start to believe that the woman was actually a teacher. She was far too attractive, to begin with, and there was nothing in her demeanor that seemed like a governess. Why would a woman apply to teach two boys with the reputation that Con and Alex had? And why would an American travel to England to tutor children? Megan’s explanations were not completely implausible, but they had not been convincing, either.

Most of all, there was the bizarre fact that she was the woman whom he had seen in his dream years ago. The whole thing was completely inexplicable, and Theo would not have told anyone about it, sure that they would think he was crazy. Of course, he supposed, the strangeness of it did not preclude her being a tutor, but the more oddities that piled up, the less inclined he was to believe the story Miss Henderson had told. The fact that Reed’s wife, Anna, had had one of her premonitions that Megan was somehow dangerous had certainly done nothing to quiet his suspicions.

Last night, when he had found her in his father’s study, slipping a key from the duke’s desk into her pocket, his suspicions had solidified. He could think of no logical reason for the twins’ new tutor to be trying to sneak into his father’s collection room.

“Theo!” Alex’s cheerful voice roused Theo from his reverie, and he turned to see Alex and Con running out of the garden.

“Hello, boys,” he greeted them as they skidded to a halt beside him.

“Hallo,” Con replied. “What are you doing here?”