An Unexpected Pleasure. Candace Camp

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СКАЧАТЬ reason that they should be bright or concerned or humorous. Any family could turn out one bad specimen. Theo was not necessarily like his family.

      The problem, though, Megan knew, was that Theo did seem like the rest of his family. He was charming and handsome and possessed a smile that she could feel all through her.

      That was what she had to adjust to, she knew. She had to prepare herself to deal not with a cold and obvious villain, but with a man whose wickedness was concealed beneath a pleasant, appealing mask. She should have known that it would be too easy, too simplistic, for Moreland to be the way she had pictured him. After all, had not her own brother sent them a letter shortly after he joined up with Moreland’s party in which he had declared Moreland a “capital fellow”?

      The man was deceptive, and she had to guard against his deception. She had to guard against her own feelings. She could not let her liking for Theo’s family color her judgment. Nor could she make the mistake of taking Theo Moreland at face value.

      To succeed on her quest, Megan knew that she must be as deceptive as Moreland himself was. She had to pretend to like him, to be fooled by his easy charm, and all the while, inside, she must be like iron.

      She had been in worse situations than this, she reminded herself, had faced worse enemies. She would get through this just as she had gotten through those other investigations, with determination and good sense. She had to. She owed it to Dennis.

      “I should go now,” she said, and gave the boys a smile, then turned one that was less genuine toward Theo. “I have a great many things to do in order to get ready.”

      “Are you coming back tomorrow?” Alex asked.

      “No. I am afraid it will have to be the day after tomorrow. There are certain tasks that I must complete first.”

      Like talking to the other men who had accompanied Theo Moreland and her brother on their trek up the Amazon. She had not really expected to be hired on here—and certainly not so quickly. She would have to do her interviews with Andrew Barchester and Julian Coffey tomorrow.

      She knew that once she began working at Broughton House, she would have very little time on her own to interview people. Servants rarely got more than one day every two weeks off from work, and she suspected that it was probably even more difficult for governesses, who were probably expected to be with their charges every day, even if there were no studies pursued that day. It might be somewhat better for a tutor of boys as old as the twins, who did not need constant watching over as younger children did, but she could not count on that.

      The boys insisted on coming down to see her off, a fact for which Megan was grateful. She frankly did not want to have to spend any more time alone in Theo’s company. It was altogether too unsettling.

      Alex and Con kept up a steady stream of chatter as they went down the stairs, eliminating any necessity for Megan or Theo to speak.

      She turned to the others to say a quick goodbye at the front door. Theo extended his hand to her, and it was impossible not to take it. Megan’s breath quickened as his hand engulfed hers. His palm was warm and a little rough, surprising her. She would not have expected an aristocrat to have worked enough to form calluses. Moreland must have been involved somehow in the menial tasks of his explorations. She had always pictured him riding along on some conveyance or other, with plenty of native servants to do all the work.

      Theo held her hand a fraction of an instant too long, releasing it just as her eyes flew to his in question. There was a certain heat in his gaze that sent an answering flame licking through her, but there was something else, a kind of watchfulness that reawakened the uneasy feeling she had experienced when she first met him.

      The smile she gave him and the boys was a trifle unsteady. Quickly she turned and walked out the door and down the street, firmly refraining from breaking into a run. She could not shake the notion that somehow, impossible though it seemed, Theo Moreland knew who she was.

      4

      Theo barely heard the chatter of the twins as he stood in the doorway, looking after the retreating figure of Megan Henderson. Who the devil was she?

      Con and Alex took off at their usual pace back up the stairs, and Theo turned and strolled through the hallway and out onto the terrace. He took the wide, shallow steps down onto the flagstone path that led to the arbor.

      He stopped at the place where he had caught his first glimpse of Miss Henderson and stood, remembering the moment.

      Recognition had jolted through him when he saw her, stopping him dead in his tracks. He could not believe it, and yet the fact of it was looking straight at him. Miss Henderson, the twins’ new teacher, was the woman who had come to him in his dream years ago. The woman who at the time had seemed so real to him, but whom he had come to realize must have been a figment of his imagination, a product of his fevered, delirious dreams.

      However, now he knew that his assumptions were not true. The woman was very real indeed…and about to be living in his own house.

      Theo shook his head in confusion and walked over to the arbor where his mother and the tutor had been sitting. He sat down in the chair Miss Henderson had occupied. The odor of the first blooming roses mingled with the subtler, faintly lavender scent of Megan’s perfume.

      He had forgotten how beautiful the woman had been—no, not beautiful, exactly, in that sort of perfect, stunning way that his sister Kyria was beautiful. No, this woman was intriguing, enticing, with a soft, curvaceous body hidden and restrained by the plain dark clothes she wore, her hair warmly cinnamon in color and curling, seeming about to escape from its pins at any moment. And her smile…

      Theo let out a groan, sinking his head onto his hands. He remembered that smile perfectly—the soft, wide mouth with its plump lower lip, slightly indented in the center, quirking a little to one side in an enchanting, eminently kissable way, her mahogany-colored eyes warm and inviting.

      But she wasn’t real. She was a dream! So how had she turned up here in the Broughton House garden?

      It had been ten years, and he had been terribly ill at the time, Theo reminded himself. The odds were he simply did not remember exactly what the woman in his dream looked like, and when he saw Miss Henderson, she had resembled the woman enough that his mind attached the teacher’s face to the image he had seen.

      Even as he came up with the logical explanation for the odd occurrence, Theo knew that it was not so. That dream was as real, as vivid to him, as it had been ten years ago. He had only to close his eyes and he could remember the slab of stone hard beneath his body, and the sweat slicking his flesh and dampening his hair. He had been burning up with fever, his mouth constantly dry and parched no matter how much they poured that drink down his throat. The air had been stifling, heavy with the smoke from the incense burners on either end of the slab on which he lay. He remembered the low, rocky ceiling that arched over him, the rough walls, damp with the moisture of the cave.

      He remembered, too, the dark, silent girl who had tended to him, wiping the sweat from his face and urging the drink on him, the metal of the goblet cool against his fevered lips. Her low voice had chanted in some foreign tongue. Dennis had been there, too, most of the time, talking to him, urging him to return from the netherworld in which he floated.

      But neither Dennis nor the black-haired maiden had been there when the woman had come to him. His fever had been burning more hotly than ever, and he had been assaulted by hallucinations—visions of animals and birds and strange, monstrous people had danced around СКАЧАТЬ