“I hate it. Next I’ll have to wear a corset, curl my hair, and learn to flirt.”

Her tone suggested a worse fate had never befallen a young lady. “Don’t panic. I think you have some time before those miseries beset you.”

“Papa says the same thing, but he never wants me to grow up. He had only boys with his other wife, and I am his only girl.”

“His only daughter for now.” Ethan’s eyes had told him Mrs. Reese Belmont was in anticipation of a happy event. “You will correspond with Miss Portman when she moves to her next post, will you not?”

“I don’t know.” The girl smoothed out the linen on her lap. She had a grass stain on one bony little knee, and her pinny was hopelessly wrinkled. “I am not too smart for her, and she can be my tutor. She just wants to go, is all. I am mad at her for that.”

Children were horrendously canny when it came to sniffing out adult prevarications. Little Priscilla’s governess might well be simply tired of the child.

“Maybe she wants to leave while you still think she’s smart and you still like her. She doesn’t want you to be smarter than she is. Word of advice, though?”

Priscilla nodded, apparently willing to entertain a confidence from a man who looked like her friend Wee Nick.

“You can be angry any time you please,” Ethan said, “but it could be that you are only picking a fight because you’re hurt, and maybe a little scared—scared because you like Miss Portman and you might not like your tutors as much.”

Priscilla kept her gaze on her lap. “I’ll miss her.”

And a child could miss loved ones passionately. A man, thank God, knew better.

“She’ll miss you too,” Ethan said, hoping it was true for the child’s sake. “If you’re really her friend, though, you want her to be happy. And I think you can trust your mama and papa to find you tutors you get along with.”

Outside the door, a herd of small feet thundered past, young voices shrieking about pony carts, kites, and a race to the orchard.

“I have to go now.” Priscilla scrambled off the couch, flung a curtsy toward Ethan, and raced to join in the happy affray.

Ethan closed the door as a rankling notion stole into his brain: Nick would see to it Joshua and Jeremiah had the best of tutors and nannies. He’d also play with them, as Ethan most assuredly did not. Ethan shoved that thought back into whatever mental dungeon it had sprung from and turned his attention to a pile of letters, some water stained around the edges. He was halfway through a reply to the steward of his sheep farms in Dorset when the library door again opened.

“Excuse me.” The governess—Miss Porter? no, Miss Portman—admitted herself to the room and closed the door behind her. “I’m returning one book and fetching another. My pardon for disturbing you, Mr. Grey.”

Ethan half rose from his seat and gestured toward the shelves. “Help yourself.” He paused to rub his eyes. They’d been stinging more and more of late, and sometimes watered so badly he had to stop what he was doing altogether and rest them. He rose from the desk and came around to lean against the front of it, watching as the governess bent to put the large volume of fairy tales on the bottom shelf.

“It’s Miss Portman, isn’t it?”

She rose slowly, as if feeling Ethan’s gaze on her, and turned. “Alice Portman.” She bobbed a hint of a curtsy. “You are Nicholas’s brother, Mr. Ethan Grey, father to Joshua and Jeremiah.”

“You call the earl Nicholas?” Ethan concluded she was one of those plain women who’d grown fearless in her solitary journey through life. He respected that, even as he had to concede there was something about Alice Portman’s snapping brown eyes he found… compelling. Her shape was indeterminate, owing to the loose cut of her gown, her dark brown hair was imprisoned in some kind of chignon, and her gaze had an insect-like quality as a result of the distortion of her spectacles. All in all, Ethan suspected she was a woman of substantial personal fortitude.

She held his gaze with a steadiness grown men would envy. “When I met your brother, he was mucking stalls in Sussex and content to be known as Wee Nick. I do not use his title now, because he has insisted it would make him uncomfortable were I to do so.”

This recitation was a scold. Ethan mentally saluted her for the calm with which she delivered it. “No doubt it would.”

She turned back to the books, but rather than bend down to the lower shelf, she sat on the floor cross-legged, as she’d sat on the rug the previous night. Then, she’d been swaddled in another plain, unremarkable dress, and banked with children on either side. For all her primness, she’d looked comfortable with the informality, if a little disgruntled to be interrupted.

Ethan’s correspondence started whining at him, but his eyes still stung too.

“So what did you name him?” Ethan asked. “The wolf with the unfortunate predilection for onions, that is.”

“That was a challenge,” Miss Portman said as she surveyed the children’s books on the bottom shelf. “Pris, being of a dramatic frame of mind, wanted to name him Sir Androcles of Lobo.”

“Wasn’t Androcles a lion?”

The governess turned her head and beamed a full-blown, pleased smile at Ethan. “Why, Mr. Grey, I am impressed, but Androcles was the young man who took the thorn from the lion’s paw. The lion never earned his own sobriquet.”

“Lobo is Spanish for wolf,” Ethan said, his gaze straying around the room lest he betray a reaction to that smile. Ye gods, the plain, prim, buttoned-up Miss Portman had the smile of a benign goddess, so warm and charming it hurt to see.

“Pris is learning Spanish, French, and Italian from her uncle Thomas, who is a noted polyglot.” Miss Portman chose a book, frowned at it, and put it right back.

“What’s wrong with that one?” Ethan asked, amused at her expression.

“No pictures,” she explained. “Who in their right mind prints a storybook for children without pictures?”

“Somebody trying to save money on production costs. Did the wolf acquire a name?” He was asking to be polite, to make small talk with somebody who was likely not much befriended below stairs.

“He acquired various names.” Miss Portman chose another book and opened it for perusal. “Wolfgang Wolf was John’s nomination. Ford, being our youngest, voted for Poopoo Paws Wolfbottom.”

She said this with a straight face, which had probably made the children laugh all the harder.

“And the winner was?” Ethan hopped off the desk and crossed the room to help the lady to her feet. She frowned delicately—a puzzlement rather than a rebuke, Ethan surmised—then put her bare hand in his and let him draw her up from the floor.

“Lord Androcles Wolfgang Poopoo Paws Wolfbottom Wolf the fourth,” she recited. “Children like anything that makes the telling of a story longer and are ever willing to mention certain parts of the anatomy.”

“I see.” What he saw was a flawless complexion, velvety brown eyes staring up at him in wary consternation, and a wide, full mouth that hid a gorgeous smile. He stepped back and dropped her hand accordingly.

“I am off.” Miss Portman edged around him in the confines of the shelves, and Ethan caught a whiff of lemons. Of course she’d wear lemon verbena. This was probably a dictate in some secret manual for governesses.

“You haven’t joined the cavalcade of pony carts making for the scene of this bacchanal?” Ethan asked, standing his ground.

“I am not fond of equines,” Miss Portman replied. “Nor of animals in general, though I can appreciate the occasional cat. I choose to walk instead. The exercise is good for me, and I am less likely to be ridiculed by the children for my fears.”

“Shall I provide you escort?” Ethan heard himself ask.

Now where in the bloody, benighted hell had that come from? “It’s a pretty day,” Ethan went on, the same imp of inspiration not yet done with him. “I’ve missed my family, and I can work on correspondence any time.”

She wanted to refuse him. From the fleeting look in her eyes, Ethan deduced that his company ranked below that of Mr. Wolfbottom Wolf after a large meal of mutton and onion sandwiches.

And wasn’t that cheering, to find one’s company distasteful to a mere governess?

“Don’t let me impose, Miss Portman.” Ethan offered her a polite retreat. A bastard, even a wealthy one with passable looks, learned the knack of polite retreats. “I can always saddle my gelding and join the party later.” He saw his mistake when her eyes narrowed, saw she took the reference to his horse as a personal taunt.

“My apologies.” He was not sorry, he was behind in his correspondence. “I meant no offense, but you do not seem at a loss for company.”

“I am not,” she replied, peering at him. “Your children need to spend time with you outside this house, and you can carry the blanket and the book. Shall we?”

Oh, she was good, reducing him to the status of her bearer and making him work for even that privilege. An idea blossomed in the back of Ethan’s mind, borne of the realization she’d tamed the precocious Priscilla and could likely handle younger children even more easily. He let this idea unfurl in his awareness, where he could consider it from several angles at his leisure.

“Let me tidy up the desk,” he said, “while you find us that blanket, and I’ll join you in the kitchen momentarily.”

“As you wish.” She whisked off, her words implying Ethan had arranged matters to his own satisfaction, when in fact, he was at a loss to explain what he was doing trundling after a prim spinster to spend hours swatting flies and trying not to let the shrieks of children offend his beleaguered ears.