Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love by Christi Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page A

same Lord Williams had earlier yesterday afternoon.
    She should be solely focused on the words he’d floated into the air, his outlandish request to make her a governess, but he ran his lips along the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist, and such delicious shivers shot up her arm and somehow fanned all the way to her belly.
    He picked his gaze up from his tender ministrations and grinned like he knew all her darkest, most wicked thoughts, and God help her, she wanted to divulge all those wicked thoughts to him. “Yes, Miss Marshville. I’d like to offer you employment as a governess.”
    The spell he’d cast upon her loosened. “A governess?” she blurted. She knew she must sound like the lack-wit he’d accused her of being a short while ago, but for all the sketchpads and charcoal in the world, she could not make sense of his offer.
    He placed one more kiss on the inside of her wrist, and then released her. “Yes.”
    A governess. His governess.
    “For who?” she eyed him skeptically.
    “My sisters. I’ve four altogether, but one has already made her Come Out, so you’d have three charges. My mother charged me with the task of finding them a suitable governess.”
    Juliet continued to eye him with a wary skepticism. “You would hire me, a stranger who found you outside your gaming hell, who entered your carriage, demanded her cottage returned—?”
    “My cottage,” he interjected.
    “And slapped you once—”
    “Nearly twice,” he pointed out.
    “Nearly twice,” she amended. “You’d ask that woman to care for your sisters?”
    “I would.”
    Between Albert and Lord Williams, she’d come to expect nefarious intentions from most gentlemen.
    She’d prepared for him to offer her a spot in his bed and not this respectable offer of governess to his sisters.
    She continued to study him, knowing intuitively there was more to his decent proposal. “You must be either mad or desperate to offer a woman you’ve only just met the post of governess to your sisters. Why…why, I could be a violent woman.”
    The right corner of his lips tugged up in a smile. With his unfashionably long crop of loose dark curls, and the wicked grin on his lips, he had the look of a marauding pirate, and certainly not that of a respectable nobleman.
    “You don’t strike me as a violent young lady, Miss Marshville, with of course the exception of the slap,”
    “Nearly two,” she felt inclined to remind him.
    “Nearly two,” he repeated with a grin. “Are you interested in the post, then?”
    Juliet sat back and folded her arms across her chest. She shook her head. Mad . He is as mad as one bound for Bedlam.
    She continued to eye him skeptically. She knew next to nothing about the earl beyond what the papers reported. He kept membership at White’s and Brooke’s and gambled heavily in his clubs and won there. He had scores of mistresses as her brother had pointed out.
    Now the gentleman spoke of three, nay four sisters and a mother. Yes, even irredeemable rogues such as the Earl of Sinclair had families. They didn’t simply spring from the soil with the summer’s greens.
    Odd, the thought of it somehow made him seem more real, and less…less…of a coldhearted monster who’d ruthlessly won her cottage in a game of cards.
    “Well, Miss Marshville,” he murmured, freeing her from her silent thoughts. “What say you?”
    “I say you’re mad,” she blurted.
    He grinned. “Perhaps.”
    Mad or desperate.
    After all, Juliet had learned at Albert and Baron Williams’ hands that desperation drove a woman to do desperate things. “Why would a powerful, wealthy earl such as yourself ask a young lady he does not know to care for his sisters?” She detected the heavy skepticism in her own question.
    The carriage rattled over a solid bump, and jostled Juliet. Her derriere left the seat a moment, and then she landed with a solid thump back on the bench. She winced and resisted the unladylike urge to rub her now sore