The Seducer by Madeline Hunter Read Free Book Online

She took a place across from him.
    He poured her some coffee from a silver urn on the table. “Your visits to the city are amusing you?”
    “Are you being treated well? Do you have any complaints? Are you learning your school lessons?”
    That brought his gaze on her very directly.
    “The questions. From the school,” she explained, too aware of how his attention still flustered her. “You continue to ask them, in a way.”
    “And are you being treated well?”
    His cadence made it clear that they now spoke of
his
care and treatment.
    “Very well. I am learning my school lessons too. It is a type of education that your sister gives me, is it not? The visits to this fine city and its many sites. The dancing lessons twice a week. The gentle instructions in comportment. Even the many visits to shops are classes in taste.”
    “Does this displease you?”
    “Only a nun would not enjoy it. I will be the most accomplished and elegant governess in England.”
    “A refined manner can only enhance your chance to get a position.”
    “I seek a position with a well-to-do family, not a duke.”
    “Well, perhaps you will obtain a better one now.”
    Perhaps she could, but that would not do. She had not been born in such an elevated world. The answers that she sought could not be found in it.
    Then again, maybe he was not referring to a position as a governess at all. Madame Leblanc’s warnings kept echoing in her mind as this largesse and training were heaped on her. She had concluded that was nonsense, but sometimes this man looked at her in a way that made her remember the breathless moment in her chamber that first day. Nothing would change in his expression, but a tiny flicker of time would expand into another mesmerizing eternity.
    Being alone with him here was making it happen again.
    She forced her gaze down to her plate, to break that spell. “Anyway, I do feel, sometimes, that I am still in a school.”
    “A more comfortable one, I hope. Indulge my sister. She has never had a protégée before, and it is giving her great pleasure.”
    That would be reason enough to set aside her misgivings. However, she could not shake the notion that she was not really Jeanette’s protégée, but his.
    “Paul is English, isn’t he?” she asked, to turn the conversation away from her. “You were both speaking English when I entered.”
    “He is.”
    “Are you? He speaks French with an accent, but you do not.”
    “I am a citizen of the world, but I am French by birth. I have spent many years among English-speaking people. Both languages are natural to me and I probably think of myself as more English than French now.”
    “That must have been awkward during the war.”
    “I spent little time in either country during the war. I was normally in the West Indies or the East.”
    Most of the time, but not all of it. Once a year he returned to France and visited a school in Rouen. She doubted that he had come back specifically for that.
    His willingness to speak of himself emboldened her. She had been curious about him for years.
    “Your name. St. John. Madame always pronounced it in the French way,
Saint-Jean,
but I saw it written once and it was English.”
    “I was blessed with a name that is very adaptable.”
    “So was I. Albret. Madame always spoke it
Al-brey,
but I knew she was wrong and that the ‘t’ should be clear, because I am English.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    What made her so sure of that? It was not only the fragments of old memories, and of crossing the water as a girl. She could not swear to which language had been spoken in those shadowy bits of her life. “I dream in English.”
    “Your dreams did not lie. You are indeed English. Did you speak English at the school?”
    “Madame was a great supporter of Napoleon and refused to hear it spoken even as a lesson.”
    “Have you lost it, then? Except in your dreams?”
    “I have a Bible that is English. I read it aloud every night.”
    “Of