Page 6 of Substitute Bride

When he realized what he was feeling, he stiffened in his chair. What the hell was wrong with him? Those kinds of thoughts were entirely inappropriate—for more reasons than he could count.

It must have just been one of those random flukes. It was part of being a man—being hit with lust occasionally, even when there was nothing real underlying it.

He’d never been particularly attracted to Rose before. She was just part of the background of his life. He was engaged to a beautiful woman, and his whole life was mapped out for him accordingly.

If he let the various aspects of his life bleed into each other, his world would turn back into chaos—the way it had when Melissa had died and he’d barely been able to function at all. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

He shook the stray feeling away and lowered the hot pad. “Okay. Thanks for this. I need to get some work done.”

Rose’s eyes widened, obviously surprised by his gruffness. She took the hot pad though, and lowered her eyes. “Of course. I need to get the girls to school anyway.”

He watched her leave, feeling another flicker of interest at the sway of her full hips beneath the hemline of her T-shirt.

Shit, he needed to pull himself together. It was probably just another outgrowth of the stress, but he had to get it under control immediately.

He wasn’t the kind of man who lusted after his nanny, and there was no way in hell he was going to take advantage of Rose.

She’d been so good to him and the girls over the past couple of years, and he simply couldn’t lose her.

2

Later that morning, Rose spread out the thick silk of a mid-nineteenth-century ivory ball gown that had ostensibly belonged to one of her long-dead ancestors. She scanned the folds of the fabric, checking its condition.

“This one is in good shape,” she said, glancing back at her older sister Deanna, who was inspecting an ornate black gown that must have been made for someone in full mourning. “I think it just needs to be cleaned.”

“It looks like this one was water damaged when the basement flooded,” Deanna said, her pale green eyes serious as she double-checked the doorway to the dining room of their historic family house in one of the oldest districts in Savannah.

After Rose had taken the girls to school, Deanna had picked her up to bring her over to the house so they could work on these old clothes. Rose was pretty much free until she had to pick up Julie at twelve thirty when her kindergarten class ended.

“Don’t tell Grandmama,” Rose murmured, checking the door just like Deanna had. “Maybe we can hide the damage when we get these all organized.”

Their grandmother was obsessed with the family’s past, treating all vestiges of their history—this old house, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century garments that had been saved, and other heirlooms such as furniture, clocks, and vases—like they were part of the family.

Thanks to the funding of Deanna’s new husband, they had recently had the old house restored, so now their grandmother wanted to have all her “treasures” fixed up and displayed throughout the newly beautified rooms of the house.

Deanna was twenty-seven, two years older than Rose, and she was a practical, good-humored person nearly all the time. Like the other two Beaufort sisters, she was long accustomed to putting up with their grandmother’s eccentricities, even when, less than a year ago, those eccentricities had landed her in a marriage-of-convenience.

She’d ended up falling in love with Mitchell, her husband, and Rose had never seen her sister as happy as she’d been for the past several months. But just because that situation had a happy ending didn’t mean their grandmother’s stubborn attachment to history didn’t cause them continual inconvenience.

“You know,” Rose said, an idea coming to her as she brushed at the folds of the silk ball gown, “what if we were to get a few dress forms—you know the kind that dressmakers use—to display some of these outfits that are in really good condition. That would take up a lot of room and would make the clothes look really good. Then maybe we could just put away the rest of them—the ones that aren’t in such great shape.”

“She’s going to want all of them here in the house somewhere where she can get at them.”

“We could put them in the closets of all those empty bedrooms upstairs,” Rose said. “Then they’d be here but not in sight all the time, and the ones that are damaged wouldn’t be such eyesores.”

Deanna nodded, obviously thinking it through. “Yeah. That’s a good idea. We could pull out some of the prettier handkerchiefs, gloves, and scarves and maybe get them framed behind glass. They would look kind of good that way, and it would be better than just heaping them in a big pile.”

“That would be perfect.” Rose was perking up at the idea of doing something both sensible and attractive with all these old clothes. She’d had visions of her grandmother wanting them hanging all over the walls on hooks, and she’d been trying to plan an argument against such a scheme. “So we’d just need to buy some frames and the forms for the dresses and then probably pay to get some of the nicer ones cleaned.”

“Yeah.” Deanna stood up, shaking out the black mourning dress as she did and wrinkling her nose. She was a few inches shorter than Rose and had always been slimmer. Rose used to be jealous of her sister’s figure, but now she simply didn’t have the time or energy to worry about her excessive curves. “These clothes always did smell kind of musty, and if they’re going to be sitting out as part of the décor, we probably want them to smell nicer.”

“Well, all of that shouldn’t be too expensive,” Rose said, trying to work out a financial estimate in her head. “I’ve got some in savings I can chip in, and Kelly said they actually had a little extra in their budget this month since you and Mitchell have been helping out.”

Kelly was their youngest sister, the only one still living at home. She had another year left of college, but she handled most of the daily running of the house as well since their grandmother mostly just presided and didn’t actually work very much anymore.

“Mitchell and I can cover the costs,” Deanna said with a frown. “There’s no reason for you to use up your savings.”

“I’m not going to use them up.” Rose had actually very little in savings since she’d been sending most of her income home to help out since she’d started working. James paid her a more-than-fair salary and she had no living expenses herself, but until Deanna had gotten married, there had been almost no money between them to keep food on her grandmother’s table and the old house not falling down around their heads. “There’s no reason why you and Mitchell have to pay for everything. It’s your money. Not family money. We don’t want to be leeches on you.”