Page 31 of The Governess and the Rogue

“If this is to work⁠—”

“Oh, what’s the point?” Bea exclaimed in a burst of feeling. “I don’t know what possessed me to tell Mrs. Dimsdale that you and I are engaged. She didn’t believe it. The other passengers aren’t going to believe it either.”

“Not if you continue looking so dashed mournful, they won’t,” Jack snapped back, nettled. “If we were really engaged, you’d be smiling from ear to ear!”

Bea’s eyes widened. She was startled into a choked laugh. “My goodness. You do think a lot of yourself.”

Jack pushed his hand through his hair. The devil! He rarely permitted himself to be goaded into incivility. And he never boasted. Not to ladies, at any rate. And certainly not about himself.

At length, he managed a sheepish grimace. “Vanity, thy name is Beresford,” he muttered. “If it makes any difference, I’m the least conceited of all my brothers.”

“And the most pursued, I gather.”

“Not by any conceivable measure. That distinction belongs to my oldest brother, James. Next to him and my second oldest brother, Ivo, my charms are decidedly third rate.”

“I can scarcely credit that,” she said.

Jack’s mouth twitched. “If I didn’t know you better, Miss Layton, I’d suspect that was a compliment.”

“You don’t know me at all, Colonel Beresford,” she returned in repressive tones.

Her starchiness only made Jack’s smile broaden. He was about to say something more when the unmistakable clatter of footsteps sounded from the stairs that led up from the deck below.

It seemed that Mrs. Dimsdale had wasted no time in informing the others of Jack’s presence on board—and of his scandalous engagement to her disgraced former governess.

All that remained now was to face them.

“That will be the welcoming party,” Jack said.

Bea’s gaze jolted toward the stairs where the tall plumes on a pair of fashionable ladies’ bonnets were just coming into view. The starch left her spine. Her face went a shade paler. “Jack⁠—”

“All will be well,” he assured her. “Granted, it’s going to be bloody awkward, but once the formalities are out of the way⁠—”

“I don’t know if I can⁠—”

“You can.” He abruptly took her hand, enfolding it in his.

Bea’s cheeks flushed pink, just as they had last night. But unlike last night, this time, she didn’t pull away from him. Instead, she curled her ice-cold fingers around his in return, holding his hand tight.

Jack felt a disconcerting swell of protectiveness for her.

And that wasn’t all.

There was something else there too. Some alarming quiver of heat that spiked his blood and made his heart lose its rhythm.

“I can’t think how I’m to behave,” she whispered as the other passengers began to appear.

“That’s easy enough,” he whispered back. “Just smile, Bea. And pretend you’re wildly in love with me.”

Chapter Ten

Bea didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep at Jack’s wry directive. She’d never been in love with anyone, let alone wildly in love. How on earth was she to pretend to such a condition?

Naturally, there had been gentlemen she’d liked before. One couldn’t reach the exalted age of nearly seven and twenty years without having encountered one or two of them. Though none stood out particularly in her memory. And certainly, none had inspired anything like butterflies.

They were all vague, faceless figures from days long gone by. The handsome young sailor who had shouldered her trunk for her at the docks when she’d first arrived in India as a girl of seventeen. The officer who had danced with her at the garden pavilion in Delhi. Or the bespectacled shopkeeper who had been so kind to her when she was struggling with her young charges during a trip to the bazaar in Calcutta.

What about him? she’d often thought during such fleeting encounters. Could he be the one?