My New Boss Terrified Everyone — Until I Caught Him Doing This
Part 1
Mud dried on the hem of my cheap wool skirt as the carriage abandoned me at the crumbling estate.
The rain battered the carriage roof for the entire journey, sounding like gravel thrown by a spiteful child.
I carried my forged letter of recommendation and a desperate need to disappear before morning.
My landlord had wanted the overdue rent paid in favors rather than shillings, so I stole a dead woman’s references and ran.
I was supposed to be a highly educated governess, but I was just a desperate bookkeeper’s daughter trying to survive another winter.
Oak Haven did not look grand when I finally arrived, it looked completely exhausted.
The house was built of dark weeping stone and choked by aggressive ivy pulling the structure slowly back into the muddy earth.
I dragged my own trunk up the front steps, my right shoulder screaming in protest.
It took three agonizing minutes of standing in the biting wind for the heavy oak door to open.
Mrs. Higgins stood there, smelling sharply of lye soap, boiled cabbage, and rigid authority.
Her face was a map of deep, disapproving lines as she coldly told me I was late.
She didn’t even look at my papers, her eyes darting instead to the mud dripping onto her pristine marble floor.
She rigidly informed me the Duke of Somerton was away in London and ordered me to keep his nieces out of the east wing.
She gave me a freezing room with a window that whistled in the wind and strictly allotted me one single bucket of coal a day.
The next morning, I followed the sound of smashing porcelain to find the nursery.
My heart did a slow, heavy thud in my chest as I pushed open the massive oak door.
My new wards were eight-year-old twins standing on a scratched mahogany table with heavy brass candlesticks raised like weapons.
Heather and Brenda looked like feral chimney sweeps with matted dark hair and soot-smudged faces.
They smelled overwhelmingly of unwashed hair and stale, stolen sugar.
Heather proudly announced the last governess cried when they put a live frog in her afternoon tea.
I didn’t gasp in horror and I certainly didn’t scold them for the broken china on the rug.
I simply stepped carefully over a decapitated doll and pulled a heavy chair away from the table.
I told them bluntly that I needed a wage and they needed to leave me in peace to read by the fire.
Heather dropped her candlestick with a heavy thud and casually mentioned their terrifying uncle had returned in the middle of the night.
She said he was currently locked in the library breaking glass and shouting.
A cold prickle of genuine awareness washed over the back of my neck.
I desperately needed to know exactly where he was so I could stay on the absolute opposite side of the estate.
By three o’clock, the nursery fire had dwindled to pathetic, dying orange embers.
The coal bucket was entirely empty, and the girls’ small hands were turning a faint, mottled blue.
Frostbite was a significantly stronger deterrent than Mrs. Higgins’ strict warnings about the forbidden east wing.
I grabbed my empty tin bucket and descended alone into the dark labyrinth of the lower floors.
Heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight against the gloomy gray afternoon light, plunging the corridors into deep shadows.
I navigated blindly by the faint smell of wood smoke, praying to find a stocked scuttle in an empty parlor.
A heavy mahogany door stood slightly ajar at the very end of the hall, spilling warm golden light into the drafty corridor.
The grand library smelled intensely of ancient leather, beeswax polish, and very expensive whiskey.
A roaring hearth fire illuminated a massive iron scuttle overflowing with shiny, beautiful black coal.
I didn’t bother using the brass tongs because they would be far too loud in the quiet room.
I dropped quickly to my knees and grabbed a jagged lump of coal with my bare hand.
It left a dark smear of black dust on my pale skin as I dropped it gently into my tin bucket.
I reached eagerly for another piece when a low, scraping baritone cut through the total silence.
Thievery is a very bold choice on your absolute first day.
I froze completely with my trembling fingers wrapped tightly around a third lump of coal.
Sitting rigidly in a wingback chair engulfed by the shadows of the far corner was a man who didn’t look like a duke at all.
Craig had harsh, angular features, dangerously exhausted eyes, and a throat tight with violent tension.
Those flat, colorless eyes calculated the exact cost of breaking something, or someone.
He smelled heavily of stale brandy, cold ash, and damp wool.
I stood up slowly, my stiff knees cracking loudly in the quiet room, and dropped the coal into my bucket.
I told him his nieces were freezing and I needed the fuel for the third-floor nursery.
He took a very slow sip of his amber whiskey and calmly reminded me the housekeeper allotted the coal.
I fired back instantly that the housekeeper wasn’t sitting in a room that was currently freezing her toes off.
My heart hammered frantically against my ribs as I waited to be thrown out into the freezing mud.
Every survival instinct I possessed screamed at me to apologize, but I knew instinctively that men like him fed on weakness.
He set his heavy crystal glass down on a side table with a deliberate slowness that made my stomach clench violently.
He stood up, radiating an eerie, predatory grace, and stopped exactly three feet away from me.
The sharp smell of whiskey was much stronger now, laced with a harsh metallic tang of adrenaline.
I locked my knees together so I wouldn’t sway under the crushing weight of his terrifying stare.
I braced myself for the monster everyone feared, but what he did next made my blood freeze for an entirely different reason.
