Free The Baron's Governess Bride by Deborah Hale Page B

reaching home in time to see the girls off to bed and hear all the news about their week.
    Of course he could always visit with his daughters tomorrow, but he would have a busy day conferring with his steward about the spring planting and riding out to check on the progress of some improvements he was making to the estate. Part of him envied his fellow peers, who could swan off to London for months at a time, leaving the management of their lands entirely to hirelings. That had never been his family’s practice.
    When his carriage pulled up in front of Nethercross, Rupert could not help glancing toward the nursery windows, even though he knew it was far too late. Perhaps the girls had begged to wait up past their usual bedtime to welcome him home.
    But the nursery windows were dark.
    Rupert stifled a pang of disappointment. Had his daughters doubted he would return home tonight? Had they gone to bed feeling he’d let them down? Dependability was a quality he prized in others and strove to cultivate in himself. It would grieve him if his daughters viewed him otherwise.
    As he climbed out of the carriage and quietly entered the house, a more palatable possibility occurred to him. What if the girls had expected him to return tonight but Miss Ellerby had disregarded their pleas, sending them to bed at the usual hour? That seemed far more likely. The new governess struck him as strict and rigid, without a proper appreciation for the sensitive feelings of children. He would have to speak to her about that. At Nethercross, he expected healthy routine and discipline to be tempered with understanding and kindness.
    Rupert mulled over those thoughts as he climbed the stairs and strode down the dim corridor to the nursery. He would not dream of disturbing his daughters if they were asleep, yet he still felt compelled to look in on them.
    With slow, patient stealth, he let himself into the nursery then stood silent, listening for the tranquil drone of the girls’ breathing to assure him all was well. Instead, the first sound he heard was a sniffle from the direction of Sophie’s bed. It seemed to reach into his chest and give his heart a hard squeeze.
    But before he could fly to her bedside, another sound stopped him.
    It was a low, comforting murmur. “I’m here, Sophie. Everything will be all right. You had a bad dream. I know they can be frightening, but I promise they aren’t real.”
    Could that be the child’s stern governess?
    “It f-felt real,” Sophie’s plaintive whimper made Rupert long to wrap her securely in his arms and never let her go.
    But it sounded as if his daughter was being comforted quite well without him.
    “Perhaps it would help if you tell me about your dream,” Miss Ellerby urged her. “Then you might see that it could not possibly be true.”
    Sophie hesitated a moment then began to speak. Already her voice sounded less tearful—as if the effort to recall her dream helped release her from its dark thrall. “I was exploring the house, looking for everyone, but some of the rooms didn’t belong. What should have been the drawing room looked like the inside of the church and Papa’s study looked like a shop in the village. I didn’t know how they could have got into Nethercross.”
    “They couldn’t, could they?” Miss Ellerby sounded nothing like he had ever heard her before…except when she’d sung hymns on Sundays. “That means none of it could be real.”
    “I called for Mamzell and Papa,” Sophie continued. “I thought I heard their voices behind the doors. But when I opened them, the rooms were always empty.”
    He’d had a dream like that. As Rupert listened to what Sophie told her governess, the frustration and disappointment came flooding back to overwhelm him. Wandering through an empty house searching in vain for Annabelle, sometimes he caught a tantalizing whisper of her voice from behind a closed door. But when he opened it, she would always be gone save for a distant echo