encouraged further. “Follow me inside and let us talk in the parlor.”
She sensed hesitation in him, and she released his arm, dismayed at her breach in conduct right out in the open.
Only when she gave him space did he stand, but he followed her as she led him to the front stoop.
“I’m not usually so prone to clumsiness,” she lied, wondering at her innate need to explain her ineptitude to this stark and monumental stranger. “I’ve misplaced my spectacles somewhere in the glasshouse, you see, and I had an extra pair, but they were…” A wave of nerves gathered on the horizon, threatening to tumble over her, and she firmly forged on before it could wash her away. “Well, that story is rather why I’m in need of you.”
“You need me to… help you find your spectacles?” He sounded genuinely baffled, and Felicity worried that he might be a little daft. His measured speech could connote a lack of cognition rather than an abundance of it.
“Tell me, are you here in answer to my advertisements in the paper, or did one of your colleagues I contacted refer you to me?”
“The paper…” His answer almost sounded like a question.
But at least he was literate.
Felicity climbed the eight steps to her grand door and pulled the bell that would summon her staff. “Did you bring references?” she queried, glancing back at him.
He lingered on the walk, one foot cautiously landing on the bottom stair. His hand gripped one of the points of the wrought iron gate, and she wondered if he could simply snap it in twain.
It was odd to have him looking up at her.
His hand went to his pocket. “I— do not have references on me.”
Something in his voice tugged at her heart. Beneath his almost absurd profusion of brawn. Beneath the innate malice that seemed to roll from his shoulders in palpable waves. Even beneath the shards of gravel and glass in his sonorous voice.
Lingered a note she couldn’t define.
It echoed from someplace so abysmal she might have imagined it. But to her, it felt like his every word— innocuous as they’d been— was laced with lament.
With fathomless desolation.
She had the strangest notion that this was quite possibly the loneliest creature she’d ever met.
Felicity had always been aware of what a ridiculous human she was. And yet, she stood in front of a dangerous man, awash with the same feeling she suffered when Balthazar, her ancient Labrador, silently begged for scraps of her supper.
“Do not let that distress you,” she rushed to appease him. “I’m forever forgetting or misplacing things. We can still have our interview and you can give me your papers at a later time.”
The door swung open and rather than her butler, it was young Billings, the coal boy, who blinked up at her. “What happened to you, miss? Are you all right?”
“Oh nothing, I’ve been in the garden and the rear entrance was locked.” She swept inside and reached behind her to untie her apron and hand it to the lad. “Will you please summon Mrs. Winterton to chaperone my first interview of the day?”
“Mrs. Winterton inn’t here, miss,” the lad informed her. “She left a note saying she ‘ad to take an early train north to see to her bruva… or was it her uncle?”
“Oh, dear. I hope it’s not serious.”
“Dunno, miss. Do you want me to summon Mrs. Pickering?”
Felicity looked over her shoulder to find the man had not followed her up the stairs. “Don’t bother Mrs. Pickering from her breakfast, but when she’s finished, she might join us in my personal parlor where I’ll be making inquiries regarding qualifications for the position.”
“Yes, miss.” The boy scampered off, trailing the long ribbons of her apron in his wake.
She turned to the man who’d not moved from his spot. “If you might forgive the impropriety of the two of us spending a moment alone together, we could begin our conversation,” she suggested. “My housekeeper will join us directly.”
“Men like me have very little use for propriety.”
The way he said that sent little shivers skittering along her skin. For some inexplicable reason, she hoped Mrs. Pickering didn’t hurry her breakfast. Indeed, she found herself very much liking the idea of being alone with this man.
Which made absolutely no sense.
Felicity was possibly the most skittish woman of her acquaintance, especially in the company of men. And this one, this mountain of masculinity, was possibly the most imposing fellow she’d seen since… well, in at least a