Page 1

Chapter

ONE

W HERE IT ALL BEGAN, SEVEN YEARS BEFORE…

“Good gracious me! What on earth is all that muck on your shoes, Charlotte?”

Trust the eagle-eyed Miss P to appear in the hallway at the precise moment Lottie was trying to sneak back up the stairs.

“You really need to start looking where you are going, Charlotte, and how you go there.” The owner of Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies, Lottie’s new home for the foreseeable future, peered at the mud-covered toes of Lottie’s boots in resigned despair.

“When you bound about everywhere at the speed you tend to, unpleasant things splatter.” Then her nose wrinkled in exasperated disgust. “A proper young lady should always avoid mud at all costs, dear. It isn’t seemly to be wearing it.

It hints at a complete lack of decorum .

” The older woman huffed out a sigh, shaking her head before repeating, as she seemed to do hourly, with the resigned patience of an absolute saint, her mantra and the ethos.

“You are one of my protégées, Charlotte. Handpicked because I know that deep down you have so much potential to succeed.” She glanced at the shoes again and shuddered.

“Very deep down. But to unleash all that potential, to become the crème de la crème and a true protégée of this school, you have to start embracing and embodying all of the Four D ’s.

” While Miss P launched into the already familiar lecture, Lottie bit the inside of her lip so that she would not give in to the overwhelming temptation to roll her eyes and tell her new mentor that she was probably wasting her time.

There wasn’t anything genteel or subdued to be found in Lottie’s character and you could place all that she knew about behaving like a proper young lady on the head of a pin.

And there would likely still be space left on it.

“The Four D ’s are the pillars that define who we are, Charlotte.

Duty. Decorum . Diligence.” Miss Prentice counted each word on her upheld fingers.

“And discretion at all times! At. All. Times!” The index finger wagged now.

“It needs to become a habit, dear. It needs to be ingrained until it is second nature. That”—she wafted a regal hand to encompass the entire building—“is what makes my graduates so special. What ensures that they are the most-sought-after employees in any great house. There are run-of-the-mill governesses, or secretaries, or lady’s companions, Charlotte, and there are my protégées.

” Miss P’s chin lifted with pride, and rightly so.

Being a protégée guaranteed one of her girls earned double the salary of all the run-of-the-mill governesses, secretaries, or lady’s companions serving the ton.

That was the single biggest reason that Lottie was determined to make a success out of her stint here, despite all her many glaring character failings.

That and the inconceivable fact that Miss P had seen something in her to handpick her.

Her!

Lottie Travers!

Tomboy extraordinaire.

Nobody had been more shocked than she had been when the letter of invitation had arrived out of the blue at the family farm a month ago, and while her father and brothers had almost wet themselves laughing at the prospect of her training to become one of the crème de la crème, they had all been unanimous.

It was an amazing opportunity too fortuitous to turn down.

Especially when fortune and the Travers clan were virtual strangers and, through no fault of their own, money ran through their hands like sand through a sieve.

This could, if she really, really, really tried to suppress practically everything that made her uniquely her, help her family financially.

“You have been given a great opportunity here…” Those wily schoolmistress’s eyes dropped to Lottie’s boots again. “Yet all that mud makes me wonder if you are paying any attention at all in your deportment lessons.”

“I am paying attention and I will try harder in them, Miss P, I promise. It’s just…” There was no point denying some of the unfortunate truth she was trying so hard to contain. “I grew up on a farm and therefore, I suppose, I don’t really pay much attention to mud because it is everywhere.”

Miss P sighed, her exasperation softening.

“I know, dear, and I should make allowances, no matter how much potential I see in you. Let us blame my passionate reprimand on the morning grumps when I am most prone to lecture.” She gently reached out to tuck one of Lottie’s errant blond waves behind her ear.

“You have years to become a true protégée and I am expecting too much for you to be proficient in the Four D ’s in just a week. ”

“I will try harder, Miss P, I promise.” For both Miss P and for her five menfolk struggling to make ends meet back in Kent.

“I know you will, dearest.”

Eager to escape now that the mood had changed and before Miss P questioned her further, Lottie offered a grateful smile before she turned.

She went to dash up the stairs, then remembering that decorum seemed to be her biggest nemesis, stopped her feet from running to attempt a suitably decorous ascent instead.

She managed all of three stairs before Miss P decided to ask the question she’d been dreading anyway.

“But where exactly have you been to get so muddy at”—she glanced at the grandfather clock, incredulous again—“six o’clock in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” With an awkward shrug, Lottie turned and then crossed her fingers behind her back to negate the necessary lie while she shuffled her filthy feet beneath the hem of her dress.

Cursing herself for not having the wherewithal to clean them outside while simultaneously hoping that her kindly new mentor wouldn’t notice that the boots, which were caked in mud, were also, in fact, not the dainty sort that any decorous young lady should be wearing here in Mayfair at all.

Instead, they were sturdy men’s boots.

To be more precise, they were her youngest brother Dan’s riding boots.

Shamelessly pilfered from his wardrobe and stuffed in her trunk along with several pairs of breeches liberated from each of her other three brothers’ closets on the morning she had departed the family farm.

“I went to watch the sunrise in the garden.” Another lie she made sure to cross her fingers to mitigate against. Because according to the gospel of her twin middle brothers Matthew and Luke, if you could get away with crossed fingers without someone demanding to see them, that went some way to canceling the lie out.

A falsehood went from being a lie to being a fib, and fibs weren’t quite as bad.

“I am never good at sleeping in a strange bed.”

Another lie, her third in quick succession and one that would have definitely had her called out at home.

Both her father and her four brothers knew that she could sleep anywhere—even upright if necessary—never mind that her new bed here was an absolute delight.

Plump feather pillows, an even plumper mattress, a thick and cozy eiderdown, and sheets so smooth and crisp she sighed with unadulterated pleasure every single time she slipped between them.

Lottie would even go as far as to say that she had never slept so soundly in her life as she had in the six nights she had been here and, from someone who always slept like the dead, that was saying something.

No doubt the rich and frothy bedtime cocoa that all the students were plied with also helped her swift drift into blissful dreamland too.

She had a decent bed at home, of course, and Papa worked his fingers to the bone to ensure that none of his five children had ever gone to bed cold or hungry.

But the sheets in Aylesford were old and well-darned and nobody had ever taught Lottie how to make cocoa.

If her mother had known, she had taken that secret to the grave with her, because there was no recipe for it in the stuffed notebook of collected wisdom dear Mama had written for her when her daughter had been barely ten and she had known the end was near.

As that precious tome included a recipe for a salve to soothe a snakebite, when there weren’t any snakes in Kent and probably weren’t any in the entire British Isles either, her practical and thorough mother hadn’t had the first clue about cocoa either.

Which was a great shame because Lottie knew she would have loved it. So would her brothers. And Papa.

A wave of homesickness hit her hard.

Lord, how she missed her menfolk. The noise, the laughter.

The incessant teasing. The freedom that came with living in an all-male household two miles outside of the village.

Back home, alien concepts like decorum didn’t exist to trip her up and remind her of how little knowledge she had about behaving like a lady.

Which in turn made her suddenly mourn her mother all over again.

As that pain must have shown on her face, Miss P reached up for her hand and squeezed it tight.

“It is perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed, dear, especially when all this is so new. But it will pass, I promise. And it’s not as if you are never going to see home again, is it?

You’ll be back with your family for Whitsun and Christmas and Easter.

A whole month in the summer with no pedantic old ladies nagging you about the need for avoiding mud. ”

“I know,” said Lottie, feeling guilty at Miss P’s sympathy when it wasn’t in any way, shape, or form deserved this morning.

“But there is something about the hour before dawn that reminds me of home. Maybe because it is the only time that London is truly quiet and I’m a country mouse at heart.

” One used to galloping across her father’s fields at the precise moment the sun poked its head above the horizon.