Page 3 of The Marriage Method

“As are all the students at the Academy?” Mr. Quincey asked.

“To a one,” she said. “They come to us from all over the county. I flatter myself that we do our best for them.”

“Your best being…?”

She lifted one shoulder in an artfully casual shrug. “We feed them, house them, and provide them with an education that will best help them meet their potential.”

Mr. Quincey narrowed in on the word with single-minded precision. “Their potential for what, exactly?”

Nell’s mouth curved in a slow smile. She comprehended the unspoken crux of his question. He believed the Academy was a home for dangerous revolutionaries. Budding feminists and crusaders for equality, willing to go to any ends to achieve their goals, even if that meant destroying the occasional man who got in their way.

He wasn’t wrong.

• • • • •

Miles was not amused.

He might have known Miss Trewlove would turn out to be some manner of goddess. It was, after all, Gabriel Royce’s wife who had pointed Miles in her direction. And the newly minted Mrs. Royce was nothing if not trouble personified.

Miles was in no mood for it. Not this morning. Lawrence Cowgill had been gone for three days straight, leaving nothing behind in his desk but a notebook marked with a series of meaningless dates. In his absence, Miles had been forced to assign the paper’s famous gossip column to another of his reporters. A poor salve on a potentially fatal wound, but it was either that or go to press without it. The latter hadn’t been an option. Like it or not, the majority of the Courant’s dwindling circulation was owing to that cursed column.

They couldn’t afford to lose any more subscribers. They’d already lost too many as it was. In the aftermath of Miles’s series of articles exposing the treachery of a once-revered politician, Viscount Compton, many in society had closed ranks against the paper, no doubt frightened that they’d be targeted next—exposed and ruined by one of the Courant’s notoriously ruthless exposés.

It was only the gossip column that kept the fashionable public coming back. Without Cowgill to write it, the paper stood to lose a fortune. No one else was in possession of the secret sources that enabled him to deliver such unusually incisive tittle-tattle.

And now this.

Another disappointment, albeit one disguised in a rather beguiling package.

Miles ran a hand over the side of his face, wishing like the devil he’d followed his instincts and gone to Miss Corvus’s Academy himself. Instead, he’d wasted months, engaged in correspondence with a woman he had foolishly assumed was an antiquated spinster.

But she wasn’t.

Antiquated, that is.

With her flaxen blond hair, heart-shaped face, and graceful figure, Miss Trewlove had more in common with an angel than she did with his, admittedly narrow, preconception of a schoolteacher.

A sultry angel, at that.

Her hooded, long-lashed gray eyes had a deceptively sleepy quality to them. Like a tigress drowsing in the sun, as languorous as it was lethal. The effect was intensified by the elegant curve of her high cheekbones, and the voluptuous fullness of her lush Cupid’s-bow lips.

A small jet brooch in the shape of a butterfly sparkled at her throat, the only spot of brilliancy in her dull black mourning ensemble. “It’s a personal calculation,” she replied to him. “Every girl has a different set of strengths. A head for mathematics, for example. Or an aptitude for writing, or a skill for sport.”

“Sport,” Miles repeated. “Such as hunting down corrupt lords like Viscount Compton?”

Miss Trewlove lifted her winged brows. They were thick and arched, a shade darker than her hair. “You presume the Academy is connected to his downfall?”

“I more than presume it. Miss Corvus’s name came up often during my investigations. Or rather, the name she went by at the time she was connected to Lord Compton, some two decades ago.”

Miss Trewlove noticeably did not refute that connection. “A man has done wrong and has finally been punished for it. What benefit can there be in violating his victim’s privacy—whomever that victim might be?”

“I don’t mean to publish her story,” Miles said. He’d promised Gabriel he wouldn’t. He hadn’t, however, promised to forgo further inquiry. The mystery of Miss Corvus and her charity school was the single loose thread in his investigation into Lord Compton’s crimes. And Miles couldn’t abide a loose thread.

“Then what does it matter?” Miss Trewlove asked.

“Call it professional curiosity,” he said.

Disapproval darkened her gaze. “At a lady’s expense? That isn’t very gentlemanly.”