No Marriage of Convenience by Elizabeth Boyle

sneaked into the room.
    Mason could only wonder what this outburst was all about. Cousin Felicity had assured him the girls wanted husbands, and surely they must see for themselves they were ill fitted to undertake such a task.
    Besides, he was only trying to help.
    “If you think, Uncle, that we are going to take lessons from some petticoat merchant, you are sadly mistaken,” Louisa announced. “Mother would be appalled, and I am sure my father would call you out for the sheer insult of having that kind of woman in our house. Not to mention,” she said, jerking her thumb toward Hashim, who’d enteredthe room behind Cousin Felicity, “this heathen she’s brought along. Why, I won’t be surprised if the watch finds us all with our throats slit and the silver missing before the day is out.”
    She nodded to her elder siblings, and the threesome stuck their noses in the air and marched toward the door in sisterly unity. Their protest would have had some meaning if Maggie hadn’t tripped with her second step and bumped into Bea, who promptly lit into her sister with a litany of curses.
    Louisa grabbed their arms and started to drag them from the room before they lent more damage to her cause.
    Mason resisted the urge to berate his lot in life to the heavens.
    For there was no doubt in his mind that if he let his nieces loose on society in their current state, they would write a chapter in the family history that twenty generations of Ashlins would be unable to repair.
    Even worse was the rigid line of Madame Fontaine’s posture. Louisa’s insulting comments hadn’t sat well with the actress, and for that matter, they hadn’t gone over that well with him.
    Freddie and Caro had been dead for all these months, and it was high time he put his foot down and made his own rules as to who was welcome in the house.
    Madame Fontaine may be everything the girls and popular gossip claimed she was, but she was also a guest in his house, and as such, she would be given the due consideration that status conferred to a lady.
    Louisa had yet to cease her very vocal tirade as to her uncle’s mismanagement of their lives. “I can’t believe, Uncle, that you would think we need this…this… whor—”
    “Enough!” Mason said, his booming order shaking hiserrant nieces out of their circus antics and bringing them to shocked attention.
    Even Cousin Felicity, he noticed, usually a whirl of perpetual motion and worries, froze in place at his uncommon outburst.
    “But—” Louisa started again.
    “I said enough!” And he meant it. If he was going to restore the family name, he’d have to start by taking control of his household. He looked over at the girls, teetering as they were between righting Maggie and trying to flee from this unexpected wrath. “Margaret, stand up straight and don’t move.”
    “How dare you,” Beatrice said, coming to the defense of her sister. “Louisa has every right to call that woman a—”
    Mason swung his gaze squarely on his eldest niece. “Beatrice, one more foul word from your lips and you shall spend the rest of your life in a convent so silent the only sound you’ll ever hear is your own heart beating until the day you die.”
    Even Madame Fontaine took a step back from him at this point.
    The only one who seemed unfazed by his uncharacteristic outburst was the lady’s servant, Hashim. The imposing man stood in the corner, grinning like an idiot. When he noticed Mason’s gaze on him, the man didn’t blanch but nodded for him to continue, as if he approved of the Earl’s finally having come to the defense of his mistress.
    Mason had always had control of his classrooms, so a household of women shouldn’t be that much more difficult, he told himself, folding his hands behind his back and striking his most severe pose—the one he used on errant first-year students.
    “Now that I have your attention, you will each listen tome. I have retained Madame Fontaine’s services to assist you