The Governess and the Gargoyle

Miss Hattie Fenn has nothing left but her wits and a battered trunk. The post at Blanchmoor is beneath her station, the house is falling down, and the master of it will not show his face before noon. Colonel Elias Blanchard is certainly the most disagreeable man she has ever met — and she cannot stop talking to him. Elias, forty-four, disfigured and done with the world, wants only to be left alone in it. Instead he has been given a governess with the nerve to argue with him in his own kitchen at midnight. She is young enough to be his daughter and utterly unimpressed by him, which is, he is beginning to suspect, the exact reason he cannot look away. When a scandal from Elias's past arrives on his doorstep and the whole village turns to watch, Hattie must decide whether the life she wants is worth the wreck of her reputation. She decides it is.