Aunt Margaret pursed her lips dubiously. “You’re the expert.”
She let that comment sit for a while. His lifelong assumptions on his wife’s guileless sister vanished, and his opinion of Aunt Margaret climbed another notch.
“The girl takes great importance in her work. You need a bathtub and would appreciate her talents. Simple as that.”
“I see,” he said, but that infuriating quirk of her lips told him he’d just amused her.
“You better take charge and communicate your need as soon as possible.” She looked like a goose ready to snap, rose, and the butler rushed to open the door, nodding his approval.
The duke raised a supercilious brow. “I see where all the cunning comes from in the family. You could box the ears of the best of the King’s courtiers.”
Aunt Margaret snorted. “It’s taken you years to understand that? I congratulate you on your accomplishment and accept your acknowledgement as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant as a compliment. I despair and remain thankful you are on our side. If King George put you up against King Louis IVI, all of France would flee to Germany.”
* * *
Anthony took Rachel’s hand and helped her into the open carriage. They had worked for several hours while Aunt Margaret slumbered, and then escorted his aunt back to the house. If only to work in his lab longer to recover from another failed experiment. But he’d promised Rachel a tour of the estate and was unable to refuse her.
How pretty she looked, wrapped in a black velvet cape bordered with ermine. “Lord Ward entertains all kinds of morbid amusements. His kind have no respect for science.”
Anthony frowned at the guard following them, hating the idea that he was a prisoner in his home, but Rachel’s blue eyes glowed like winter turning to a warm summer lit sea and her excitement was infectious, making him forget his jailer.
“We are not going to think about Lord Ward and let him spoil our outing,” she commanded.
Anthony raised an eyebrow at her bold decree, climbed in beside her and laid thick furs across their laps. Harnessed in front, two matching black bays shook their manes and pawed the ground eager to be off. Anthony snapped his wrists and rippled the lines. The huge horses in perfect unison sprinted down the road and into the vast forests surrounding his ancestral home.
“Isn’t it delightful to get out and get some fresh air? Enlivens the brain.”
He couldn’t have agreed more.Nothing like glacial cold to tamp down the mounting fire in his body.Hours of trying to concentrate on his work left him wanting, her intellect sweeping over him like a carnal caress. It was not logical. How could he control his body? There must be some sense made to this madness. He exhaled, the air forming a perfect cloud.
“I have accomplished the impossible and have pulled you from your laboratory.”
Was there enchantment in her smile?
“If you like frostbite and the bitter cold, cutting you with a hundred knives.”
Rachel giggled. “Acknowledge all the beauty before us. How the afternoon sun glitters off the snow-burdened branches and hills, and the slight wind that tosses the tops of the towering oaks and whistles softly through their lower limbs, its power diminished by the thickness of the forest. So silent and peaceful as if the forest is holding its breath.”
“All I hear is the ringing in my ears where sound is frozen and the cracking of my iced-up face when I speak.”
“That sound from your face cracking is a smile born. Admit it, you are enjoying yourself.”
“I think you are eccentric,” he huffed.
She leaned into him to speak conspiratorially, and he savored her warmth. “My eccentricity has taken years of dedicated effort to acquire.”
“No doubt. What next, Miss Thorne, chattering with cold until my teeth break? Or something industrious that a Colonial privateer would do, hanging my frozen body from the yardarm until the crows have picked their fill?”
“You are hopeless.”
He chose a less traveled road, and yielded to a cloying compulsion to detour toward what made Miss Thorne tick.Why had she said she would never marry?“This visit is about obtaining a husband?”
She stiffened beside him.
“You’re the same age as Abby, two and twenty,” he argued with his own smile of bemusement. “That’s hardly in your dotage.”
Because I’m not that desirable.His heart gave a kick. Couldn’t get out of his head what she had muttered at the ball when she thought he hadn’t heard. She then piqued his curiosity in the science of what people were thinking, needing to understand why someone of Rachel’s loveliness would think she was not attractive?
