“Let me get the other fabrics I brought for you to consider.” The dressmaker departed for the adjacent room which no doubt housed a repository of fabric.
Rachel’s back ached and a chill set across her body from the long hours of standing in nothing but her chemise and a half-sewn dress.
Anthony walked in and barreled right toward her. “I’ve been thinking about the formula you left me and I need to—”
Rachel crossed her arms over her chest. She blushed from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair. The seamstresses squealed. From the uproar, the dressmaker returned and frosted their intruder with a withering stare. “Lord Anthony!”
At her icy authority, Anthony stepped back. He frowned, looking Rachel up and down. Thunderstruck, his jaw dropped with the dawning realization of her dishabille and his indiscretion. “My apologies.”
The dressmaker slammed the door in his face. When Rachel’s lightheadedness diminished, she gave a small smile. Poor Anthony. She had baited and whetted his appetite with the hydraulic formula on incompressible flows. Of course, he’d be like a dog after a bone until he obtained more answers.
Predictable.
Chapter Three
Anthony scowled. He knew exactly what Miss Thorne was doing, making him cool his heels through fittings, a nap, her toilette. He had received a note from her, informing him that Lord Humphrey, her cousin Jacob’s half-brother, had offered to be her escort this evening, relieving Anthony of his duty. Time had completely gotten away from Anthony and he was arriving at Chelmsford’s home at the eleventh hour. He scaled the steps, tossed his hat and coat to the awaiting footman.
Already seated at the dinner table, pink-cheeked and smiling, was Miss Thorne, like a flower among weeds. The blue dress she wore, miraculously prepared by the seamstresses this afternoon, molded snugly to her narrow waist. Her breasts pushed high enough to spill impressively over the bodice. On any other woman the gown would be lackluster, but on Rachel, the gown evoked a timeless elegance, like a mathematical theorem exactly proportional to a number of independent ideas he could grasp in a theorem, and inversely proportional to the endeavor it took to envisage them. In spite of Anthony’s astonishment, it was difficult to believe she was the same outlandish woman who had invaded his laboratory, and then dared to keep him at bay all afternoon.
Anthony nodded to Lord Humphrey and Lady March. The rest of the fifty inhabitants he could care less about. Rachel finished an anecdote and pure energy boomed around her, a tangible throb of laughter.
He was seated in the only chair left across from her. “Miss Thorne, I’d like to continue our discussion.” His request came out as a command and she straightened.
“Enjoy the party,” said his host, Lord Chelmsford. Chelmsford, his former roommate at Eton had a predilection for taverns, billiard rooms and other forbidden premises. Where Anthony excelled and prodigiously graduated in two years before attending Oxford, Chelmsford barely finished Eton at four years, no doubt earning his degree in buffoonery. Time had not altered him.
“Shocked to see you. Thought you’d fallen off the edge of the world,” said Chelmsford.
Anthony ignored him. “About the hydraulic—”
Miss Thorne sighed, her eyes, though a gentle blue, seemed unusually penetrating, as if they had witnessed a profundity of experience seldom met by a person her age.
“You should have learned patience, Lord Anthony. It’s a conquering virtue.”
“There’s no time for it.” Right now, he was a highly combustible, biological and chemical compound ready to explode. “Unless you really don’t know.”Take that, Miss Thorne.With certainty, she’d submit to thumbscrews before she let him have the upper hand.
She disentangled herself from her partner’s conversation and smiled at him impudently. Wisely, Anthony restrained himself from grinning outright. It wouldn’t do to send Miss Thorne into a temper. Beneath that angelic expression, her eyes glittered then darkened, and then with a momentary flash, bore through him for revealing her as a bluestocking.
“Drawing upon Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and laws of viscosity” she said, “I implemented Bernoulli’s Calculus that affirms for an inviscid flow of a non-conducting fluid. An increase in the speed of the fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or a decrease in the fluid’s potential energy.”
Everyone turned and stared. A woman having intellectual interests? Anthony did not care. It was in the interest of science. “I had rejected Bernoulli in my calculations.”
“Your error, Lord Anthony. You need to move from Pascal.” She inclined her head, a candid censure, indicating he was using calculus from an earlier mathematician.
“Amazing,” said Lord Robert Ward, his guttural voice grating, as if he worked in a coalmine and swallowed dust. “Didn’t know you made errors, Rutland.”
A vein pulsed at the base of Anthony’s throat while Lord Ward did a double take, his gaze making a slow motion trail from Miss Thorne’s face down to her bodice. Hot blood shot through Anthony’s veins. How long would it take for a two hundred and thirty-five-pound man to dissolve in a vat of sulfuric acid? One day? Two days?
Lord Ward had already gained entrance to the coveted Royal Society of Science. Of course, from the notes on electricity he had paid someone to steal from Anthony’s laboratory a year ago.
His hands fisted. Oh, what he would like to do to…could do…
At the age of nine, Anthony’s older brother, Nicolas had insisted on boxing lessons for the two of them. At first, Anthony had seen the sport as transitory but the exercise proved to give him satisfaction and kept him in shape. He sparred with the tenants on his father’s estate, massive farm boys built from hardened work, eager to take on the duke’s son with no regard for his position. The fighting was dirty, and he liked it that way.
Anthony focused his gaze on his nemesis. “So nice to see you, Ward. Your presence, like an indefinite visit from an impossible senior relative, with all the dottiness, fragility of mind, and…terrible thievery. When you leave, no one will shed tears of sadness, on the contrary, tears of relief.”
“Are you questioning my honor?”
“I am not questioning your honor; I am denying its existence.”
