Vanity immediately nodded, her topknot of hair juddering. “Yes, sir, you certainly are!” she answered with the enthusiasm of a woman who can see Employee of the Month in her near future.
Amelia pushed back her chair so forcefully it scraped against the floor. Ignoring the shot of pain that the awful, ill-mannered noise sent through her nerves, she stood, smiling with a frosty politeness. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Going to rest?” Dummersby asked, smugly condescending. “Quite understandable, my dear. Long days of work are hard on feminine delicacy.”
Amelia’s smile in response was so masterfully serene, it ought to have inaugurated a new annual award category: Women in Academia Restraining Themselves from Slapping Men (gold medals for any and all ladies who achieved it). “To the contrary, Mr. Dummersby,” she said. “I am going back to work.” The sooner they got it done, the sooner she could return to the serenity of Oxford. Rowdy students would be a balm after the company of these people. “Enjoy your meal.”
And she swept from the room before her dignity completely shattered.
—
But the nextafternoon, a miracle occurred. Walking from the formal drawing room to the less-formal-but-still-overdecorated sitting room, reading volume two ofThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireas she went,Amelia rounded a corner to find Caleb standing in the corridor ahead, inspecting a marble statue of Hephaestus. She halted, he turned, and they stared at each other in silence. They were, for the first time in days, completely alone.
Suddenly, Amelia found herself backed against a wall by almost six feet of impatient (but exquisitely perfumed) maleness before she realized what was happening. Her book fell from numb fingers to the floor, where it narrowly missed breaking toes with its weight. Caleb loomed over her, one hand on the wall beside her head and a dark heat beneath his long eyelashes. His smile only failed to meet the definition ofcaressingbecause, alas, it was not actively doing so to her lips.
“Hello, Professor,” he said in a low voice.
Amelia swallowed dryly. She’d been greeted thus by hundreds of people over the years, but never before had it ignited such a reaction within her. Indeed, she’d not have been surprised had she fallen pregnant from the words. “Professor Sterling,” she managed to reply, her crisp manner concealing the sudden, sparkling chaos inside.
“I’ve been wanting to get you all to myself for days now,” Caleb said, his gaze moving down her body as if he saw that internal chaos and recognized something of himself in it.
“Oh?”
“You’ve been…” He leaned in to whisper against her ear. “Very naughty.”
“Nonsense.” Amelia’s vocal cords supplied this response out of sheer habit, because her brain had abruptly announced it was divorcing her, and was throwing her intelligence out the window like left-behind clothes and toiletries.
“Yes,” Caleb said. “You’ve robbed me of my—”
“Good senses,” she inserted.
“Teaspoon,” he corrected her.
Amelia blinked as her intelligence snapped back into place. “What?Nonsense.You have it. You took it from me that night in the dining room.”
“I put it in a safe bag in my suitcase,” Caleb told her, “but you’ve obviously taken it back, considering how that sauceboat erupted yesterday.” He began sliding his free hand into her skirt pocket, and she slapped it away.
“I have not,” she whispered fiercely, glancing along the corridor to be sure no one was present to witness this scene. “Perhaps it’s in one ofyourpockets.” She began delving into them, even as he searched all of hers. Their hands rummaged among each other’s clothing and brushed against each other’s limbs, and so comprehensive was this mutual searching that their breath came fast and their faces began to warm. Only the approaching sound of sharp, tapping footsteps forced them to stop. Caleb stepped back, pushing a rather trembling hand through his hair. Amelia smoothed her skirt.
“Did you actually double-check in your suitcase before deciding to manhandle me?” she asked with a stern look.
“No,” Caleb said, and grinned wickedly. Amelia would have gasped, but at that moment Lady Ruperta appeared around a corner, trailed by her housekeeper.
It was like the approach of a royal procession, albeit a very small one. Amelia’s dignity yanked her into perfect posture with the speed of someone whose adolescence had been ruled by apitiless tyrantboarding school headmistress. But Lady Ruperta afforded her only the briefest glance, a mere flicker of generic disgust that consigned Amelia, her dignity, and her doctorate into a bin labeledTradesperson. Garbed in black, Lady Ruperta seemed to sap the light from oil lamps along the corridor walls as she went. Her taffeta dress made a spectral whisper. Her shadow seemed as baleful as the weather outside. The housekeeper, also in black, did not lower herself by even a glance. She was an austere woman named Mrs. Cuddle (pronounced eerily alike tocudgel), who wore at her waist a chatelaine of keys that no doubt would have been bones had she lived a thousand years ago. Amelia put her hands behind her back lest she cross herself. Within seconds, the women had departed around another corner, but Amelia knew their image would haunt the night to come.
“I swear, Radcliffe could have written Lady Ruperta’s character,” Caleb murmured.
“Do you mean Egremont Radcliffe, who took part in the Rising of the North?” Amelia asked confusedly.
Caleb chuckled, and he brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek, even though Amelia was almost certain one did not exist there. “As soon as we’re home again I am going to buy you a novel.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Because you—are a termagant who drives me insane!” he replied, his voice rising as he stepped away from her. Amelia sighed noiselessly before looking around to see a door beginning to open farther down the corridor. Pipe smoke drifted out.
“Fiend!”she snapped, and retrieving her book from the floor, she stomped off around the same corner Lady Ruperta and Mrs. Cuddle had taken.
Then stopped, astonished, to see a long stretch of corridor ahead of her, not a single door within it, and neither woman anywhere in sight.
