Page 64 of The Luckiest Lady in London

“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she admonished. “I distrust you and will continue to do so.”

“Your distrust is the spice that gives my life flavor,” he said grandly. “Long may your suspicions simmer.”

Little did he know how much he would come to regret that sentiment.

Chapter 14

Louisa had never brushed her teeth or combed her hair at quarter to four in the morning. But her lover had said he would be coming to her room at four to see how she was getting on with her astronomical observation, so here she was, seeing to her toilette in the dead of the night for a man she couldn’t trust.

It was always a problem when he put his hands on her. His touch diminished both her capacity to remember the past and her ability to plan for the future, so that she was liable to think only as far back as the previous time they had made love, and forward only to the next time they would make love.

Her common sense was further decimated, given that she’d spent at least an hour sitting between his legs, with his arms around her.

Had he never stopped coming to her bed, had he never shown her the kind of cruelty of which he was capable, she would have been deliriously happy by now.

She was still too pleased for her own good, but it was a happiness with thorns.

At exactly four o’clock, he walked in, kissed her on her hair, and led her out through her sitting room to the balcony where she’d stationed the telescope.

“Let me show you something.”

He removed the tarp from the telescope and pushed it, on its wheeled base, out to the edge of the balcony—he was a pleasure to behold, in his shirt with two buttons open.

“Find Jupiter, will you?” he said.

She wrested her gaze away from him. Telescopes, marvelous as they were, magnified only a tiny patch of the sky. She had better know at which coordinates she ought to point the thing before she looked into the eyepiece.

Jupiter came into view, a slightly blurred cream-and-orange sphere. “It looks the same as usual.”

“Let me see.” He took her place at the eyepiece. “Hmm. This telescope should be able to achieve a greater resolution than this.”

He maneuvered various knobs, a rather adorable scowl of concentration on his face. And those strong, shapely forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves—she couldn’t stop looking at them.

Remember this, she thought to herself. Remember this weakness in yourself. Remember that you do not know why he behaved abominably a fortnight ago, or why he is sweetness and sunshine now. It could all go away again in the blink of an eye, without warning, without explanations.

“Aha!” He felt around the base of the telescope, opened a drawer she hadn’t even known was there, and swapped in a different eyepiece. “Now come see.”

When she looked this time, Jupiter was much smaller, barely the size of a farthing. The image, however, had become razor sharp. Not only could she see two of Jupiter’s moons, but she could see the perfectly round shadow one of them cast on the giant planet’s surface.

A solar eclipse on Jupiter. She sucked in a breath. “How did you know it was going to happen?”

“I didn’t. I saw it myself only half an hour ago. So I thought I’d show it to you, too.”

“Where is your telescope?” She knew he had to have one.

“Somewhere on the estate,” he teased.

She would not beg him to show it to her. Well, not yet. Putting her eye to the eyepiece again, she asked, “So how did you become interested in the stars?”

“I used to have trouble sleeping as a child. So I would slip out, walk about, look at the sky, and, after a while, notice the wheeling of the stars.”

“Was your health frail?” She couldn’t quite imagine him as a sickly child.

“No, I was quite sturdy.”

She glanced back at him. Perhaps it was his stillness, the darkness of the hour, or the soft light spilling out from the sitting room and limning his features, but she remembered the late marchioness’s portrait in the gallery, her dramatically beautiful face against a velvety black background.

“You resemble your mother a great deal.”