Page 67 of The Luckiest Lady in London

But before she could say anything to shield herself from embarrassment, he went on. “I would have to start you with the fundamentals and assume that you know nothing beyond elementary arithmetic.”

“But I can solve—” She stopped, self-conscious. “Saying I can solve paired equations now would be like telling a safari hunter that I once stepped on an ant, wouldn’t it? Or that I once caught a mouse in a trap?”

“You once caught a mouse? I run from those satanic creatures.”

She had the urge to giggle at the image he brought to mind, but suppressed her mirth. She did not want to be disarmed by his humor—it would be even more difficult to be wary when she was dissolving in laughter.

Instead, she cleared her throat. “Will you actually teach me?”

For a moment he seemed disappointed that his joke wasn’t better received. She felt a strange pang in her chest. She had to remind herself that with him, there was no such thing as simply wishing to please her. Always he aimed to exert more control, to reap more power.

He tapped a pencil against the barrel of her telescope. “See, this is why so many gentlemen never marry. You get yourself a pretty wife, you spend half of your waking hours pleasuring her; then you spend the other half eradicating her ignorance. Soon your estate smolders in neglect and your personal hygiene suffers. Your tenants complain, your staff depart, and your wife won’t let you near her anymore because you are poor and malodorous.”

Something about his tone—a barely perceptible melancholy—made her want to reach out for his hand. But it was probably her mind playing tricks on her. She needed to defend against him, not comfort him.

“I had eleven pounds and eight shillings of emergency money set aside,” she said briskly. “I will earmark it for soap, so you never need to reek, no matter how poor you become.”

He looked at her a moment, his expression inscrutable. “Well, in that case, I must test you to see exactly how undereducated you are. Then we will need to spruce up the schoolroom—a dismal place. After that, I will try to teach you, provided you can refrain from seducing the professor.”

A tactical retreat, she thought. She’d done the same herself, steering a conversation into the somewhat less complicated realm of the bedchamber. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Will you rap me on the hand with a yardstick if I do try to seduce the professor?”

“Of course,” he said. “I might even have to bend you over the table and spank you.”

“Oh, my.” She touched her throat. “I suppose I had better let you know that I’ve never been in the presence of a learned professor without somehow becoming naked in the process.”

That had led to a very good time in bed, including a few playful thwacks on her bottom. But now it was the middle of the next afternoon, his lordship was sequestered with his secretary, and she was alone in the schoolroom, looking about.

She wouldn’t go so far as to call it dismal, but compared to the rococo airiness of his apartment, it was undoubtedly dull and uninspiring, all dark panels and somber drapes. Much of one wall was taken up with a big blackboard. Near the windows stood a lectern; in the middle of the room, a desk and a chair.

Inside one glass-fronted cabinet was a rock collection, with each mineral’s name, provenance, and date of sampling recorded in a meticulous hand. Her attention snagged by the sparkling interior of a geode, she didn’t realize for some time that all of the rocks came from locations on the estate, in the neighboring countryside, or from parks in London during the Season.

She had assumed that since he’d never had to submit to the fixed schedule of a school, he might have visited interesting, glamorous places when other boys were stuck in drafty classrooms. But if anything, his childhood had been almost as geographically circumscribed as her own.

It was disconcerting to think of him not as a man who marshaled wealth, beauty, and cleverness to obtain everything his heart desired, but as a possibly lonely little boy who could no more control the events of his own life than he could change the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

She shook her head: She was reading too much into a room that he hadn’t visited in a decade. If anyone was born able to manipulate, it would be him. His nannies probably ran themselves to the ground to please him. His parents would have lavished him with presents. And what father wouldn’t be thrilled to have sired such a son?

All the same, she left in a pensive and perhaps mildly forlorn mood.

* * *

Felix felt as if he were in the middle of a long stretch of a high wire, unable to go back to where he’d started, nor reach the relief of the far end—if there was such a thing as the relief of the far end.

He needed a safety net: If she were already in love with him, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible if he were to fall off his shaky perch.

Looking back, it was shocking that he hadn’t been particularly concerned about the state of her heart. Whether she loved him had been immaterial; it had been enough for him to hold her mesmerized and unable to escape.

Now he was the one mesmerized and unable to escape.

As much as he pleased her in bed and as much as she couldn’t seem to get enough of him, like a racetrack, the bed was a closed venue. All the distances covered, all the thunderous finishes, and still they were in the exact same place as before.

He needed to do something that would open the terrain, that would in fact break through the confines. The decision to invite her to his observatory was not made lightly. It was a door that, once opened, could not be so easily closed again, the door to almost the entirety of his private life, something he shared with no one else in Society.

Even after the decision had been made, he still hesitated: It would be no different from the gifts he’d presented to his parents, in the hope of pleasing them and pleading his case.

The weather, overcast when it wasn’t actively raining, gave him a valid enough excuse to postpone the visit night after night.

But eventually the sky cleared.