Page 72 of The Luckiest Lady in London

“Find the planet and prove me wrong.”

“I will, tonight itself.”

She smiled, closing the notebook, only to remember that she was practically covered in them. There were notebooks on her lap, next to her on the chair, on both armrests, behind her head, and at her feet—she’d wanted to feel as if she were in his embrace. “You won’t. It will rain tonight. You will better spend your time in my bed.”

He looked at her oddly, almost as if he were displeased by that invitation. “Still haven’t tired of me yet?”

His question unnerved her. “Any day now,” she said, deliberately flippant. “So you’d best take advantage of my lust while it lasts.”

He picked up a newspaper that had been set down on top of a low shelf and brought it to his desk. She gazed at him as he began to read while still standing—the beautiful profile, the strong shoulder, the long, sinewy arm—but only a moment; she didn’t want him to catch her staring.

So she stared at the cover of the notebook instead. Planet IX, volume 2. After a few minutes, he left the paper and returned a book to its place on the shelves just behind her chair.

Her heart began to pound as his hand cupped her face and turned her enough for him to kiss her. “Finally,” she murmured. “I was wondering whether I’d expressed my carnal needs forcefully enough.”

“Worry not. You always express your carnal needs loud and clear.”

It further unnerved her that she couldn’t tell whether he wanted to reward or punish her for being so forward.

He rounded to the front of her and shoved aside all the notebooks from her person with a carelessness that was completely at odds with the thousands of meticulous hours that must have gone into the work. Next thing she knew, her skirts were bunched at her waist. He sank to his knees, pushed her thighs apart, and pulled her to the edge of the seat.

She began to tremble almost from the moment his mouth descended on her. And she did not stop trembling until long after he was finished.

Only to tremble again when he rewarded—or was it punished?—her the exact same way that night.

* * *

She was recovering from a case of sniffles brought on by a sudden onslaught of autumnal weather. Her nose was red. The rest of her face, too, was somewhat ruddy. And the somber blue of her cloak did her complexion no favors, making her appear even more splotchy.

All this Felix perceived. But he could see only loveliness, endless, endless loveliness.

Love was not blind, but it might mimic a deteriorating case of cataracts.

“No luminiferous aether?” she asked, half frowning, smoothing the thick blanket on her knees with her gloved hand. Outside the carriage, the day was cold and drizzly, as it had been since the middle of October. “But that’s the medium in which light travels, isn’t it? What next, no gravity either?”

Sometimes he wondered what she’d made of him lately. He was afflicted with a deep possessiveness intermingled with an equally deep frustration that he could not move an inch closer to her heart, even with the help of his telescope. She might not be able to identify exactly what ailed him, but as much as he tried to keep it to himself, she had to have sensed, to some degree, his inner disequilibrium.

“You can verify gravity,” he answered, “even if you cannot see, hear, or touch it. Luminiferous aether, on the other hand, is entirely conjecture. Why can’t light simply travel through a vacuum?”

They were approaching the nearest town: The renovation of the schoolroom was almost finished and she wanted her own supply of notebooks before her lessons began. He was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of those lessons: In his vanity, he had wanted to be the one to reveal to her the scope and majesty of his favorite disciplines, but now the lessons seemed simply the next thing that would not garner him her heart.

“So that’s what your correspondence with the American professors is about, disproving the existence of aether?”

He had familiarized her with his various scientific inquiries and correspondences in the hope that she might yet fall in love with what he did, if not who he was. When had he come to be made of foolish hopes? Or perhaps more accurately, when had he come to be once again made of foolish hopes?

“We discussed the specifics of their experiment. If aether exists, then one should be able to measure its relative motion to our planet as it moves through all the surrounding aether. If you are interested, there is a lecture coming up in London on refining the measurement of the speed of light, and that should address some of the issues surrounding whether aether plays a—”

The carriage had slowed to a crawl as it neared the high street. Her attention was squarely on him. Then it wasn’t.

She stared beyond his shoulder, her expression one of both confusion and consternation. He turned around to see what had caused such a reaction on her part.

His gut tightened. Miss Jane Edwards, Lord Firth’s sister, emerged from a milliner’s shop, arm in arm with a man. The man opened an umbrella, his face turned toward Miss Edwards and away from Felix. But Felix didn’t need to see the man’s face to know that he could not be Lord Firth, unless Lord Firth had added two stone in weight and four inches in height.

“That is Miss Edwards,” said Louisa, as their carriage began to pull away.

“So it is,” Felix replied, hoping he was as good an actor as he used to be. “I wonder who is the man—not Lord Firth, to be sure.”

Louisa, her lips curled in distaste, still stared after Miss Edwards and her companion, who climbed into a carriage of their own that drove off in the opposite direction.