Page 84 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Chapter 19

Louisa’s lessons began on the second day of the New Year, after their guests had departed.

Since she’d last visited the schoolroom, a bronze model of the solar system had been placed on top of one of the shelves. The easel-like blackboard next to her husband’s desk had been painted with a grid of lines. And though the golden tulips were gone, there was now a large mixed bouquet on the deep windowsill, a splash of color against the greyness of yet another winter day.

In a fawn tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows, the professor arrived exactly on time. He opened his lecture notes, checked his supply of chalk, and tapped one piece of chalk against the painted lines on the easel blackboard. “We’ll start with the Cartesian grid.”

* * *

When Louisa was called to the small blackboard and asked to find various coordinates on the grid, she’d been all too conscious of the shape of his hand at the top of the easel, the way his hair curled at his nape as he reached in to take another piece of chalk, and the scent of the fancy soap they’d been given at Christmas, which made him smell as if he had just taken a stroll, in the snow, across an entire slope of pine and spruce.

But this physical proximity, as dangerous as it was, was not the reason she had resisted and then postponed the lessons for as long as she had. She’d been afraid he might prove to be a good teacher; as it turned out, he was an exceptional one.

A love for his subject, a deep understanding of its intricacies, a logical, orderly progression of topics, and a delivery as charismatic and mesmerizing as any rallying speech from Henry V.

She sat spellbound by this other side of him, the antithesis of the largely smoke-and-mirrors Ideal Gentleman. This was a man who had arrived at his knowledge and competence the honest way—no tricks, no shortcuts, no manipulation of the perception of others.

A man of substance.

An hour flew by.

She left the schoolroom with four pages of sprawling notes and returned to her rooms to see her obviously flushed face in the mirror. It was another hour before she was sufficiently recovered to tackle her homework.

And when she had done so, for reasons that did not exactly make sense, she walked out to her balcony, removed the cover from her telescope, pushed it out to the balustrade, and pointed its nine-and-a-half-inch aperture toward the Roman folly in the distance.

There were once again dress dummies on the belvedere. No, not dress dummies: a single dress dummy, clad in a tweed coat much like those her husband wore around the estate, with a boutonniere pinned to the lapel.

And the boutonniere was none other than a sprig of golden tulip.

I am hopelessly in love with you.

* * *

She was the perfect student.

She was always on time, always ready to learn, and always willing to ask questions. Her notes looked like those of a monkey attempting cuneiform, but her homework was always impeccably neat and almost always completely correct. In fact, she missed only one problem, on the third day of their lessons, and it had vexed her so much that it hadn’t happened again.

However, Felix, by the end of their second lesson, already regretted that he hadn’t hired a tutor for her instead.

She had the most potent gaze in the world.

He could not fault her for looking at him as he described how to graph an equation or calculate the slope of a line—after all, she was supposed to pay attention. And it wasn’t as if she licked her lips, played with her hair, or toyed with the buttons on her blouse. To the contrary, she was indisputably prim and proper, her pen flying across her notebook, her expression serious, sometimes frowning slightly, as she took in his explanations.

And yet, ten minutes into a lecture he would be tumescent. And at the end of a lesson he would be ragingly erect.

It was in the slight part of her lips as she stared at him, the heightening of the color in her cheeks as the minutes passed, the way her left hand gripped onto the edge of her small desk during the latter part of a lesson, as if she were trying to physically restrain herself.

He had to relieve himself with his hand after every lesson. And sometimes another time after she came to show him her homework. During their lessons, he would write problems on the big blackboard for her to solve, and he would find himself standing far too close to her, watching her, and barely holding himself back from pushing her against the blackboard and having his way with her.

All the same, when she asked, after the lessons had gone on for a fortnight, whether she could have two lessons a day, he said yes.

And then immediately locked himself in his bedroom, desperate for relief.

* * *

If he were actually someone hired to tutor her, Louisa would have been doomed.

The purposeful, fluid movements of his wrist as his chalk dashed across the blackboard held her rapt. His perfect freehand circles and parabolas sent frissons of pleasure through her. The talk of quadratic equations, matrices, and inverse functions were so much erotic poetry that set her belly aflutter. And if he even so much as hinted at trigonometry, well, she burned.