Outrageously Yours (10 page)

She caught herself staring, arrested by the firm lines of his face, the power of his silhouette. Then she blinked and shifted her gaze back to the generator, remembering that men didn’t look at each other like that; most tended to make eye contact only rarely. “I . . . er . . . had access to a first-rate library for most of my life. My uncle’s. It made country life so much more interesting.”

She was babbling, and bit the insides of her cheeks to stop herself.

Lord Harrow smiled indulgently. “That should prove enormously to my advantage. Come.” With the easy familiarity of a master to his student, he set his hand at her nape. “I wish to acquaint you with the components I work with. The conducting metals, the gauges of the wires, that sort of thing. It’s important that you become well versed with the strength of the current produced by the various elements. Have you used a galvanometer before?”

“Uh . . . no, sir.” With his palm and splayed fingers producing warmth on her neck, it was all she could do to concentrate on the question he had asked her.

His hold, though gentle, communicated a sense of strength, of authority. His fingertips produced a different sort of current that left her tingling, and scattered her thoughts even as his demonstration yesterday had scattered broken glass and burning potassium across the tabletop.

She swallowed, cleared her throat, and attempted to gather the shards of her common sense. “I have not used one, but I have studied the basic principles.”

“Good. Then we’ll assemble an improvised current meter together. Come.”

She hesitated. “Another test, sir?”

“No, this activity isn’t designed to trip you up, Ned.” He led her to a second laboratory table and released her with what seemed to her a manly shake of encouragement, even affection.

He took a box off the shelf behind them, set it on the table, and lifted the lid. The interior was filled with what on first glance appeared to be clock parts—dials and gears, rods and shafts. Then he pulled a book from the same shelf, flipped it open, and set it beside the box. “You are quite possibly the most erudite first year I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve grown curious as to how far your knowledge will take you. Let’s see what you’re capable of.”

Ivy stepped up to the table’s edge and peered down at the labeled diagram that filled a page in the book. Lord Harrow no longer touched her, but the memory of the contact continued to smolder along her nape, a sensation that proved as distracting as it was compelling. With him beside her, it wasn’t easy to remember the descriptions of galvanometers she had read in Uncle Edward’s library.

“I’m not exactly sure how to begin, sir....”

“I’ll guide you, but you do the assembling.” He reached one formidable arm around her shoulder and chose a demarcated copper ring from the gadgets in the box. “This was once part of a clock dial, but it will serve nicely in measuring current output. Now, what do you suppose comes next?”

He continued to stand uncommonly close as she consulted the diagram, and then selected a magnetized compass needle, which she attached to a length of fine silk thread. “Like this, sir?”

“Very good. Now you’ll need a conductor to catch the current. An improvised coil, perhaps?”

As she took up a thin copper wire and began wrapping it around a slender dowel to form a clumsy coil, he leaned over her shoulder, his warm breath grazing her cheek.

“I’m impressed with your workmanship, Ned. Yes, that’s correct. You need to suspend the needle from the coil, and position both over the dial. Are you quite certain you’ve never done this before?”

“First time, sir.” Concentrating on configuring the coil and needle as he instructed, she turned her head only slightly as she replied, but even that small shift brought her mouth perilously close to his. As though generating a thermodynamic attraction, the heat of his lips pulled her closer still. At the last moment Ivy gasped and froze, and Lord Harrow pulled back with a start.

“S
orry, sir!”

“No, Ned, my fault.” Retreating to the other side of the laboratory table, Simon seized the first voltaic cell with which his hands came in contact, while the near collision of his lips against hers continued to heat his loins and propel his heart against his chest wall.

He hadn’t been that close to a woman since . . . since Aurelia. And the pleasurable sensations that traveled through him felt like a betrayal of her memory. Not enough time had passed, perhaps never would. She had been infinitely more than just his wife, at least in the sense that most men thought of their wives. She had been his partner, his equal, his lover. When she died, he lost everything . . .
everything
.

Except his work, continued in her memory.

After adding the necessary acid to the cell, he lingered long enough to harness his pulse before returning to his equally unsettled assistant, if her crimson cheeks were any indication. Even without the loss he had suffered at Aurelia’s death, how could he have forgotten himself so entirely that he’d come within a fiery hairsbreadth of kissing someone he was pretending to believe was a boy?

“I, ah, had merely been about to point out that your thread had slipped off center of the needle. See there.” He pointed, relieved to discover that the thread had indeed slipped a fraction; not enough to skew the measurement, but enough to convince young Ned that he had entered into the employ of an exacting taskmaster.

“Oh, yes, I see. Thank you, sir.”

Keeping a good yard or so of space and cool air between them, Simon placed the cell beside the galvanometer she had constructed. “Now we’ll measure the current and see how accurate your indicator is.”

As she hooked up the wires to connect the cell to the meter, he watched, not her progress, but
her
. The deft movements of her small hands, the adorable crease of concentration above her nose, the secret softness of a body hidden beneath men’s clothing, all captured his gaze and his approval. Ah, yes, he approved.

“This way, sir?” She threaded the connecting wire through the coil.

He briefly shifted his focus. “That’s correct, Ned. You’re almost done.”

Galileo’s teeth, but he had never encountered a woman like her. Bluestockings and academic-minded suffragists, yes, those he had experienced aplenty. They were usually bespectacled, prudish spinsters who hung about the university gates engaging anyone who would listen in a debate about the importance of women gaining access to formal education and higher learning.

Over the years, a few had even forced their way into the lecture halls, and it was not unheard of for the more insistent of their set to don britches and a coat in the attempt to fool the registrar’s office—just as this woman had done.

Some of their antics bordered on the absurd, but Simon sympathized with their plight; theirs was not an unreasonable argument. His mother had been well educated. Aurelia, too. Even Gwendolyn, before her descent into impulsive, self-destructive behavior, had shown aptitude for her studies.

“Ready to make the final connection, my lord.”

“Go ahead.” He found himself drawing closer to her again, not to assist in the procedure, but to inhale the scent of her cropped curls, to visually caress the creamy curve of her nape exposed above her collar.

This would never do. He had tried telling himself he tolerated her charade only because he championed her desire to explore the field they both loved so well. No one could fake the kind of knowledge she possessed, and no one but the truly passionate could wade through the often dry exposition covering the past several centuries of research.

There were those words again: desire and passion. When it came to “Ned,” he seemed unable to govern his impulses or depend upon his common sense.

“It’s working!” A vivid flush suffused her cheeks. “Look, sir, the needle is moving in a perfect perpendicular pattern to the current.”

Her joy was infectious, so much so that Simon very nearly caught her up in his arms and spun her about. He stopped himself just in time, answering her enthusiasm with an approving if sedate, “So it is, Ned. Well-done.”

“Thank you, sir.” She jotted down the numbers on the dial indicated by the needle. Her excitement might have been measured on that galvanometer as well; elation lit up in her features and added a tremor to her voice. “What next?”

“I have a store of chemicals and compounds I’d like you to catalogue.”

Her enthusiasm dimmed, and he fought back a grin. Who wouldn’t rather engage in hands-on experimentation than take up pen and notepaper and sort through a musty storage cupboard? He’d certainly endured his share of tedium as a younger man, but he had learned from it as well, as this student would do.

“Tell me, Ned. How old are you?”

After pausing a beat, she said, “Eighteen, sir.”

He wondered how close to her true age that was. If he were to judge her features by male standards, she looked about the age she claimed, if not younger. But in comparing her with other females he knew, his sister included, he guessed her age to be closer to twenty, perhaps even a year or two older than that. For no reason he cared to acknowledge, he hoped she
was
above twenty, making her more his contemporary and so much less a child.

“You’ve your whole life ahead of you,” he mused aloud. “What would you most like to do with it?”

Her answer came without an instant’s delay. “
This.
I don’t believe I realized how much before today . . . before I stepped through that doorway. I feel at home surrounded by this equipment, in a way I’ve never done elsewhere.”

Her zeal raised an ache in his chest. He empathized with her dream, yet he also grieved that such a dream could never be, not for her. Her pretense could not continue indefinitely. At some point, probably not long hence, someone not as understanding as he would discover her deception, and there could be a lofty price to pay. The thought of the humiliation she would have to endure made him inwardly cringe.

Was he wrong to encourage her? Perhaps she’d be better off if he called her out now and sent her home where she belonged, where she’d come to no harm.

But now that he thought of it . . .

“Where are you from, Ned?”

“London, most recently, sir. I reside in a house my sisters and I inherited from our uncle.”

“I see.” He frowned as a vague memory prodded. Then he remembered what Bartram Hendslew had revealed about the “odd little chap,” information that contradicted the impression Ned had given so far of having been raised by an uncle. “What of your parents? Does not your father serve in Her Majesty’s government in some capacity?”

The quick lowering of her lashes failed to conceal a flicker of alarm. “That’s true, sir. He is an undersecretary to the chancellor of the exchequer.”

She had spoken those last words as if by rote, prompting Simon to entertain serious doubts about their truth. “Then this uncle of yours . . . ?”

“My mother’s brother. Mother passed away when we were all quite young, and we began spending a good deal of time with Uncle Edward. He was retired, you see, had time to devote to us while business kept Father from home.”

“That would explain your having such extensive access to your uncle’s library.”

“Yes, sir.” She compressed her lips and darted a glance around the laboratory. “The cataloguing, sir. I suppose I should be getting on with it. I assume the substances in question are kept in the armoire?”

He followed her gaze across to the oaken wardrobe whose doors he always kept tightly locked. “No, not in there. Follow me.”

He brought her to a bank of cupboards stacked two high. Upon his opening the first of the doors, a package of powdered resin tumbled out. She moved quickly, catching the bundle before it hit the floor.

“Rather untidy,” she commented brightly, without a hint of complaint. “Shall I restore order as I catalogue?”

“I would appreciate that, Ned. It’s something my wife used to do for me....”

He left the remainder of the thought unfinished, astonished that he had mentioned Aurelia at all. He rarely ever did, and then only in the company of friends who had known her, those whom he most trusted. The topic was still too raw, too painful for casual conversation.

With a nod, “Ned” went to work, leaving Simon with a keen sense of gratitude that she had neither probed him with questions nor bestowed upon him the pitying look he often encountered and so heartily loathed.

Across the room, he put on his spectacles and settled in to make some calculations, but his attention repeatedly wandered to the trim form of his assistant. He wished he knew her real name. Even if he couldn’t address her properly, he would have preferred to
think
of her in feminine terms, in honest terms.

He again considered whether it would be kinder and wiser to end her deception now. But he lacked the heart to crush her aspirations, especially before she had the chance to accomplish something extraordinary, something she could always look back upon with pride.

In a way, their alliance made perfect sense. Besides her remarkable abilities making her a top-rate assistant, there was also the matter of secrecy, a thing they had in common. Her own need for discretion guaranteed that she would safeguard any revelations he shared with her.

For the foreseeable future, then, he would allow her the benefit of her lie. He would call her Ned, think of her as Ned . . . and maintain a proper physical distance, just as he would if she truly had been Ned.

 

Coming upon an unlabeled bottle about the size of her smallest finger, Ivy plucked it from the shelf only to have it slip from her fingers. In a sudden panic she snatched at it with her other hand, but it bounced off her palm before her fingers closed around it. The vessel flipped upward, striking her shoulder and then plummeting. She dropped to her knees and somehow managed to capture the tiny bottle with both hands against her waistcoat.