I Thee Wed (8 page)

Orion's fists clenched as her gentle voice seemed to brush across the back of his neck and give him chills. “Its cranial capacity is the size of a poppy seed,” he said mechanically, his voice coming from someplace very far away. “I doubt it thinks at all.”

She shook her head and released a sigh. “Do you not believe in anything you cannot measure or stir?”

Orion believed in many things. He believed in loyalty, and even honor, in an abstract, pragmatic way. He believed in his own powers of deduction and intelligence. He believed that man had only touched the edges of the science there was to learn, and the greatness of what he did not know was one of the few things in life that humbled him.

Suddenly, he wanted to tell Francesca these thoughts, and to hear what she had to say about them.

What an appalling notion. Open up his mind like a watch face and let her see his inner clockworks? If it were anyone else, he would think the notion insane.

Yet he imagined that Francesca might possibly . . . perhaps . . . understand.

Worse still, he wanted to see
her
clockworks! He suddenly found himself insatiably curious about her thoughts—even more of her odd notions about enchantment and beauty in science.

Well, not that heredity nonsense. That was utter balderdash, of course. Worse, it was elitist, for it meant that a man was no better than his beginnings, and could never rise above them.

Orion Worthington deeply wanted to rise above his beginnings. Or at least depart from them greatly. Preferably halfway across the country. And then he would build a castle and a moat to keep them away.

All, but for Attie.

Francesca obviously took his silence for the negative. She
shook her head pityingly. “I prefer to think of the world as an open box of confections. Because it is, Mr. Orion Worthington. The world is a constant source of wonder and magic.”

His reply was automatic, the thinking man's retort. “There is no such thing as magic. Everything has a logical explanation. We may simply not know what it is as yet.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Really? Everything? Can you explain love?”

Treacherous ground. That was a very deep hole, and Orion already felt himself teetering on the alarming, unstable edge. He took desperate refuge in logic. “Love is a chemical reaction. Attraction for the purposes of reproduction. Much the way bees are attracted to flowers, because the flowers feed them for their pollination labor.”

“What if there was born a bee who did not care for flowers?”

He blinked. “What?”

She turned toward him. The blue butterfly, disturbed, fluttered drunkenly away. She did not notice, so focused was she upon her topic. “Consider it,” she pleaded earnestly. “What would happen to such a bee? It would not seek flowers. It would not bring nectar and pollen back to the hive. It would not help make honey.”

She seemed so serious. Orion tried to give the notion equally serious thought, unwilling to again upset this peculiar and astonishing girl.

“A hive is a carefully organized thing,” he said slowly. “Its survival depends upon every member knowing its proper role. I imagine that the other bees would reject such a misfit.”

Her eyes were huge and dark. “They would drive it away? Count it as useless and declare it unwelcome?”

Orion realized that he rather ached for the bee. Or for someone, at any rate. “That would be in the best interests of the hive.” He spoke gently, as though he delivered terrible news. “It cannot succeed if it must feed those who do not
contribute.”

“So the hive remains static. It never changes, never alters? No one who does not conform is allowed to remain, or even encouraged to survive?”

Orion lifted a brow. What was her point? “I believe I already answered that.”

She looked away. “It must be a very lonely thing, to be a misfit bee.”

There was something in her voice that caught at Orion's attention. Sadness. Mourning.

And something else that he well understood. Isolation.

However, he was not a misfit bee. He was precisely where he was supposed to be, on his way up the scientific ladder.

So who was the misfit? Other than her recently revealed orphan state, he knew nothing of Francesca's family in Italy. Did her relatives applaud her for her gifts? Did they appreciate her ever-present laughter, devour her cooking, listen with reluctant astonishment to her opinions and then, later, secretly find themselves finding sense and value in her arguments?

If they did not, had the misfit bee left her home and flown across the water to land in a new hive—one where she was even now ill-tolerated?

Orion wasn't usually much moved by pity. By observation he'd realized that most people did enough pitying of themselves; therefore, they did not require him to exert himself on their behalf.

However, Francesca did not seem self-pitying. Rather, she seemed lost . . . or, perhaps, seeking. Orion understood seeking: seeking knowledge, seeking his purpose and place, taking unknown paths to find something he was sure existed.

He wanted to say something to help her, something true, and valuable. He wanted to aid in her search—but while he'd hesitated in silence, she'd scooped up her runaway specimen and bustled away with her head up and her shoulders set in
determination.

He found himself close to smiling at the indomitable set of her chin.

Orion had no idea where the strange, unearthly Miss Francesca Penrose was going, but he was damned confident she would get there, eventually.

H
OURS later, Orion gazed out at the twilight of the day through the tall laboratory windows. He'd made much less progress with the methodical elimination process of solvents than he'd hoped to. Sir Geoffrey had set him the boring task for obvious reasons, for there was no point in taking up a scientist's valuable time when a competent assistant could make attempts and catalog the failures.

Unfortunately, Orion wasn't feeling terribly competent at the moment. The work was pathetically simple. Any ape with a rudimentary understanding of reading and measurement could do it—so why did he keep having to go over the same steps again and again?

Distraction. Disturbance.

Francesca.

To be more specific, his desire for Francesca.

She was everywhere. From her desk in the corner there wafted the scent of fresh flowers. His gaze was constantly arrested by her scrawled charts that contained (surely
unintentionally whimsical) drawings of bunny noses, bunny ears, and, yes, bunny toes!

Worse, Orion knew that if he ventured into Blayne House, he would be further surrounded by her. She was everywhere. He would smell orange blossoms in the hallway. He would hear her laughter from the parlor. If he sat down to dinner with the family, he would taste her in every bite of food that passed his lips, even as she tempted him from across the table!

This fatal distraction had to stop.

He wanted nothing more than to win a place in the serious scientific world, a place not overshadowed by his notoriously unserious family. So why couldn't he stop thinking about the maddening Miss Francesca Penrose?

Until now, he'd had an abstract, clinical interest in women. His body felt desire, but he'd had little trouble quenching its clamor before now. Even his single visit to his brothers' favorite brothel had been more of an expedition of exploration than a sexual adventure. His rather clinical examination of his partner got him evicted before he actually—ahem, well, no sense in dwelling on the past.

Francesca, on other hand, inspired the most disquieting thoughts! He could not concentrate for thinking of her dark hair falling across his naked chest, her hot skin sliding against his own, and her sweet, slippery—ahem, well, no.

Indeed, her flashing dark eyes arrested his attention, her mind inspired his admiration, her figure inspired his obsession, but her undisciplined, insatiable approach to life reminded Orion far too much of his outrageous, erratic family.

She was lovely, though, wasn't she? Like an exotic flower, she burned so much brighter than all the pale English blooms . . .

A sudden hiss and scorched smell of burning interrupted his circular thoughts.

“Bloody hell!”

Another experiment boiled over!

*   *   *

“A
ND WORST OF
all, Orion is woolgathering!”

In the parlor-cum–painting studio at Worthington House, Attie sat back after delivering that appalling bit of news and watched her family's reaction. Each face gave away something different.

The most concerned was Daedalus, of course. Dade worried about all of them, too much as far as Attie was concerned.

“I've never known Orion to do that!” Dade frowned. “Do you suppose it is the daughter, Miss Blayne, who is distracting him from his work?”

Attie considered the possibility for as long as it deserved, which was not at all. “Impossible. The girl is about as distracting as an empty seashell. It's pretty, but it doesn't do anything!”

Mama fanned herself with a folding Japanese fan dripping with faded, decaying tassels. “What of the other one?” Iris asked dreamily. “You said you got a better glimpse of her this time, didn't you?”

Attie looked down at her folded lap and plucked at a broken thread of her woolly stockings. “She's all right.” She didn't want to think about Francesca, because she'd liked her, very much—and there were all those bunnies . . .

Anyway, it wasn't Chessa whom Orion was all queued up to marry, was it? It was that drip of a girl, Judith, who had about as much personality as a pinecone!

“No, Orion doesn't like her at all,” Attie insisted, for if he did like Chessa, then Attie might have to do something about it. She could not allow anyone to come between her favorite brother and her beloved family—no matter how much she might like them! “I listened outside the door of the laboratory. Francesca and Orion fight about everything!”

“Ah!” Archie's expression was knowing. “‘They never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them.'”

Iris patted the gnarled hand that lay on her shoulder. “
Much
Ado About Nothing
, act one, scene one, dearest. Oh, my, yes, Archie.” She smirked flirtatiously at him. “‘A merry war,' indeed!”

Attie grimaced. Iris and Archie were always going off the topic at hand! The question was how were they going to get Orion out of bloody old Blayne House and back home where he belonged!

Archie seemed to drift out of his love-induced fog for a moment when he saw the disappointment on Attie's face. “Well, perhaps we ought to do something about Orion . . .”

Iris snuggled closer to her silver-haired husband and giggled. “In that house, with not one but two lovely creatures from which to choose? I can't think of a better way to crack that poor boy's shell. He's always been so terribly shy.”

*   *   *

O
RION FILLED HIS
hands with twin offerings of soft, gold-tinged flesh topped with pink rosebud nipples. With a low, rich laugh, she slipped from his grasp, flowing away like warm cream. He grabbed for her, but she wasn't there.

“Rise, my darling . . .”

Her husky lilting voice swirled over his bare neck, warmed by her breath. She was behind him now.

He rose for her, his cock swelling and thickening as her hands slid over his shoulders from behind and smoothed down his sweating chest.

“Grow for me.”

His body obeyed her command eagerly. Her delicate hands wandered farther down, her fingers spread wide over the twitching muscles of his belly. Lust stole his breath, choked his voice, trapped his body. He wanted to turn, to take her into his arms, to press her hard against the wall and feel her bare breasts against his chest. He could not move.

“Swell.”

He swelled, his rigid cock aching with need. The ache
traveled through his entire body as he stood helplessly at her mercy.

Her roaming hands slid down between his hip bones, and at last her delicate fingers wrapped tightly around his aching, throbbing cock. She squeezed him.

The touch of her cool fingers should have sent him over the edge, so aroused was he. He had never wanted a woman more in his life. He'd never wanted anything more in his life than he wanted to thrust his swollen, aching cock into the sweet, hot, wet haven between her thighs.

He could not move. He had not the power to take matters into his own hands. He could only long to be hot aching flesh beneath her delicate touch.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was something he was supposed to be doing. Something important. He could not remember, and he could not bring himself to care about that lapse. There was nothing, nothing but her.

Her voice. Her hands. She ruled his senses. She commanded his every thought. He was her willing and eager supplicant, if only she would give him the release he longed for.

If only she would let him in . . .

“Come,” she ordered, her lightly accented English deepening and roughening the word. Her hands enveloped him, doubled fingers entwining tightly. “Come for me.”

He came.

Orion woke with a start, blinking and gasping. He looked around in confusion for a moment. The room was dark; he was alone; he was still a virgin; there was no evidence of Miss Penrose—but plenty of evidence of his desire for her.

Bloody hell!

T
HE next morning, after sidestepping his duty to accompany the ladies into morning calls by way of breakfasting before dawn and disappearing, Orion stood in Sir Geoffrey's laboratory, lost in unaccustomed frustration.

In his own shabby, cobbled-together laboratory in Worthington House, Orion had become accustomed to using a tallow burner. He would melt a portion of smelly, yellowish, lardlike tallow on Mrs. Philpott's termperamental old woodstove and then pour it carefully into small pottery dishes he'd made ready with cotton wicks. The pots, shaped like flattened bowls, would sit beneath a flask holder, an iron tripod with a ring top, and heat whatever substance was in the flask. Orion's home-stewed tallow had smoked and blackened the exterior of the beakers. He'd had to take great pains that the mess didn't contaminate his results!

In the pristine environs of Sir Geoffrey's laboratory, no such dirt was allowed. The burning bowls were of glazed ceramic, filled with pure, white tallow. A stack of ready-made ones sat on the shelf, all set for use.

The only problem was, Orion couldn't use them.

He had tried to start the first few with a flint starter, but had given up and lighted a candle, using a splinter of wood to bring the candle flame to the virgin white wick of the burning bowl. Nothing had worked.

Orion was a patient man. He could watch a boiling beaker for hours or stir a compound together, adding one crystalline grain at a time. Reminding himself of his previously famous patience did little good as he stood filled with frustration before an array of unsuccessful attempts.

He was a learned man. He was a brilliant man. He could do elaborate sums in his head, without the need of chalk and slate. He could quote facts and figures, and yes, Shakespeare, without ever doubting his accuracy.

However, without fire, he was as powerless to do research as was the earliest cave dweller! He took a deep breath, held yet another wood splinter in the candle flame, and when it was burning, brought it to the short wick emerging from the center of the glazed bowl of fine white tallow.

The wick made a slight crackling sound, just as it had many times before, but it did not take the flame at all. Orion persisted, holding the flame on the wick, while the wooden splinter burned to black charcoal, dropping chunks and bits into the tallow-filled bowl.

“Light, damn you!”

“Having trouble with your wick?”

Orion turned to see Miss Francesca Penrose in the doorway, leaning one shoulder on the door frame with her arms folded. Her pose gave the impression she'd been lounging there for some time, watching him fail. Amusement danced in her dark eyes as she smirked at him.

“Don't worry,” she consoled him mockingly. “Many people do. Inability to reach full combustion could happen to anyone.”

His jaw clenched in annoyance. It was bad enough that she'd caught him in such a disadvantageous moment, but when
she said things like that, perfectly innocent things that made him think decidedly not innocent thoughts, he knew she was laughing at him.

Her mockery just made his sexual frustration worse.

No, wait. I meant my performance frustration.

Oh God no. I meant my inability to combust—I mean, light my damned wick!

Bloody hell!
He closed his eyes briefly. “I had no trouble with it yesterday. I will make it light.” His tone came out gruff from a throat that was nearly shut tight with the sudden onslaught of lust.

She let out a small snort. “No, you truly won't.” She dropped her insouciant pose and strolled toward him.

Her approach brought the scent of summer in with her, the grassy smell of the freshly cut lawn she'd just crossed mingling with her own warm orange-blossom aroma. He breathed her in despite his unwillingness, for to refrain drinking her in at every opportunity would take more self-control than he possessed.

“I can help you with your flame,” she said.

Oh yes. Please, set me afire!

She came quite close, as if to oblige his questing senses. For a long, sweet moment of dream-induced fantasy, he thought she meant to press against him.

To the disappointment of a large part of him, she merely reached around him to his latest unlit burner bowl and picked it up with one hand. Holding it high where he could see it, she reached her fingers to grasp the scorched but unburned wick—and plucked it completely free of the tallow.

His jaw dropped at such rudeness. “It will never light now!”

She let the hand holding the bowl drop slightly and held the length of wick, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, insultingly close before his gaze. “It was never going to light,” she said slowly, as if to a simpleton. “It's not a wick.”

“What?” Orion took the two-inch white stick from her
fingers and turned toward the window, holding the thing to the light. It was stiff and hard, not at all like a flexible cotton wick. It was also somewhat translucent.

“This is made of glass!” He looked down at her, affronted. “Is this some sort of trick?”

She smiled brightly. “Wouldn't that be clever of me? But alas, I did not do this to taunt you. This is merely how Sir Geoffrey prefers it to be done. In warm weather, the tallow softens, and the wicks can slip down beneath the surface. Sir Geoffrey came up with a way to prevent it. We make the flame bowls with these glass picks in them to keep the hole free.”

She turned to the shelf where the burn bowls were stored and pulled down a small tin box that Orion had overlooked. Her small hands flipped it open with the ease of long practice and held it out for his view.

He peered in to see neat lengths of wick, precut and looking waxy with tallow, ready to use.

“Go on,” she urged, her laughing eyes on him. “They won't fight back.”

Orion regarded her sourly but reached into the box and took a wick. The stiffened length of it slid neatly down into the hole left in the tallow, leaving just the right amount free to light and then trim as needed.

“The ones you used yesterday were set out for you in advance, with the wicks inserted.” Francesca closed the tin and returned it to the shelf. “It's very clever, really. This way the bowls are always perfectly ready to use, and the wicks never take on the damp.” She stepped back and gazed about the laboratory with a slight, thoughtful frown. “My uncle can be so ingenious . . . sometimes . . .”

Orion turned back to his table full of failed “combustion.” With an unaccustomed embarrassment, he recalled the last three-quarters of an hour he'd spent trying to light glass sticks on fire. Now that he'd closely examined one, it was perfectly obvious that they were not cotton wicking, but cool, gleaming silicate sticks.

He'd been neatly tricked, after all, but only his own lack of observation was to blame. “‘The devil has the power to assume a pleasing disguise,'” he quoted ruefully.

“
Hamlet
, Mr. Worthington?”

“Act two, scene two,” Orion added without thinking.

“Oh, you are dour! Do you honestly think Shakespeare is appropriate at a time like this?”

She was laughing at him again. He knew that if he turned, he would see her bright eyes and that smile that seemed to dance ever ready at the corners of her luscious, summer-rose lips.

Then she finally seemed to notice the destruction his quest for fire had caused. The table was spattered with spilled tallow and scorch marks, while nearly a dozen bowls he had tampered with sat muddled and contaminated with ash.

With a gasp, she stepped next to him at the table. “You cad! You brute!” She had her fists plunked onto her sweetly curved hips. “Very well. When it is time to render more tallow,
you
can help Judith cook and strain the nasty stuff three times to purify it!”

“Judith makes the flame bowls?” Orion frowned. “Herself?” Judith seemed far too refined to take on such a menial task.

Francesca blinked. “Ah. Well, yes . . . but perhaps you might refrain from mentioning that to Sir Geoffrey. He is under the impression that she orders them special from the chandler. Unfortunately, Sir Geoffrey kept finding fault with the man, and then the bills—well, Judith found it simpler to refill the bowls at home and reuse the glass stems. She says that way she can be sure Sir Geoffrey will be satisfied.”

Rendering tallow was a foul task. Orion felt a stab of guilt at his wastefulness. “Miss Blayne is a very caring and dutiful daughter.”

“Miss Blayne is a slave,” Francesca muttered, or at least, that was what Orion thought she said, but he must have been mistaken. Look at the luxurious life Judith led as the
daughter of a prominent man. There was no reason to think any such thing!

But his own fault could not be denied. “I will repair the damage.”

She blinked. “You will?” The doubt in her voice resolved him.

He went to work at once, patiently pulling every crumb of blackened wood from the tallow and scrubbing off all the stained, scorched glass stems. He left the purified tallow out in the sun for a while until it liquefied. Then he brought the bowls back in and reinserted the glass stems while the bowls cooled in the shade. Then he set about scrubbing all the sooty marks from the white marble tabletop.

Francesca, who pretended to work on her charts, watched him carefully. It seemed Mr. Worthington was not averse to a bit of restitution labor. She bent her head over the paper, trying not to let him see the pleased and impressed smile that insisted on taking over her lips.

She tried to think of any other man in her acquaintance who would go to such lengths to make matters right. She could not think of one who would not leave the mess to someone else, usually a woman, to clean up. At best, she might imagine a few kindly fellows like Asher Langford, who would apologize sincerely and then bring chocolates or something to “make it up” to a woman.

Her eyes would not stay away from Mr. Worthington. His efforts made her heart melt—and the ensuing warmth pooled in a location significantly lower in her body. She fought the urge to wriggle in her chair. Her gaze slid his way again. He was bent over, scrubbing at the spilled tallow on the marble. His muscled bottom flexed in time with his efforts.

Heavens! If the male population of the earth had any idea how attractive the sight of a man cleaning was to womankind, the world would be a spotless place, indeed!

Orion scrubbed at the table he'd spilled the tallow on with a little more force than he might normally have done, but his
hands were on automatic while his thoughts were occupied by the beauty across the room.

God, she was enticing. When she had laughed at him, he'd wanted to laugh with her even as he'd wanted to wipe the smile off her full, pink lips with a hot, deep kiss.

As he had again and again for the last quarter hour, he watched her from beneath lowered lids as his hands went about the business of clearing up.

When she wrote in her notes, she would begin sitting up straight and scribing in a measured ladylike fashion. Then her pen would begin to fly, ink would spatter, and the sound of her rapid scribbling would be drowned out only by the murmured encouragements she bestowed upon herself. “In ancient Rome, the rabbit was revered as a symbol of lust and fertility.” She paused. “Oh yes,” she whispered. “Oh, that's terribly good!” Now she sat hunched over her desk, with her tongue stuck firmly in her cheek and her brows lifted in science-induced delight as her hand flew over the stack of paper, the feather of the quill twitching like a live thing in her fingers.

She was adorable. Orion wanted to watch her, observe her like a hunter in a blind observed a doe, so that he could delve deeper into the mysteries contained behind her sparkling dark eyes and laughing mouth.

He could not stop himself from wanting to know more.

He could not stop himself from
wanting
.

Why Francesca? Why this girl? Why not the other, perfectly attractive and so much more appropriate Judith?

What, in her own unique cast of the heredity die, gave Francesca Penrose this power over him?

And why must she mutter about lust in a laboratory?

Finally, he realized that he was merely scrubbing the same perfectly clean spot over and over. No more excuses. He had work to do.

Orion forced himself to focus as he began to select several types of solvent from the shelves. He lined them up neatly,
and then reached absently to his right for a wooden rack of glass tubes to work with.

His hand encountered warm, soft girl instead.

“Oh!” Startled, she whirled to face him, her eyes wide.

Oh no. Had he just—

Orion took in her figure, and then referenced the height of the desired shelf with the height of her lushly rounded bottom.

Oh damn
.

His fist closed on the memory of the warm, resilient handful of Francesca he'd just helped himself to.

“Ahem. I beg your pardon, Miss Penrose. I—I meant no offense.”

“Ah. Well. None taken, I'm sure.” She took a measuring weight off the shelf next to his desired rack of tubes and moved off slowly, walking backward away from him with her dark eyes huge in her unsmiling face. “Truly, sir, I did not mean to get in your way—”

“No, no, I ought to look where I'm— It was— I'm terribly sorry.”

I am not sorry. At all
.

Her flesh had felt like heaven, like the best parts of sin and temptation—like his dream.

They both busied themselves with their work, but concentration was becoming impossible for Orion. His only thought was that he wished he had reached for that rack with both hands!

Damn it
. Another day with little to show for it. Sir Geoffrey was going to think him useless!

She took a step. His hearing focused instantly on the slide of her shoe on the floor and the swish of her skirts as she turned.

The draft that crossed her workbench brought her tempting scent his way, filling his senses with her. His entire being was focused on hearing her, seeing her, scenting her, oh God,
touching
her!