A Riveting Affair (Entangled Ever After) Page 2

  She wasn’t sure why the thought disturbed her so much.

  “No, I suppose not,” Sebastian said regretfully. “That would be rude. Ah, well. I had better have Greaves pay her and send her on her way.”

  He rang for the butler and gave the old man instructions to dismiss the woman with a sum that made Rose stare. Did all ladies of ill-repute make so much money?

  When the butler had gone, Sebastian returned to his seat by the fire and regarded her once again with that cool, unreadable gaze.

  Rose forced herself not to squirm with discomfort, though his regard warmed her skin.

  “Forgive me, madam,” he said. “I have no idea what this is about. Perhaps you had best begin with your identity.”

  “Yes, of course.” She licked her dry lips. “That seems very sensible. I suppose that you don’t remember me, but I’m Rose Verney. My father was Richard Verney. He taught you when you were at Yale. We have” —her voice faltered briefly— “we have met before.”

  Sebastian was silent for a very long moment. Then he said, “You said ‘was.’ Am I to understand that your father is now deceased?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rose said. “He died a year ago.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring at her. A muscle ticked in his jaw. The news grieved him, she realized.

  “My condolences,” he said at last, and his tone was quiet. “Your father is—was—one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation, as well as a good friend and generous mentor. He will be sorely missed.”

  “Thank you,” said Rose. “That is very good of you to say. My father always spoke very highly of you as well. That’s why I came here today.”

  He leaned back in his chair once again and regarded her without comment. She swallowed carefully, wishing that he had received her letters. It would make everything so much easier if she didn’t have to explain to him why she was here while he stared at her like that.

  “When my father died,” Rose said, “he was working on a teleportation device—something that can transmit objects and people across a distance.”

  An expression that might have been interest or excitement crossed Sebastian’s face, and sudden hope flared within her. Did the idea of the device still enthrall him as it had so many years ago? Would he agree to help her, then? But before she could continue, his gray eyes once again became shuttered and remote.

  “I’m acquainted with the concept of teleportation, thank you,” Sebastian said.

  Rose’s heart sank, and her brief flare of hope died.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, flushing with embarrassment. “I know that when you were at Yale you worked with him to demonstrate the possibility of transmitting an invertebrate or an inanimate object instantly across the Long Island Sound.”

  Sebastian gave a brief, stiff nod.

  “It was my father’s greatest wish that this teleportation box be fully developed to transport people across great distances,” she continued. “In his will, he left you all his blueprints and notes from the project, and requested that you continue his work.”

  For a moment, an expression she couldn’t read flashed in his rain-gray eyes. Then it was gone, so rapidly that she thought she must have imagined it.

  “I see,” he said. “How did your father die?”

  “Cancer of the brain. He was ill for a very long time.”

  “So you are here because he wished me to complete his work on his teleportation device?”

  “Yes.” She took a quick, eager step toward him and held out her hands. “My father always said that you were the most brilliant student he ever had. For some time, I attempted to continue his work alone, but my sister disapproved of the project, and—and anyway, the mechanical and electrical intricacies, as well as some of the more advanced mathematical equations, are beyond my skill.”

  He was silent for a long moment.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Verney,” he said at last. “You’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t build machines anymore.”

  Rose froze, utterly bewildered. “You—you don’t build machines anymore?”

  “No.”

  “But—” Rose’s voice trailed off.

  Of all the excuses she had been prepared for him to make, of all the refusals he might have presented to her, she had never considered that Sebastian Cavendish had become a Luddite. It seemed incredible. This man’s inventions had dazzled his Yale professors and classmates alike: steam-powered coaches, clockwork automatons, electric mules. How could he have stopped building?

  In all the speeches she had rehearsed since she had first made up her mind to defy Louisa and seek Sebastian’s help, Rose had intended to appeal to his scientific curiosity, his desire to build. The many impressions she had received of him in her girlhood left her with the belief that he was a man essentially like her father, obsessed with science and technology. Richard Verney had never been able to resist a clever machine, and she had thought that Sebastian would be the same.

  Had she been wrong?

  “Mr. Cavendish,” she said at last, clasping her hands together, “when my father was dying, he asked me to bring you these blueprints. He said that you would understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You have made your journey in vain. I cannot help you.”

  “Please,” Rose said. “You’re the only one I know who can finish my father’s work.”

  He rose. When he spoke, his voice, like the expression on his scarred face, was unreadable, but he emitted palpable waves of hostility that confused and frightened her. “As it’s late and you may have difficulty procuring a room at a respectable establishment, you may stay here tonight. But I want you gone first thing in the morning.”

  He bowed briefly and limped out of the room without a backward glance.

  Sebastian’s hands trembled as he limped down the long corridor. In the darkness, he made his way unerringly to the library, one of the very few rooms in the house he still used.

  The fire had nearly died in the hearth, but he ignored the chill of the air and went directly to the sideboard. It sat next to a gilt-framed mirror that hung above the elaborate marble mantelpiece, a fixture on his wall he’d avoided for the four long years since Appomattox. Not because he feared his own ugliness, though he was certainly ugly, with that huge burn scar seared across his left cheekbone. In truth, his physical beauty had never mattered much to him.

  What he feared was that someday, he would look into the mirror and see nothing at all because he, too, had become a ghost. Like all the young men who had died in the war because of the killing machines he had built.

  He retrieved a decanter of brandy and tried to pour himself a glass, but he missed, splashing his fingers. For a moment he stared at the amber drops on the polished wood. Then, with a deliberate motion, he picked up the glass and hurled it into the fireplace.

  Brandy splashed onto the dying embers, and the flames burst to life once again.

  He let out a slow breath and sank into his chair, dropping his head into his hands. The only sound he could hear in the room was the slow ticking of his clockwork heart, reminding him that he was no longer whole. Reminding him that, despite his human needs, he was no longer human.

  For a long while he sat without moving, unable to form a coherent thought. He had plunged suddenly into a private hell from which he couldn’t escape. His engineered heart beat a violent tattoo.

  He remembered well the teleportation device he and Professor Verney had worked so hard to construct. For a brief moment, as Rose Verney had pleaded with him to finish her father’s work, it had all come back to him: the excitement of discovery, of creation, of invention. For one brief moment, his mind had filled with ideas and plans and visions.

  And then he had remembered. Remembered that everything he had ever built had ended in death, and war, and destruction. Remembered that he had sworn to never build another machine again.

  To distract himself from the teleportation device he wouldn’t—couldn’t—build, he
focused instead on the thought of Rose Verney.

  Earlier that evening, finally succumbing to the weakness and need that had gnawed at him for months, he had instructed Greaves to send a note to Mrs. Morrison’s establishment, requesting her to send one of her girls to Cavendish House.

  It was a move to which he seldom resorted. But it had been a long time since he had been with a woman, and he had wanted, no matter how false, for however short a period of time, the illusion of companionship.

  For the first twenty-six years of his life, Sebastian had never lacked for female attention. He had been seven years old when a tiny, besotted Margaret Astor Ward had assaulted him behind a settee in the drawing room of Cavendish House, and informed him he was to marry her as soon as she was old enough. He had been just thirteen when Daisy, a dimpled maid at his boarding school, had drawn him into an alcove of the library and seduced him in the hour between dinner and tea.

  They were a blur to him now, the women who had coveted him when he had still been human. The servant girls at his parents’ many estates, the town girls during his Yale years, the debutantes in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, as well as their perfumed and bejeweled mothers, all of whom had made him understand, directly or indirectly, that they were available to him.

  But that had been before the war, before Confederate rayguns had destroyed his face, a bullet from a Confederate rifle had pierced his heart, and a fall from an iron horse of his own invention had shattered his leg.

  He had been lucky. He hadn’t lost the limb, though he still required a brass and leather leg brace and would never walk without a limp again. He hadn’t lost his life, though the metallic ticking of his heart beat a constant reminder that he’d never be whole again.

  But the woman he had loved, and whom he believed had loved him back, had severed their engagement as soon as she saw his face. And now the only kind of woman who would look at him was the kind of woman he had to pay.

  In a way, Sebastian preferred the simplicity of this new kind of relationship. No one expected anything of him. No one dreamed of orange blossoms or hinted at marriage. No one got hurt. After all, the girls who worked for Mrs. Morrison, the proprietor of a discreet and highly exclusive establishment at 34th and Broadway, were consummate professionals.

  Rose Verney certainly wasn’t.

  She had certainly grown up in the dozen or so years since he had seen her. He could still remember her at thirteen years old; she was shy and capable, a charming, sensitive, clever child with a grave air that made her seem much older than her years. She had always overseen the meals and teas in her father’s graceful New Haven home, and the professor had often said that she was his greatest pride and joy—an excellent scholar, able housekeeper, helpful lab assistant, and dear companion.

  Sebastian had never known the professor’s wife, who had died when her daughter was still quite young, but he thought that Rose must look like her mother. She certainly didn’t resemble her father, a large, absent-minded man with graying dark hair, a wavering voice and dark eyes.

  Rose was small and slight and fine-boned, her eyes as blue as a doll’s, her face pure and pale and lovely. It had been her hair, however, that had made his breath catch. In the firelight it had looked like something mined instead of grown, gleaming coin-gold as it spilled down the back of her simple dark cloak.

  But even though his wanting body ignited at the memory of her kiss, a wave of disgust and self-loathing extinguished his desire. How could he have touched her, with the hands that had murdered so many? How could he have touched her, when she was the daughter of the one man who had been the closest thing Sebastian had ever had to a father?

  He rose to his feet, despising himself, wanting to crawl out of his own skin. The moonlight cast silver-white light across the ornate furnishings and illuminated his way down the hall to his unused bedchamber. Once the room had been beautiful, but now a thick layer of dust lay over the furnishings.

  If it had been a long time since he’d had a woman, it had been longer still since someone had cleaned this room. Greaves was too frail to do much housework anymore, and Sebastian would be damned if he allowed anyone else into the house or permitted the use of any of the automatons that now lay rusting on the fifth floor nursery amid the detritus of his old dreams.

  As always when he felt restless, he sought the solace of his rose garden, his one refuge in this stifling mausoleum that held the ghosts of his youth.

  He had planted his roses in the heart of the mansion, in the courtyard he had once made his laboratory, for the light that streamed in through the massive skylights above. There was no sign now of the machines and automatons he had loved to build, of the work benches and tools that had filled this space.

  Now, there were only roses, growing in a wild profusion all over the courtyard, though outside it was winter and the cold winds seemed to penetrate his very heart. There were roses red as spilt wine, roses pale as snow at dawn, roses that spilled over arbors and out of large tubs and crawled up the shallow courtyard steps, winding sinuously around the marble pillars. Icy white moonlight spilled through the glass overhead and illuminated the gardens. The rest of the house might suffer from neglect and lack of care, but his roses did not.

  At the very heart of the garden was a single bush, set apart from the others, that Sebastian had bred himself. It alone, of all the plants in the courtyard, hadn’t yet bloomed. He had planted it more than a year ago, and it had grown luxuriantly, with great, leafy branches, but though Sebastian had done everything he could, it wouldn’t bloom.

  Now a sudden and overwhelming rage against it erupted. If the damned bush wouldn’t bloom, he would cut the blasted thing down and start over again.

  It took him a moment, thrashing about the garden, to locate his knife. Then he fell to his knees in the dirt and slashed viciously at the boughs until the green leaves and branches were piled at his feet like an offering.

  …

  The butler was nowhere to be found.

  At first Rose had waited in the bedchamber for someone to come fetch her, or for Sebastian to return, but neither event had occurred. Now, carrying her borrowed valise, she made her way through the dark hallways, trying to decide what she ought to do next, and where she ought to go. She had taken a candle from Sebastian’s bedchamber to guide her, but the tiny flickering flame did little to penetrate the heavy darkness.

  As she walked, she constantly moved the candle around so that she could see where she was going. The pallid light fell across paintings decaying in heavy gilt frames, vases and ornaments lying broken and useless, and once, a mouse scurrying along the shadows.

  At last, lost in the labyrinth of rooms, she simply chose a random door and pushed it open. She raised the candle. It was another bedchamber.

  She stepped inside and searched for something to illuminate the room, eventually unearthing a box of candles in a bureau drawer. When she had lit one, she saw that she stood in a large, airy room that must have once been quite beautiful but which now, like the rest of the house, was shabby, filthy, and cold.

  Still, it would have to do, as Rose suspected that she wouldn’t be able to find the butler again today.

  She discovered a nest of more mice in the mattress, but the settee by the window, though dusty, was comfortable and sufficiently large for her to lie down upon. Since she only had a thin night dress, also borrowed from Jenny, she elected not to undress at all.

  She set the valise carefully onto an arm chair, then blew out the candles and climbed onto the settee, sneezing several times from the dust. But though she was exhausted, her mind refused to quiet. What had happened to make Sebastian Cavendish, a man her father had considered the most promising young inventor in America, to cease building machines?

  Perhaps it was the war. She knew too many young men who had returned home changed by their experiences in battle. Certainly, with his shattered face and mechanical leg, Sebastian looked entirely different from the boy he had once been, yet she had hardly noticed his
scars after the first brief moment of shock.

  He had kissed her. She tried very hard not to think about it because the kiss hadn’t been intended for her, but she couldn’t help remembering the warmth of his lips, the gentleness of his hands, the feel of his hard body against hers.

  Instead, as she lay in the darkness, shivering, sneezing, and distinctly confused by the events of the night, she tried to consider her next course of action. She ought, of course, to do exactly as Sebastian had told her to do; buy a ticket on the first train back to New Haven and forget this whole crazed scheme to complete her father’s last invention.

  It had been an idiotic notion from the start. She was mad to have even considered it.

  But she had wanted to work in a laboratory again, wanted to use her brain and her hands and her knowledge. She had hoped that if she brought her father’s blueprints to Sebastian and he helped her complete the device, she would be permitted to work as his assistant, as she had been her father’s.

  Now, the thought of returning to New Haven to live out the rest of her life in unpaid drudgery under Louisa’s thumb—or worse, as poor George’s wife—made her spirits quail.

  She didn’t want to go back. She didn’t want to return to the long, boring days filled with Louisa’s endless lectures on propriety and the Perils of Educating Females, and poor George’s longing glances, and her dismal little bedchamber with its bare floors and bare walls.

  She couldn’t go back.

  She wouldn’t go back.

  She rolled onto her back and considered that notion. She liked the sound of it.

  I’m not going back, she said to herself, and found herself smiling in the darkness.

  I’m not going back.

  So where would she go? Jenny would take her in, of course, but Rose could hardly expect her friend to support her for the rest of their lives. So where, then?

  In the next instant, the answer rose in her mind, fully formed and obvious.

  Here.

  She would remain here. In New York. In Sebastian’s home.