Her eyes went wide. He wasn’t about to throw her over his shoulder again, was he? The Philistine! He released her hands, took a step away, and then in one deft movement, hooked her round the waist and hauled her over his shoulder as if she weighed no more than a feather. The breath left her in a swift whoosh, which was fortunate for him indeed since it rendered her momentarily incapable of blistering him with a few choice words.
She thumped on his back and struggled to regain her breath. Her corset made it nearly impossible, but she somehow managed. “Let me down, you oaf.”
“No,” he said slowly, pivoting and heading toward the door. “I don’t think that I will, Lady Helen.”
“What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?” The blood rushed to her head, making her quite dizzy.
“I formally request the honor of your presence at dinner,” He opened her chamber door and breezed out into the hallway, still carrying her over his shoulder as though he were a pagan and she his spoils of war. “Will you join me of your own free will, Mrs. Storm, or must I carry you the whole way to the dining room?”
“If I say yes, will you put me back on my feet?”
“Perhaps,” came his cryptic reply.
“I will join you,” she said as primly as she could while hanging upside down, “as it seems I must one way or the other. Now do put me down, if you please.”
He did, and she reluctantly took his proffered arm, allowing him to escort her to dinner.
* * *
Levi believed himself to be a man of reason, which was why he stood silently, hands clasped behind his back, as his new wife wandered through his private workroom. When he’d overseen the new design of this elegant old edifice, he had taken great care to make it have as much of the same feel as his Fifth Avenue home as possible. Of course, there was no denying that his home in Manhattan was far larger, far more encompassing and grand than his Belgravia house. But London had always been meant to be his second home, the helm from which he managed the European arm of North Atlantic Electric. He wanted to feel at home wherever he lived, damn it. And so he’d taken a drawing room and the study, removed part of a wall, and fashioned a workroom instead.
This workroom was not nearly as brimming with projects as the one in his Fifth Avenue house, but he hadn’t known how long his stay in London would last when he’d left, and he’d brought as many of his projects as possible with him. He had a habit of deconstructing the works of others and rebuilding them into improved versions. There wasn’t a thing on earth that couldn’t be somehow reworked into something better.
She bent down to examine a contraption he’d dissected, fingering a foil-wrapped cylinder. He itched to say something. To explain to her precisely how the parts all came together to be one working machine. But he had decided to permit her to look her fill and to hold his tongue. He owed her that. So he waited and he watched.
As a general rule, he didn’t allow anyone into his workroom. Not even servants, for a careless maid could do a great deal of harm, whether by unintentionally dislodging a component or by revealing his prototypes to someone else. No, a man didn’t share his works-in-progress with anyone.
Unless a man had a glorious, blonde-haired goddess of a wife who was as stubborn as she was regal, even in her shapeless sack of a pink gown. A wife who was the father of his precious son. A wife who had recently pointed out to him that he’d shared very little with her other than his body.
Hang it, she wasn’t far off the mark.
Helen stopped at another version of the same contraption, this one fully assembled and in working order. “What is this?”
He stalked forward at last, approaching her from behind and standing near enough to her to touch both the machine and her. Near enough to smell her and experience an aching surge of desire. He was tempted, so tempted, to sink his fingers into the silken web of her hair, pull out the pins keeping her long wavy locks tucked away. To undo the row of buttons fastening the front of her gown. To take the kiss she’d denied him earlier. But she had asked him a question, this alluring wife of his.
He cleared his throat and touched a finger to the handle on the side of the machine. “This is an Edison speaking phonograph. Have you heard of it?”
“I have, though I’ve never seen one myself.” She turned to him, her eyes bright with excitement. “Will you show me how it works?”
The urge to kiss her grew even stronger. He forced himself to think of the machine, an inanimate object, its components. Crank and needles and diaphragm. Anything but her mouth, a sweeter color pink than her gown could ever hope to match. He fitted the conical horn to the mouthpiece on the machine, holding it in place for her. “Speak into this part here, and I will record you.”
“Truly?”
He nodded, enjoying her enthusiasm even as he knew a spear of jealousy that it wasn’t directed at his own work but of that of one of his greatest competitors. “Truly. Speak into the machine, and I’ll play your words back for you.”
Her eyes went even wider, fixated back upon him. “What shall I say?”
He could think of more than a few things, none of which seemed likely to spill from the luscious lips he couldn’t stop admiring. “You may say anything at all.”
“But will it be recorded forever? If it is, I’ll want to say something grand. Something that isn’t silly.”
Maddening woman. He sighed. “Mrs. Storm, you may say anything you damn well like so long as you don’t stand here all night fretting over the words without actually saying them.”
Her expression changed, going mulish once more. “I’ve got just the thing now,” she announced. “Tell me when I should begin.”
He waited until she had positioned her face in the wide, open end of the horn as he’d demonstrated before turning the handle. “Be sure to say it loudly and clearly.” He began turning the handle. “Now.”
“Mr. Storm is the most stubborn, vexing, thoroughly arrogant man I’ve ever met, and his disposition is worse than a surly bear’s.” she announced loudly into the machine.
A startled laugh almost burst from him, but he managed to restrain himself, focusing on the task at hand. He stopped turning the crank as she stepped back, throwing him a look of sheer defiance. He might have said the same about Mrs. Storm. Indeed, he had surely thought it on more than one occasion. Perhaps they would make a fine match for each other after all, given time.
Carefully, he lifted the needle away from the tin-foil-wrapped mandrel on the machine, readjusted the cylinder back to the indentations marking the beginning of the recording, and lowered the needle into place before turning the handle once again.
“Mr. Storm is the most stubborn, vexing, thoroughly arrogant man I’ve ever met, and his disposition is worse than a surly bear’s,” her words echoed back through the workroom from the horn, in a voice that, while slightly altered by the recording medium, was undeniably hers.
“Dear heavens.” She pressed a hand to her mouth and stared, first at the phonograph and then at him. “It’s amazing! I daresay it’s the oddest thing imaginable to have one’s own words spoken again in one’s own voice.”
“Amazing,” he agreed in a dry tone, “other than that the delicate tin foil upon which the speech is recorded doesn’t withstand much repetition. If I were to replay your recording more than a handful of times, it would no longer be intelligible. I believe that a better version of this machine can be created, one with a more durable medium of recording. I’ve been experimenting but have yet to discover the solution.”
“This is a phonograph that you’ve taken apart,” she observed, turning back to the machine he had dismantled and running a finger down the mandrel. “Is that why you dissect things? To find out how something works so that you can improve upon it?”
How easily she read him. “I like to know how everything works. It’s an odd but inescapable habit of mine. At some point, I realized that just because something already exists doesn’t inherently mean that a superior version of i
t cannot be made. In fact, nearly everything that exists can be improved upon.”
Except for her. No improvements necessary in that regard.
“At what point did you realize that?” she asked quietly.
He thought for a moment, surprised by the question. “To be honest, I’m not even certain when I first started taking things apart. There was a time when my mother had found a patron willing to give us a small rented flat to live in. I was a lad no older than five, and I found his pocket watch while he and my mother were…otherwise engaged. I had it in pieces by the time he came out of her chamber. That was the worst backhand I’ve ever received in my life.” He rubbed his jaw, recalling all too well the shock and the pain, some thirty years later as a man fully grown with a wife and son of his own and more money than that sad son-of-a-bitch had earned in his lifetime.
“How dare he hit a small boy?” Helen’s hand settled lightly over his, just for a moment, as if she could somehow lift away the pain and the memory. Apparently thinking better of it, she snatched her hand back. “Someone ought to have hit him. A man of his own size.”
“It wasn’t the last time a man hit me, not by a long shot.” One of his mother’s customers had found pleasure in abusing women. Levi had rushed to defend her after hearing her pained cries and had promptly received the worst caning of his life. Only his mother’s begging and pleading had tempered the man’s rage. He’d been seven then. Two years later, his mother was dead.
“I wish I could go back and find the people who would hurt a child,” his wife said then, her gaze steady and searching. “I would give them an earful. Why, if someone were to abuse Theo, I’d want to see him run over by the nearest carriage.”
“I’m sure they’ve all found their own reckoning by now anyhow.” He worked very hard to keep his voice even. In truth, he never spoke of his past, and he rarely even visited it in his own mind any longer. When he did, the anxiety and the anger inevitably settled in, and there he was again, a helpless boy who loved his woefully imperfect mother, ready to take any of the pain and weight off her shoulders that he could. “That was all many years ago. My mother is long dead, God rest her soul, and I’m not that boy anymore.”
Helen turned back to the table then, tracing her fingers lightly over the parts and pieces assembled there. “How old were you when your mother died?”
“I was nine,” he said roughly. “Consumption took her.” His relationship with his mother had never been easy. But he had loved her, and she had loved him in her way. She’d done the best she could’ve done for him, considering. “She’s buried in a pauper’s grave on Ward’s Island. I tried to find her when I was older, when I had the means. I was never able. I was too naïve to realize that they don’t give paupers the dignity of individual graves. They dig a trench and lay in as many bodies as they can. She has no stone, and I have nothing to remember her by, not even a lock of hair.”
He didn’t know why he’d confessed that to Helen just now. It was something he’d never said aloud. Not to anyone. His mother and his past were closed books, slid onto a shelf to molder into oblivion. He didn’t care to take them down off the shelf, blow off the dust, re-read them.
Helen laid her hand on his arm, and it wasn’t a pitying touch but one borne of compassion. “Levi, I’m so very sorry.”
The fury he’d felt toward her for keeping Theo from him drifted completely away then, as a thundercloud might flit into the horizon after a brooding summer storm. Slowly, but leaving a brilliant sun in its wake. He closed his hand over hers, and the contact brought the same sensual fire to life that had always blazed between them. She sensed it too. He could see it in the way her eyes darkened, the way she tensed as though ready for flight.
Something within him shifted. Perhaps it was the glass of wine he’d had with dinner or perhaps it was her, but suddenly, the thought of her withdrawing from him seemed unbearable. He had to do something, say something, to preserve the tentative link between them.
“If I hadn’t lived the life I did as a boy, I never would’ve been driven to be the man I am today. Having nothing makes you want something, makes you want to become someone.” His thumb rubbed a lazy circle over the top of her hand, savoring even this smallest of connections. “What do you wish to know, Helen? Earlier, you accused me of only sharing my bed with you and not telling you anything of import. Ask what you want of me now, and I’ll tell you.”
Her expression remained guarded but also became pensive. She tilted her head, considering him for a moment in that patent way she had, seeing—so he thought—all of him, even the parts he would prefer to hide. “What is your middle given name?” she asked.
Levi almost laughed. He hadn’t expected a question so simplistic. “Zachary. I was born in an election year, and my mother wasn’t very original. What is your middle name?” Zachary Taylor, a national war hero, had been elected president in the year of his birth. Levi had not lived up to his namesake, though he’d done his duty.
“I thought you were the one answering questions.” She gave no quarter, even if she hadn’t yet pulled away from him.
His thumb traveled to the delicate bones of her wrist, tracing with the lightest touch to the stitches on her sleeve. Damnation, he had missed her. Her skin felt like heaven to him. “Forgive me, Mrs. Storm. Continue your interview.”
Her pulse beat fast against his thumb, indicating she was not as calm as she appeared, but she nevertheless didn’t move away from him. “You told me before that Miss VanHorn’s father was your greatest investor. Did he withdraw his investment from your business when you didn’t marry his daughter?”
He shouldn’t have been surprised that her sharp wit had made the connection. “Yes, he did. Our agreement was not contingent upon my marrying his daughter, but it did contain a clause allowing him to withdraw his investment whether or not the withdrawal was for cause.”
“And yet you also said that your company was in need of funds before you went to Paris, and you were still engaged to Miss VanHorn at that time. How did you manage?”
He was well aware that most men in his acquaintance—Jesse Whitney being perhaps the only exception—would not allow their wives to pry into their affairs or question their business. Most men didn’t think it a woman’s place. But Levi had been raised by a strong woman, a woman who had earned a living in one of the worst ways imaginable to try to keep him from the poorhouse, who had tried to take the caning for him that long ago day. He wasn’t most men, and neither was he afraid of a strong woman.
His thumb slid beneath the thick cuff of her sleeve now, his fingers in a loose grasp on her wrist, holding her to him as long as she allowed it. “I sold nearly all of my real estate holdings. Everything but this house and my house on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I decided that risking just about everything I possess on a business I know will succeed was worth more to me than the price I had to pay for the VanHorn money.”
“Yet you married me so easily, with nothing to gain except Theo’s legitimacy.”
“With everything to gain,” he corrected before he could think better of his words.
She withdrew her hand at last. He had pressed his luck too far. “What is everything?”
“You and Theo.” The answer was instant, straight from the very depths of his admittedly black soul. She thought his money and his business were all he cared for, but she couldn’t be more wrong. “The both of you are everything to me, and the rest of it, all of this—” he waved his hand to encompass his workshop, its contents, and the entire house—“could disappear tomorrow for all I care. I’d start again, rebuild everything, with my wife and my son by my side.”
Helen stared at him, and he wished to God that he could see inside her in that instant, read her thoughts. She shook her head slowly. “You don’t mean that.”
But he did. He meant it more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. He hadn’t understood just how powerful their bond was until that moment when he realized that everything he had worked a lif
etime to achieve—the wealth, the standing in elite New York City society, the patents, the businesses, the homes—it all paled in comparison to the sensation of at last being anchored in the world, of belonging. He was an orphan no more. He had a wife, a son. A family. Money couldn’t buy something so precious. Shouldn’t buy something so precious.
“I mean it, Helen.” He stepped toward her. “Hang it, I mean it as surely as I stand before you.”
“What has changed for you so suddenly?” Her brow furrowed. “How can you make such protestations when only a week ago, you threatened to take him from me and leave me here alone?”
“I was angry,” he admitted. Angry, and too thick-headed to think straight. He might be adept at learning the inner workings of all manner of machines, but he sure as hell didn’t know what to do with finer emotions.
“Victoria,” she said suddenly. “My middle given name is Victoria, after the queen.” She skirted a table, putting a wooden expanse cluttered with components and half-deconstructed objects between them. The electric lights bathed her in an otherworldly glow. “Thank you for the demonstration. It’s been most edifying, but I fear I’ve been away from Theo too long. He’s likely quite hungry and I daresay I ought to go.”
He’d offered to hire a wet nurse and she had refused. She was fierce and protective when it came to Theo, and he hadn’t a doubt as to how much she loved their son. While he was loath to see her go, Theo came first, even if Levi suspected Helen’s urge to flee was more inspired by the direction of their conversation than by her need to return to their son’s cradle. It hadn’t even been two hours since they’d first gone down to dinner.
Edifying, she had said. Yes indeed, their time had proven most edifying, but not in the detached, passionless manner she suggested. She had burned for him once, and she would again, he vowed.
First, however, he would allow her to retreat, for now. He inclined his head to her. “Should you ever want another demonstration, you know where to find me.”
Heart’s Temptation Series Books 4-6 Page 22
