Tempting The Rival (Scandals and Spies Book 3)

by Leighann Dobbs

  Felicia attached the stem of the beaker to an iron stand fixed to the brazier. Without looking at Gideon, she stepped back to let the heat of the brazier do its work. Even without turning her head, she felt his gaze on her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Pressing her lips together, she willed the water to boil.

  Unfortunately, a watched beaker never boils. The water stubbornly took its sweet time to heat.

  In a gruff voice, Gideon asked, “Did you have an idea of which ingredients you wanted to mix with the oils?”

  Here came the tricky part. She hadn’t been able to successfully create the serum with her attempts, using herself as a test subject—or, in one lonely case, a willing friend. Although the diluted oils made her woozy, when quizzed she felt no need to confess her sins. In some cases, she didn’t even remember what she said come the morning, but those who had helped her test the serum informed that she had not divulged the correct answers when badgered. Meaning that, even while under the influence of the brugmansia oils, she still had the presence of mind to hold her tongue if she wanted to. The one time she had convinced a friend to try the serum instead, she had noticed a quick onset of sedation, dilated pupils, and slurring of speech. Unfortunately, the sedation had taken effect too quickly for her to press as hard as she would have liked for the answer to her questions. Once asleep, she hadn’t been able to rouse him until morning, when the serum wore off and left him with a horrible headache.

  In a polite tone, Felicia explained what she had already tried in an attempt to replicate the serum. “I have everything logged in a journal, if you’d like to read it.”

  “I would.” He didn’t look at her, his gaze fixed on the beaker. Small bubbles formed in the bottom, not yet rising to the top.

  After a moment of terse silence, she said, “There’s a tea from China that purportedly calms hysteria. If we can isolate the compound from the tea, we might be able to use that lowering of inhibitions in the serum to loosen the recipient’s tongue.”

  “That sounds more like your area of expertise.” He tucked his hands into his jacket pockets.

  The silence stretched on. More bubbles formed, some slowly drifting to the top of the beaker.

  “If you’re looking for something that lowers anxiety, why not try valerian or passion flower?”

  Felicia shook her head. “Both are sedatives, aren’t they? I tried valerian once and the mixture rendered my test subject unconscious within minutes. He couldn’t stay awake long enough to answer my questions.”

  The water boiled. Gideon removed his hands from his pockets. “Let’s try the tea, then. It’s a place to start.” Given the dubious quality to his voice, he didn’t believe that it would work.

  Since the tea was out of her price range for the quantities she needed in order to experiment on it, she didn’t know that it would work. It was only a theory.

  “There’s a bottle on my work table labelled Wuliqing. Did you want to try mixing it with the oils and seeing the outcome before I try to isolate the compound I spoke of?”

  Gideon shrugged. “We might as well.” Since he was closer to her work bench, he retreated to the neatly lined rows of bottles arranged by compound and perused the titles.

  Meanwhile, she used tongs to remove the beaker from the heat. She uncorked the bottle with the oil and carefully added several drops into the water. Until they determined the effect of both ingredients, weaker was better. Besides, without the plants flowering again and producing seeds, she would be unable to replicate this particular batch of oils.

  As she carefully returned the vial to the row among the others, she slipped past Gideon. When she turned, she found him about to pour out the contents of the bottle into the water. The collection of small grayish lumps in mineral oil was not the tea to which she had referred. Her heart jumped into her throat. She flung her hands into the air, though she was too far away to push him.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  He paused, his hand tilting over the beaker.

  “Step back. Now.”

  He heeded the urgency in her voice and took a healthy step back, out of harm’s way. Her pulse beat fervently in the base of her throat.

  The moisture in the air. Lawks.

  “Put the stopper back in the bottle. Don’t let it touch the water.” Or the air. Oh God, the humidity.

  It was a miracle the bottle hadn’t exploded. The mineral oil covered the lumps—for now.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Have you?” Her voice was shrill. “That isn’t tea—that’s pure sodium! Sodium catches fire when exposed to water!”

  He thrust the bottle into the air between them, a little too close to the beaker of hot water, in her opinion. She took it from him, ensuring that no licks of flame contaminated the inside. She couldn’t be sure. She should dispose of it, just in case. Or, at the very least, store it somewhere other than the humid orangery.

  “How was I supposed to know?”

  She glared. “You’re a botanist. You should know when something doesn’t look organic.”

  “I thought you had already brewed it and isolated the compound you were talking about. Why do you even have it?”

  “In case I need it.”

  His eyes were wild now, to match his hair. Given the look on his face, he wasn’t pleased with the mix up.

  Neither was she. She carried the bottle to the door and, for now, set it on the ground outside. With the clear windows, she would be able to see if anyone neared it. And it was cold outside, bitter and far from humid.

  She clenched her teeth as she shut the door. “I know you aren’t stupid. Does the word ‘sodium’ look like ‘wuliqing’ to you?”

  He pulled a face. “It was labelled as Wuliqing.” To be on the safe side, he spelled the word—correctly.

  Felicia opened the door and checked the label on the bottle of sodium. It was wrong.

  “Impossible.” Her fingers were numb. “I arranged these bottles this morning. They were labelled correctly.”

  “You must have misread.”

  When she glared at him, he ran a hand through his hair and amended, “Maybe the humidity caused the label to peel off and fall and when a servant replaced it, they accidentally returned the label to the wrong bottle.”

  The wax that adhered the label to the bottle was still soft, though that could partially be due to the heat of the orangery. Felicia gritted her teeth. “Maybe someone switched the labels on purpose.”

  “You’re mad.”

  After carefully peeling off the label and soft wax, she stomped to the row of bottles to return it to its rightful place. The sodium wasn’t the only thing mislabeled. “Am I?” She shook her head. “Nothing here is correct.” An exaggeration maybe, but it was more than coincidence. She set the label down on the table before she crumpled it in her fist. After several deep breaths, she steadied her hand enough to work on rearranging the labels to their rightful places. She pressed the wax onto the bottle with more vigor than necessary, as if by doing so, she could meld the label onto the glass.

  Gideon loomed over her right shoulder, silent. Her skin prickled with awareness from his stare.

  When she glanced at him, he spread his hands and said in a calm voice, “You’re overreacting. Take a moment to breathe and we’ll approach this rationally.”

  “Rationally?” She set down the bottle in her hand with a clink before she turned to face him fully. She crossed her arms. “Let’s review the facts: not one, not two, but eight of my ingredients have the wrong label. Earlier this morning, they did not. Because of the mix up, you might have ruined our sample of the serum along with the two plants that we have—” She gestured to the potted plants, lined to one side of Gideon’s work bench. “—and you could have burned yourself badly in the process.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Even assuming that someone would purposefully switch the labels—which is ludicrous—they had no means of knowing that I would choose that precise bottle. Not to ment
ion if you had been the person to choose it, you would have known instantly that it wasn’t the right bottle. In terms of sabotage, the culprit would have done better to steal our plant. This was an accident, nothing more.”

  He was wrong. Felicia knew it in the pit of her stomach. Call it instinct, but no one fiddled around with her projects. Most who glimpsed the bottles had enough sense not to touch what they didn’t understand; those who recognized the contents were aware of their hazards.

  Stepping closer to him, she canted her chin up to meet his gaze. Beneath the citrus-and-floral scent of the orangery, he smelled of cedar. She lowered her voice.

  “What we are doing is vital to the nation, yes?”

  His eyes turned guarded. “Yes.”

  “Then, is it such a stretch to believe that our enemies might have caught wind of our assignment?”

  A muscle in the hinge of his jaw twitched. “Yes.” He sounded less convinced this time.

  “Don’t be stubborn, Gideon.”

  Look who she was talking to!

  She shook her head. “Consider, for a moment, that the French learned of our assignment. Wouldn’t they want to stop it at all costs?”

  “Perhaps…” His voice trailed off. He lifted his arm, likely to run his hand through his hair or fiddle with his collar, but she stood too close. He brushed against her instead. They both sucked in a breath as he stepped back.

  He dropped his hand to his side again, balling it. “Even if a French spy learned of our assignment—and considering that only you, I, Morgan, Phil, and Strickland know about it, I think that is unlikely to say the least—they would never be able to infiltrate this estate. Zeus, half the servants here are British spies, either on leave, between assignments, or in training. How would they have evaded the prying eyes of over fifty servants?”

  Felicia dropped her hands. She fought the urge to mirror his hostile stance and make a fist. “Tenwick Abbey is huge. It isn’t inconceivable.”

  “Yes, it is.” His voice cut off, strained. He finger-combed his hair and glanced toward the glass ceiling. When he released a breath, the tension in his shoulders visibly deflated. His gaze still glittered with hostility when he lowered it to hers. “I am trained in field work. I could walk this estate with my eyes closed, and I wouldn’t have been able to slip in or out of the premises without detection. You are overreacting.”

  “And you are underreacting.” She stormed around him to pluck one of the two brugmansia plants off his work bench.

  “What are you doing?” He sounded exasperated.

  “I’m taking this back to the wagon.”

  “You can’t do—”

  When she turned on her heel and strode away, ignoring his protests, the clip of his boots against the stone walkway trumpeted the fact that he followed her.

  “That plant isn’t healthy. It needs to stay here.”

  At the glass door leading to the lawn, she rounded on him. “It is my plant and I will do whatever I want with it.” Namely, she would keep it safe. If Gideon refused to acknowledge that there was a threat, she would take precautions herself.

  “Fine,” he spat. “Take your bloody plant. It’s not as though this serum is going to work, anyway.”

  The words—and sentiment behind them—sliced her deeply. Far deeper than she expected, from a man as infuriating as Gideon. He didn’t respect her, after all. Not her life’s work, in any case. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Without a word, she exited the orangery and stopped only to scoop up the sodium on the way.

  She didn’t need Gideon’s help, not beyond ensuring that the plant remained alive and bloomed should they need more seeds. But if someone wanted to stop her from completing her task, it would make a difficult task impossible.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  14

  Felicia fumed as she reached her wagon. She opened the door one-handed, raising her knee to fend off her overexcited dog as he barreled down the steps to sniff her skirts. Given his level of excitement, one might think she’d been gone for days rather than less than an hour. As she climbed into the wagon, he squeezed in next to her.

  She carefully set the plant down on the counter she used as her work table. After she tucked the sodium into a special section of her cabinets, she checked the distilling process. Satisfied that it was complete, she gathered the oils, spread the coals, and disposed of the excess water.

  As she turned the corner around her wagon, basin still in hand, she came face to face with a black beak and a beady eye.

  “Giddy!”

  Chubs barked. He was also giddy to see the visitors.

  Squawking, Antonia flapped her wings and hopped from Lucy’s arm to her shoulder. She flipped her tail at Chubs, who danced around the young woman as if looking for the right angle to jump. Felicia shifted the heavy basin into one hand as she lunged for the mastiff’s collar. She missed. He balanced on his hind legs and stretched to deliver a single lick to Antonia’s beak. She snapped at him as Lucy stumbled for balance. Chubs, pleased with himself, sat and thumped his tail on the ground. Felicia wrapped her hand around his collar.

  Charlie, who had dawdled a step behind Lucy, leaped forward to offer her assistance. She got a wing to the ear for her troubles, but Lucy remained on her feet.

  The moment the young women turned, Felicia burst, “Forgive me. I didn’t know you were there or I would have restrained Chubs.”

  “It’s fine.” Lucy’s voice was strained as she battled to calm her parrot. After several minutes of soft words and strokes to her ruffled feathers, Antonia perched quietly on Lucy’s shoulder. Her feathers were puffed out to twice their usual size, making her resemble a fluffy ball. When the parrot glared at Chubs, he thumped his tail with more vigor.

  Felicia tightened her hold on his collar, just in case.

  “We thought you might be hungry,” Lucy said. She angled her body to put more space between her pet and Felicia’s. Her mouth was tight—the parrot’s grip must be painful.

  Charlie chimed in. “Would you like to take tea with us inside?”

  Inside sounded like a better option than trying to keep Chubs in line. Nodding, Felicia stood and herded the mastiff toward the wagon. “Tea sounds lovely.” After all, it would give her and Gideon some time apart to cool off.

  Her chest tightened at the thought that someone was trying to sabotage their project. The fact that he refused to believe her… She loosened her hold on her dog’s collar before she choked him by accident.

  “Come along, Chubs,” she said, forcing a smile. She guided the mastiff into the wagon and told him, “Guard.”

  He cast a forlorn glance at Antonia, but sat in front of the distillery. With the coals banked, the warmth would slowly recede but it would remain at a comfortable enough temperature for the dog while they ate. After she slid the distillery basin back into its rightful place, she shut the wagon door and left Chubs on watch. No one would harm that brugmansia plant, that she could guarantee.

  As for the other… she didn’t want to liberate it from Gideon’s hold while he was still in a foul mood. She had to trust that it would be safe for the time being.

  When she strolled toward the abbey doors, Charlie and Lucy linked arms with her—Antonia on Lucy’s outside shoulder. They chattered away, Charlie enthusiastically discussing embroidery and asking after Felicia’s favorite stitches.

  As they reached the abbey doors, Charlie added, “If you come down to supper tonight, I’ll show you my latest project in the drawing room. We always sit there after supper and I do my embroidery while Lucy and Evelyn chat.”

  Lucy’s hand tightened on Felicia’s arm. She sensed that, even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been allowed to cry off for a second night.

  Felicia smiled. “That sounds delightful.”

  Lucy’s hold lightened. Felicia flexed her fingers as they tingled.

  “What happened to Miss Merewether?” she asked. “Did she go home?”

  Charlie
made a face. Lucy’s expression was serene and polite, undoubtedly learned from her mother. “She’s still sitting with Mother. She’s a nice enough woman, but…”

  “Stiff?” Charlie suggested.

  They exchanged a glance around Felicia.

  “Grasping,” Lucy corrected. “Haven’t you noticed the way she addresses Mama and me with such familiarity?”

  “I assumed you invited the intimacy,” Felicia put in, even though the question had seemed rhetorical. “You did with me, after all.”

  “You’re different,” Lucy said, shrugging her parrot-free shoulder. Even a one-armed movement jostled Antonia into an indignant squawk. The tie linking Antonia’s leg to Lucy’s wrist went taut.

  After a scuffle with the parrot that ended with Antonia perched on Lucy’s leather glove once more instead of her shoulder, Lucy resumed the conversation. The trio entered the abbey through the main entrance.

  “You’re Giddy’s friend, so you’re our friend, too.”

  Felicia bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “I don’t know if you would call your brother and I friends.”

  “No?” Lucy’s eyes narrowed as she cast a coy sideways glance at Felicia. “Would you say more than friends?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Felicia must have sounded appropriately decisive over the notion, because Lucy’s face fell. Charlie sent her friend a sheepish look and a shrug. Felicia pretended she hadn’t seen the exchange.

  Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she took the lead. At the corridor, she paused to let her two companions draw nearer. She didn’t know in which parlor they intended to take tea.

  Lucy hailed a footman as she entered the corridor. The young man tugged on his forelock as he stepped nearer. She handed her parrot to him with instructions to bring her to Evelyn, then linked arms with Felicia.