Chapter Four
Edmund made a noise behind me, jerking forward as if he meant to offer me comfort. I appreciated the gesture even as my mind reeled and my broken heart bled.
My mother was standing in my laboratory. My mother – who I’d seen coughing and half-dead with consumption. I’d watched my father mourn her. I’d watched him toast her on her birthday every year for thirteen years, and now here she stood so wild and untamed and alive that I thought my body would crumble to dust with the knowledge of it.
A pair of women followed her through the hole and helped lift my steam engine prototype into a crate. The first woman, the one who’d threatened me, stood with her hand on her holster as though waiting for orders.
“You are just as beautiful as I’d hoped,” she said, smiling softly at me. Proudly. Like a mother ought to smile at her daughter. Her voice was as warm and comforting as I remembered it. My chest clenched painfully. “I imagine you have a lot of questions?”
“Just one,” I replied. My voice was as hard as steel. “Where are they taking my engine?”
She pursed her lips in disapproval. It was a look I knew all too well. “We are taking it to be destroyed.”
“What?” I shouted. “That’s – that’s months of work!”
“I know,” she replied. She tossed her head to keep her hair out of her eyes. She did not wear a tool belt, but there was a holster on her hip with a modified pistol the same as the one which had been used to threaten me not moments ago. “We keep an eye on inventors and advancements and, if we need to, we intervene.”
Edmund spoke behind me: “Who is ‘we’?”
My mother looked over my shoulder, as if just realising that Edmund was there.
“We call ourselves ‘The Mothers’,” she said, speaking more to me than to my manservant. “We are a collective of women who fight to protect the world from things it is not ready to understand.”
Edmund frowned. “So you protect the world by keeping it ignorant?” he asked.
The woman who had threatened me snorted, but was silenced by a look from my mother.
“By keeping it safe,” she clarified. She turned to the woman and muttered: “See to the rest, Elizabeth – get it all.”
The woman nodded and began barking orders to the rest of the women who’d swung through the hole in my attic wall. They began collecting my failed indoor illumination globes, my tools. One even came to remove the tool belt from my hips and the gasmask from my neck. I felt stripped bare and utterly exposed, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel the violation. I was too busy trying to reconcile my memory of my mother’s funeral with the solid, robust leader before me.
“I thought you were dead,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. She flinched as though I had struck her. “We buried you, father and I.”
“I so sorry, dear one,” she said. She might as well have shot me in the chest. “But it was necessary. Your father would not allow me to forbid you from tinkering. He thought it was harmless. He has no idea what technology could do in the wrong hands. With The Mothers, I can do some real good for this world – more than I ever could have done as his wife.”
“You were more than his wife,” I said. “You were my mother.”
The women picked up my steam engine and began carrying it to the door.
“Please,” I said, reaching out as though I could take it back, but the woman with her hand on her holster kept me frozen in place. “Don’t take it. I worked so hard on it –”
“My dear one,” my mother said, stepping forward and taking both of my hands in hers. “You’ve nearly poisoned yourself trying to make this machine work. We were on our way to intervene long before we got word that you had finally managed to solve the problem.”
“And how did you get word?” Edmund demanded behind me.
“We have ears everywhere,” she said. I tried to recoil, but she held onto tightly to my hand. She’d been listening to me? How? Why? “I always hoped that you would outgrow this… curiosity,” she said, speaking to me again as though Edmund had never interrupted us. “I knew that you would be a danger right from the beginning. You’re too inquisitive, my dear. The world is not ready for a mind such as yours.”
“So you would have banished me to a drawing room for dancing and marriage?” I asked, feeling tears flood my eyes.
“I’d hoped that your father would see to that, yes. But I see he continues to indulge you.”
The women had gathered all of my inventions and stuffed them into crates. One by one they were carried downstairs. It was as if she were chipping away at everything I was. Edmund seemed to realise the agony I was in, because he reached forward and gripped the tips of my fingers with his own.
My mother glared disapprovingly at our joined hands. “You would do well to remember your place, Mr Price,” she said, sniffing in a way which was so uncannily like my father.
Edmund gritted his teeth and did not let go of my hand. “My place is right here,” he said. “Supporting Miss Lapointe.”
“See that your ‘support’ does not overstep your boundaries.”
I felt a sudden slice of red-hot anger cut through me. “I will decide what is out of bounds,” I said. “I am the mistress of this house while my father is absent.”
“I beg your pardon?” my mother said, flaring her nostrils at me. “I do not know what your father has been teaching you, but you will not speak to your mother in such a manner.”
I released Edmund’s hand to step forward so that we were mere inches apart. I could see the pattern of freckles over the bridge of her nose. They were the exact same pattern as mine.
“My mother is dead,” I said coldly. I saw a flash hurt cross her eyes and felt a hint of satisfaction. “You wear her face, you speak with her voice – but a real mother would never abandon her family.”
She gazed at me with a look of soft sorrow. I realised that we were about the same height. I remembered all of the times when I could have used her guidance over the years; my first monthly cycle, when my father had ordered one of the maids to guide me through the process. My coming-out ball. What I wouldn’t have given to have a mother’s guidance over the last few weeks when my confusing attraction to Edmund had left me so distracted I could barely think straight. Although judging by her reaction to his holding my hand, I imagined that her advice would not be the kind I wanted to hear.
The first woman – Elizabeth – returned to the room. She did not seem to notice or care that she had interrupted our argument.
“Everything has been accounted for, Ma’am,” she said. “Shall we remove the threat?” Something about the way she said it sent a shiver down my spine. Edmund shifted so that he was between me and Elizabeth.
My mother gazed at me for a moment longer before shaking her head slowly. “No, we leave this one alive,” she said.
Elizabeth frowned. “But Ma’am –”
“Get back into the dirigible, Elizabeth. I will join you presently.”
Elizabeth huffed and left through the door. Apparently getting back into a flying machine was much more difficult than getting out of it. I watched her go and wondered how much pleasure she would take in killing me – how much pleasure my mother had just thwarted.
My mother watched her go as well. “Now, listen to me, my dear one,” she said, speaking low as if she were concerned about being overheard. It was just myself, my mother, and Edmund in the room. “The general protocol in these matters is to remove the inflammatory material – your experiments – and destroy it. Then we remove the person who created it. But I would not harm you, if I could help it.” She paused, as though expecting gratitude. When I offered none, she continued. “You will, of course, stop this tinkering nonsense and settle your mind. You are brilliant, my dear one, but the world is not ready for your brilliance.”
“And if I refuse?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly. “I do not have the power to protect your forever.” She reached forward and ran her fingers thro
ugh my hair. It took everything I had not to recoil from her touch. “I love you.”
“I loved you, once,” I replied. “But I do not know who you are anymore.”
She smiled. “I am your mother,” she said simply. “And I know what is best for you.”
Without another word, she stepped around me and left the attic. Edmund had to side-step out of her way. Once she had disappeared, I ran to the hole in the wall to gaze out at the flying machine, memorising the way the propellers looked when they were in motion, the ghost of a plan forming in my head.
My mother walked out of the front door of the manor. A rope ladder fell from the glass tank tied to the underbelly of the flying machine’s balloon. Her hair flew in a black curtain behind her, in a strange mockery of the black curtain which covered her portrait in the drawing room. She put her foot in the bottom rung of the ladder and held on tight as the flying machine took off. I stood silhouetted by the flying machine’s spotlight as it carried my mother away.
Chapter Five
Silence fell. Edmund was still standing against the wall, staring at the hole in the wall where my mother had entered and then left.
My attic lab was a mess. The Mothers had taken all of my papers, my prototypes – everything I’d been working on for years. Everything I’d used to bury the grief which had consumed me in the wake of her death. I felt numb. What would I tell Father?
Edmund began to limp around the room, picking up rubble and tossing it into a pile in the centre of the room.
“How did you hurt your leg?” I asked, suddenly curious.
He looked down as though he’d forgotten about it. In his defence, he had more pressing concerns to attend to. “Oh, a boyhood misadventure,” he said. “I was trying to walk across a fence and fell off.”
“That must have hurt,”
Edmund shrugged. “I suppose. I took a nasty hit to the head as well, so my memory of the event is not terribly strong.” He paused, then asked: “Are you alright?”
My mouth went dry and I did not answer.
He gazed around at the wreckage my mother had left in her wake and sighed. “We ought to fetch the maids. Hopefully they were sensible enough to fetch the authorities.”
“And tell them what?” I asked, hearing the hysterical edge in my voice with detachment. “That my dead mother and a band of insane housewives blew up my father’s house and flew away on a mechanical flying machine? They’ll be sent to Bedlam before the sun rises.”
I began picking through what was left. A few indoor illumination globes had survived the blast, although their glass baubles had been smashed in the blast. I wondered how difficult it would be for me to replicate the modifications I’d seen on the pistols the women had worn. I wondered how one went about purchasing a pistol. My father had always bought me everything I’d wanted when I was tinkering – but I’d never wanted to experiment with weapons before.
“Do you know where to buy a gun?” I asked Edmund. The cold breeze from the hole in the wall chilled me to the bone.
Edmund looked at me with a crease in his brow. “Whatever would you need a gun for?”
“I’m going after the.”
Edmund swallowed. “Rosalie – Miss Lapointe –”
“Do not keep calling me by my last name, Edmund – not after what just happened.”
“Rosalie, then,” he replied. He looked as though he was choosing his words very carefully. “Your father hired me to keep you safe.”
“He hired you to feed me!”
“Whatever your father hired me to do, the fact is that I have grown quite… fond of you. I do not want to see you hurt, not when I have the chance to do something about it. Going after The Mothers – or whatever they choose to call themselves – is suicide. How could you possibly hope to win?”
“What makes you think I plan on winning?” I demanded.
Edmund flinched. “Rosalie –”
“You cannot have grown fond of me – you’ve barely spoken to me since you arrived!” I remembered all of the brief exchanges, the times he had looked at me and then turned away. He’d spent more time in the gardens than he had in my company, and now he claimed to be fond of me?
Defeating The Mothers would be impossible. With their superior technology, my attacking them would be like a kitten swatting at a bulldog’s cheek. But I wasn’t thinking about winning – I was thinking about justice. About the many hours I’d poured into tinkering to hide the pain of my mother’s death. All these years, she had been deliberately deceiving me. And now, she’d burst into my home and told me that I was out of my depth, as though she could possibly know what I was capable of. I would show her. I would show them all.
“I know you, Rosalie,” Edmund said, looking at me with such intensity that it broke through the haze of vengeance which had clouded my mind. “I know that you despise white beans. I know that your favourite dessert is tarte tatin, but you hate candied apples. I know that you bury yourself in your work because you cannot bare to leave your mind idle, and I do not know why but I’d wager it has something to do with the curtained portrait in your Father’s study.” His voice rose with passion as he kept going. “I know that you’re happiest when you’re working, but you’re also saddest. I may not know everything about you, Rosalie, but I know enough to know that you are the most intelligent, exciting, utterly incomprehensible woman I have ever met.”
I stepped forward and pressed my lips hard to his. I realised tardily that I had dreamed of this moment. Not this moment exactly, but a moment like this. Ever since he’d walked into my attic and quirked that amused eyebrow at me, I’d been lost. I’d dreamed of kissing him a hundred different times, in lots of different ways. Like the mornings I would wake up and sketch the blueprints which had come to me in the night, I was living my dream in that moment.
Edmund froze. I pressed my hands to either side of his face and moved my lips against his. Finally, he relaxed into the kiss – sighing and pulling me close as though he hadn’t quite allowed himself to hope that this moment was real. As we kissed, I felt his hands move around to fiddle with the strings of my corset.
“Go ahead,” I asked, breaking the kiss so that I could speak. I felt bold and daring. The dead had risen tonight. I could kiss a man without marrying him. Anything was possible.
“I –” Edmund swallowed. “Maybe we should – the wall – the maids –”
“Hang the wall,” I said. “Hang the maids. I want to feel you.”
He swallowed again. A heavy, liquid feeling rose in my belly as he hesitantly moved around to untie the strings of my corset. I felt his hot, almost feverish fingers trace down the panes of my back. They worked quickly to remove the offending item.
Edmund kissed the back of the neck and I felt a bolt of heat shoot down into my lower belly and between my thighs. I let out a soft oh as he finished removing the corset and let it fall into a heap on the ground. A surge of confidence broke over me like a wave, and I turned in his arms and pressed my hands against his chest, feeling the hot muscles beneath his shirt.
His warm, green eyes stared into mine. “I do not want to overstep –”
I pressed my finger to his lips. “You are not overstepping,” I told him. “I promise.”
He grinned. His entire face lit up with it. He pressed me gently against the edge of my workbench, running his hand down my waist to my backside and lifting me up so that I could sit on the edge. He bent to kiss the swell of my breasts, running his lips up to my neck and pressing them gently against the tender spot beneath my ear. His bad leg was rested against the side of the bench while his good leg kept him upright.
“Edmund,” I said. I was shocked at how breathless I sounded. His kisses sent shivers through my body, making my blood hum with want. I felt an uncontrollable need to press my body against his.
Finally, he pressed his lips to mine again. I felt his tongue pushing into my mouth and met it with my own, feeling a thrill of excitement when he moaned and as he pulled me closer by m
y waist. Without the corset, I could feel his warm fingers roam unhindered over my sensitive flesh. I wanted them everywhere.
As though he could read my thoughts, he ran his hands down my hips, over my thighs, and began to lift my skirt. The cool air of the attic sent shivers over my over-heated skin as he pushed my petticoats aside and exposed my sex. He stopped kissing me and looked down. I felt unbearably exposed by his gaze, but his eyes held nothing but admiration.
“You will tell me to stop?” he asked, and I was glad to hear that his voice was as breathless as mine.
I wanted to ask: Stop what? But I did not want to appear completely naïve. Instead, I ran my fingers through his hair and nodded, kissing him low and deep as his warm fingers skittered over my thighs and the outside of my core. My hips jerked up without my consent, chasing his fingers, desperate for friction. He broke away from my kisses, his lips curling up in a crooked smile as he gazed fondly down at me. His cheeks were flushed and his hair a mess. Apparently I had gotten carried away in my attentions, running my fingers through it until it stood on end like a surprised porcupine. A giggle escaped me as I gazed back at him. His smile widened before he fell to his knees and – to my horror and delight – pressed his lips to me.
Before long I was writhing desperately against his mouth, beyond thought, reason or shame. The pleasure was too keen; I could not contain it. “I can't, I can't,” I gasped. But even as I said it, a blazing, rushing climax tore through me, leaving me limp and gasping. Edmund did not stop his attentions until I used the hand which had been buried in his hair to pull him away. He kissed my wrist, then took my hand and kissed up my arm.
“You are so beautiful,” he said, looking up at me through hooded eyes.
“So are you,” I replied breathlessly.
The deep flush on his cheeks grew deeper. I watched in a daze as Edmund rose and struggled with the buttons on his breeches. I pushed myself up on shaking arms to help him. Our fingers tangled together and he kissed me, short and sweet, before the button on his breeches finally popped open and he freed himself from their confines.
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Southern Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) Page 96