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 it 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 lifetime 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.”
But he wasn’t just talking about phonograph demonstrations, and they both knew it.
elen woke to the urgent cries of her hungry son. She rose from bed in the chill night air wearing nothing but her nightgown before scooping him up into her arms. Levi had seen to every detail of Theo’s nursery, but Helen had not been able to leave him in another chamber for the night just yet. For all his life, he had lain in a crib by her bedside. She could hear his breathing and rustling and rest easy in the knowledge that he was always within reach.
Theo continued to wail as she struggled to find her way in the darkness of her new surroundings. Levi’s dynamo was shut down for the evening, meaning his hundreds of bright electric lights wouldn’t work again until tomorrow. The convenience was a novel one, but perhaps needed some refining. What had Levi said? Nearly everything that exists can be improved upon.
Yes, so too his electricity. Not that she missed the odorous gaslights, but she’d always had a dreadful time seeing in the dark. She had an oil lamp somewhere at hand, but of course she couldn’t find it now when she needed it most.
“Drat,” she muttered, feeling blindly for the table. Her toe connected
solidly with another piece of furniture and she cried out, which startled Theo enough to make him keen even more vehemently. Perhaps she ought to simply toe her way back to the bed and burrow into the warm cocoon of blankets to feed him rather than sit in her customary chair.
Suddenly, the door connecting her chamber to Levi’s was thrown open. The warm glow of a hand lamp filtered into the murky chamber as her husband strode into the room, his expression one of alarm.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded, at once painfully aware that he wore nothing more than a pair of drawers he’d slapped on in a hurry. The placket was unbuttoned at his waist, and his taut abdomen and muscled chest were stunning in the soft light. His body was every bit as strong and rigidly defined as she’d recalled. For a moment she couldn’t help but stare, drinking in the sight of him, masculine and glorious, his battle scar dark and proud on his arm. An answering ache blossomed deep within her, undeterred by the wailing infant in her arms and the fact that she had insisted their marriage be chaste.
“The baby is crying,” he said, sounding concerned. “What is amiss? Where the hell is his nurse?”
“His nurse is dismissed for the evening. I’ve no need of her, and nothing is amiss.” Levi was plainly unaccustomed to hungry babies who woke in the night. Helen hadn’t had a good night of rest in months. “Theo’s hungry, that is all, and he’s possessed of a rather foul humor when he’s suffering from an empty belly.” She offered their wailing son to him. “Take him, would you please, until I get settled?”
He took Theo into the crook of his open arm without hesitating before setting his lamp on a table and patting their wailing son’s bottom. She stared for a moment at the intimate picture he presented, bareback and cradling their child. Some men wanted precious little to do with their children, believing they belonged in the nursery or with their mothers or nurses at all times. Not Levi. He had taken to being a father with an instant ease that didn’t fail to touch her heart. Theo calmed down in his arms, his cries subsiding.
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