Love and Other Perils

by Grace Burrowes

  “Why?”

  “Why do they work more quickly? I suspect because the size of the individual particle when pulverized in a dry form—”

  Antonia patted the place beside her. “Why investigate this topic?” She loved bread still warm from the oven, but she’d never once—not ever—considered how bread was made.

  “Because bread that requires two risings takes longer to prepare, and time is money.” Mr. Haddonfield sat beside her, making the old sofa creak. “Because leavening with whipped egg white or whipped heavy cream takes effort and expense. Because the French have come across a simple means of making soda ash—sodium carbonate—from brine, which when reacted with an acid becomes sodium bicarbonate and that has potential for many uses, including in the kitchen.”

  “You are passionate about this.”

  He popped the last of his lemon cake into his mouth and dusted his hands. “My siblings find my vocation amusing. Many bright minds are intent on developing faster means of transportation for goods and people. Other bright minds are making stronger steel, cheaper copper, and the like, but every bit as much work is done in the kitchen as in the factory. Why not lighten the load in the kitchen too? We can live without enormous bridges or quick passage across the seas, as we have for generations. We cannot live without safe, affordable, nutritious food.”

  While Mr. Haddonfield poured two cups of tea and added a dash of sugar to each, Antonia finished her cake. “You seek to lighten the load of women with this work.”

  “I spent a year apprenticed to a cook that I might familiarize myself with basic food preparation,” he said, resting an arm along the back of the sofa. “The effort needed to produce a palatable, safe, nutritious meal is enormous. Miss Betty and Miss Dottie are tiny, for all they seem to be in good health. Would they be more robust in their old age if preparing a decent meal was easier for them?”

  “You have quite the imagination.” And he was both fierce in his beliefs and confident of his priorities. What a refreshing change from men who sought only to while away their mornings at the tailor’s or to be seen riding bloodstock in the park.

  “You have an imagination too,” he said. “What occupies your fancy when you have the time to indulge it?”

  His question might have come from a particularly engaging dinner partner, but darkness had fallen, and Antonia had spent much of her day with the man seated so casually at her side. She would soon have to make a decision regarding Peter—none of her options in that situation appealed to her—and yet, she had this stolen moment with a fellow she liked and increasingly respected.

  “When I have time to indulge my imagination lately,” she said, taking his mug and setting it aside, “I think about you, Max Haddonfield, and about kissing you.”

  His smile spread like a sunrise across a bountiful land in high summer. “Do you truly?”

  “In fact, I’m thinking about kissing you right now.” She bussed his cheek, which took every bit of her courage, then hesitated.

  He lifted her to straddle his lap—lifted her easily—and then he was kissing her back like she was the answer to all of his dreams, and a few of his wildest fantasies too.

  As he was surely the answer to hers.

  A long afternoon watching Antonia reach for the highest shelves, handle books, and bend to retrieve more books from boxes had sorely tried Max’s self-restraint. She was well formed, generously endowed, and she’d bumped up against Max any number of times in the cramped confines of the gothic shelves.

  He would never importune a lady uninvited, but his imagination had shed every pretense of gentlemanly decorum hours ago.

  He and Antonia needed to talk. She needed to understand that he was not without means, though he preferred to use those means for his vocation. He was well born, not a fact he set much store by, but it would matter to her.

  Apparently, getting his neckcloth untied mattered to her more.

  “Antonia, we mustn’t.” Not yet, maybe not ever.

  She kissed the thought right out of his head and replaced it with sensation as she sank her weight over his falls. Whatever else was true, Max had to kiss her back, had to finally, finally learn the shape and softness of her breasts in his hands.

  Her next project was unbuttoning his shirt and slipping her hands over his chest and around his neck.

  “Did you know,” she whispered right into his ear, “watching you handle books unsettled me?”

  “The affliction is apparently contagious, for I—Antonia, what are you doing?”

  She gathered her skirts and petticoats. “I am for once doing as I please, for once ignoring the strictures polite society trusses me in from the time I pour my second cup of tea until I lay my head onto my pillow. I will soon be a spinster or worse, and I have squandered so many opportunities. I refuse to squander this one.”

  Something in her comment wanted further investigation—what was worse than being a spinster?—but Max’s deductive powers were consumed with figuring out how to undo the buttons of her bodice.

  “Let me,” she said, brushing his hands aside.

  In moments, Max was staring at the frothy lace trim on a pair of snug chemises. “You don’t wear stays?”

  “I must for formal wear, but I often walk here in the morning, and one wants to breathe. A fitted chemise allows more freedom.” She untied the bows holding her décolletage closed and some of the urgency seemed to leave her. “You will think me very forward.”

  “I think you very delectable.” Max eased the linen and lace aside, and wished the English language offered more effusive terms. He stared at pale, abundant female perfection, alabaster smooth in the firelight, ever so much warmer than alabaster.

  He buried his face in the cleft of her breasts, reveling in the scent of lemons. “Why me, Antonia? Why allow me this honor?”

  Her head fell back as he caressed the soft undersides of her breasts, then teased her nipples. “Because you look at me and you see me. Because we deserve this. Because that feels wonderful.”

  She tasted wonderful, of tart fruit and sweet woman, of desire and abundance. Max was soon more aroused than he could recall being since his randy boyhood.

  “We should stop, Antonia. I can satisfy you without. . .”

  She had scooted back to start unbuttoning his falls.

  “This is not wise, Antonia.” How he loved the sight of her, half undone, determined on her objective, that lock of hair again curling against her shoulder.

  “Wasting this opportunity would be unwise, Max. I envy Miss Dottie and Miss Betty. They were young and happy once, they knew themselves to be desired and envied. They turned heads and broke hearts. They didn’t sit among the potted palms wondering how soon they could leave the ball without causing talk.”

  Max could not fathom every nuance of what drove Antonia, but he knew that to refuse her, to reject what she offered, wasn’t in him. Her lively, sensible mind might grasp his reasoning, but the tender heart she guarded so well would be hurt.

  “Antonia, do you understand what follows if we continue? I will exercise restraint,”—somehow, he would find that strength—“but conception is always a possibility.”

  She framed his face in her hands. “I understand, and I thank you for the question. My mother made sure I was not kept in ignorance, and at finishing school, I met a groom.”

  “Yes?” Whoever that young swain had been, he’d made Antonia smile.

  “I was not always the buttoned-up, practical, plain woman you see now. Before my parents died I had more courage.”

  Didn’t we all? “You are not plain, Antonia, and at the moment, you don’t qualify as buttoned-up either.” Practicality had left the premises a good twenty minutes ago.

  She looked down at her breasts, expression quizzical. “I could grow to like being unbuttoned in your company.” She resumed undoing Max’s falls. “I like unbuttoning you too.”

  She liked handling him, exploring textures and contours with a careful curiosity that made Max’
s vow to exercise restraint a slender spar of clarity on a vast sea of temptation. Somewhere between measuring day-old bread loaves, befriending stray cats, and setting a good example for Dagger, Max had lost sight of the sheer pleasure of being an adult male in the company of a willing adult female.

  “You will indulge my curiosity all evening if I ask it of you, won’t you?” Antonia said, kissing him on the mouth. “I can’t wait all evening.”

  There were reasons—reasons beyond rampaging desire—that Max would not tarry in the library all evening, though at the moment, those reasons eluded him.

  “On your back,” he murmured. “I want you on your back.” For he would need to withdraw, and that meant maintaining as much control over the situation as possible.

  Antonia scrambled off his lap. “Up you go,” she said. “I have need of this sofa, sir.”

  Then Max was over her, half-hampered by skirts and breeches, until they got their clothing arranged, the pillows arranged, and themselves arranged. He took his time, easing into Antonia’s heat, waiting for any hitch in her breathing or tensing of her body that might signal the need for retreat.

  “I like this,” she whispered. “I want this.”

  I like you. Max couldn’t get the words out, because he was too busy mentally checking his own desire, and besides, he more than liked Antonia. He treasured her humor and practicality, her spirit and her determination. He gloried in her desire for him, a man who spent his days measuring bread and befriending cats.

  “Faster,” she murmured, scooting down to get a better grip on him.

  “Soon.” When she couldn’t speak, she was so overcome with passion. “Move with me.”

  “How?”

  “Like dancing, Antonia, only sweeter.”

  She was a quick study and had a marvelously short fuse. Max tried to complete a simple calculation in his head—divide 11.5 by 3.14—while Antonia thrashed and keened beneath him, but even the charms of mathematics were barely adequate to bolster his restraint.

  “Maximus Haddonfield.” Antonia made his name sound like her favorite sweet. “You astound me.”

  He gave her a few minutes to catch her breath, and then astounded her again, though that was the limit of what he could ask of his self-discipline. When Antonia’s legs had eased down to his sides, and her breathing had relaxed, he slowly withdrew.

  “Must you go?” she asked.

  They had not spoken of marriage, hadn’t even mentioned courtship. Did she seek that from him, or was this experience a fist she raised against the approaching arrival of spinsterhood? Max would summon the focus to untangle those questions, when desire no longer clamored so urgently for satisfaction.

  He extricated himself from Antonia’s embrace, rose, took out his handkerchief, braced his back against the mantel, and brought himself off in a few swift strokes. When he opened his eyes, he beheld Antonia, sprawled on the sofa, skirts rucked to her thighs, eyes slumberous and frankly watching him.

  “Never have I been more pleased to spend time in a library,” she said, “and I do love my books.”

  Max had to concentrate to make sense of her words. She hadn’t said she loved him, but then, what did he expect? He cast around for a reply—something witty, self-possessed, original—as he tidied up and buttoned his falls.

  He regarded the houri on the sofa and had to look away lest he start unbuttoning again. “We should open a window.”

  Oh, that was witty.

  Antonia wrinkled her nose, sighed, and sat up. “I’ll crack the door to the back passage. We leave that window ajar for the cat.”

  “I’m sorry,” Max said, taking the place beside her. “My store of urbane banter is at low ebb and I never commanded much to begin with. I am… I did not anticipate… Bloody hell, Antonia.”

  Worse and worse.

  “Is that a good bloody hell or a bad bloody hell, Max?”

  The unforgivably foul language spoken in those prim tones made him smile. “It’s an utterly flummoxed bloody hell. You have slain my rational mind, ambushed my grasp of logic, and drowned my self-possession in pleasure. I don’t know whether to thank you or apologize or. . .” Propose? The idea appealed much too strongly.

  “Or kiss you,” Antonia said, bussing his cheek and then drawing her chemises closed. “This is not at all how I envisioned my day ending, though the notion of having ambushed you pleases me. If you apologize I will be very disappointed.”

  Max would never, for any reason, intentionally disappoint this woman. “Then I will thank you. You amaze me.”

  She tied off the second chemise and started on her buttons, and by the firelight, Max saw color steal over her cheeks.

  “The sentiment is mutual, Mr. Haddonfield.”

  He wanted her to call him by his name, but he understood that as passion receded, and reality intruded, proper address was like another set of buttons that must be fastened.

  “May I walk you home, Miss Antonia?”

  Her fingers stilled, then resumed their buttoning. “I don’t want to go home, to be honest, but my family would panic, as would my household. You need not walk with me.”

  “Are you ashamed of what happened here?” Perhaps Max should be, but he could not muster a single whit of self-reproach.

  Antonia stood and smoothed down her skirts. “Ashamed? Absolutely not. I am ashamed of wasting years trying to curry the favor of polite society. I am ashamed that I took my parents’ love and support so much for granted. I am ashamed that I allowed Mr. Kessler to intimidate me, when as you say, he was dishonest and mean this morning. You may be assured he and I will have a very short discussion tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Max said, pleased to see the lady on her mettle. “I think the Barclay sisters would like to overhear that discussion. I know I would.”

  Antonia smiled at him, her gaze lit not with mere determination—she’d always been determined—but something else, something quite attractive.

  “I’ll crack the door to the back if you’ll bank the fire,” she said, “and then we really must be going.”

  She bustled off, no invitation to tarry again some other evening, no final embrace to revisit shared pleasures. Max tended to the fire and straightened the sofa cushions, his mind a jumble of bemusement, pleasure, hope, and misgiving.

  Lucifer leapt down from a windowsill, twitching the curtain aside. A handsome coach sat waiting in the street, a pair of matched grays in harness.

  “Has somebody sent a coach for you?” Max asked when Antonia returned.

  “Possibly,” she replied, passing Max his coat.

  He held her cloak for her and shrugged into his jacket, the moment becoming awkward. What to say? What did she want him to say?

  “Shall we be going?” Antonia asked, a bit too brightly.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “What exactly?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” This matters. You matter.

  “I won’t get any ideas at all, Mr. Haddonfield. Three ambushes in one day rather defeats even my formidable resources.”

  Max had no idea what she meant by that, so he offered his arm and escorted her to the waiting coach. The vehicle was elegantly appointed, though the door panels displayed no crest. Max handed Antonia into the coach and then she was gone.

  Light footsteps intruded into the mental morass that was Max’s attempt to make sense of his day.

  “Did you forget?” Dagger asked, shivering.

  “You need not have waited for me, Dagger.”

  “Didn’t wait for you. I popped ’round here when you didn’t come home. You are due for dinner at Lord Somebody’s in an hour. Thought maybe you’d forgot. I did all the measurements, just like you said.”

  Dinner. Lord Somebody. “Damnation.” Max took off up the walkway, his tool bag banging against his thigh.

  “You said I was supposed to do the measurements.”

  “I did indeed, and I’m sure you made an excellent job of
it.” If Max sent regrets to Lord Somebody—Humble? Hambugle?—he’d simply be putting off the inevitable, and it was just possible the viscount might be willing to sponsor some research.

  Not that Max would be capable of thinking scientifically about anything for quite some time.

  Chapter Five

  Antonia’s mind was sluggish though her body felt alive for the first time in ages. Max Haddonfield had done that, muted the endless prosing of her conscience and reminded her that life should include joy, spontaneity, affection, pleasure.

  Cupid in the clouds, the pleasure had been astonishing. Antonia pulled the shades on the coach windows and dimmed the lamps, the better to let her thoughts wander where they would. Three conclusions emerged, the first of which should have been obvious.

  The longer she subjected herself to polite society’s company, the angrier she became. Where was it written that an earl’s daughter had to marry at all, much less to “keep the fortune in the family”? The time spent with Max Haddonfield had shown her just how constant a companion ill-humor had become.

  “I liked to dance, once upon a time,” she murmured to the darkened coach. “Before men began staring at my settlements and my bosom with equal covetousness.”

  Max didn’t even know she had settlements, and his regard for her breasts had been nearly reverent.

  The second conclusion was a less welcome insight: Antonia’s lover had not ended the evening with any smitten declarations. No polite offer to stop by the next day for a recounting of the exchange with Mr. Kessler. No sweet, until-next-we-meet kiss goodnight. No suggestion that they share an ice at Gunter’s on Tuesday next.

  “I amazed him,” she muttered, “but I’m not to get the wrong idea.”

  She’d amazed herself, truth be told, seizing from the moment and from the man exactly what she wanted. She had the sense the Barclay sisters would have understood. Perhaps not approved, but they would have understood.