Proof by Seduction (Carhart 1)

ouldn’t let Lord Blakely reduce her to that level.

The man drew himself up. “You can disparage figures all day long, but that’s what proof means. It means one has a factual basis for one’s assertions.”

“You call what you’re doing proof,” Jenny snapped. “But you prod and poke and pick. You have no interest in proving anything.”

“What do you know of scientific proof?”

“Oh, you’re the sort to pin insects to cards in order to study them. After several months spent perusing their desiccated carcasses, you’ll announce your triumphant discovery: all insects are dead! And you’ll delight in the ascendancy of scientific thought over human emotion.”

Lord Blakely cocked his head and looked at her, as if searching for some hidden meaning in her face. “I study animal behavior. It’s imperative I not kill the subjects of my inquiry. Dead macaws rarely flock.”

“There’s no need to murder the analogy by overextending it, atop your other crimes.”

His gaze slid down her body. “The only question in my mind was whether you believed your own lies or were actively attempting to defraud Ned. I suppose it is a compliment to you that I have decided you are too clever for the former.”

“Naturally. You don’t believe anything you cannot taste or touch.”

“I believe in Pythagoras’s theorem, and I can’t taste that. I believe there may be some truth to Lamarck’s theories on inheritance of traits. But no, I do not believe in fate or fortune-tellers.”

“Fate, fortune-telling—or feelings.” Jenny snapped her fingers in his face. “The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.”

The insouciant look on his face faded into cold steel. “A monograph?”

She inhaled, sharply. “Listen to yourself. You cite Lamarck instead of talking of your cousin’s future. I have never seen you laugh. I’ve never even seen you smile. No wonder Ned would rather listen to me. You’re a cold, unemotional automaton.”

“An automaton?” His shoulders jerked and he stiffened.

Jenny wasn’t done with him. “Just because you’re as dispassionate as sawdust and as brittle as old bone doesn’t mean everyone around you must ossify.”

“Ossify.” His nose flared and his chin lifted, as if parroting her syllables constituted some kind of brilliant argument. He looked down at his right hand, clenched into a fist in front of him. The muscles in his neck tensed. Jenny took a step back and wondered if she’d gone too far. Madame Esmerelda would never have let anger carry her away.

Then he looked up, and her doubts froze like so much lake water in winter. His eyes reflected some boreal wasteland, inhabited only by wind and a cold sweep of snow. Jenny felt the chill through every layer of Madame Esmerelda’s costume, and she shivered.

When he spoke, there was no emotion in his voice at all. “You should have taken the two hundred guineas. After that outburst, I shall enjoy proving you a fraud.”

BY THE TIME the carriage rumbled back to the Blakely home in the heart of Mayfair divested of all inhabitants but Gareth, it had begun to rain. It wasn’t the warm tropical downpour he’d enjoyed in Brazil; instead, it was the frigid, anemic drizzle that typically plagued London. Drop after sullen drop sank to the earth.

So he was a cold, emotionless automaton? Strange, then, that he felt so damned furious. Gareth gritted his teeth as he stepped outside the carriage. Servants swarmed around him, attempting to rush him inside, out of the wet.

He brushed away their hands. “Leave me. I’m going for a walk,” he snapped. They exchanged glances—his servants often exchanged glances—but they let him go.

Walking was an eccentricity he had developed in Brazil. It was, after all, the only way to make his daily rounds of observations. He’d brought the activity home with him. In London, the habit was inconvenient at best. The streets were all muck, and there was no overhead cover—neither wide-leafed jungle trees nor thick canopies—to speak of. But at a time like this—with his thoughts disordered, his mind awhirl and his body as ready to ignite as tinder—he needed this solitary exercise more than ever.

He set off into the dark. Cold rain ran down Gareth’s spine in rivulets, but it did nothing to dampen the fury raging inside him. Dispassionate as sawdust?

Madame Esmerelda was wrong. It wasn’t science that killed emotion. It was this place. These people. This title. He’d spent years in the rain forest, where life and color flourished anywhere it had the smallest chance of surviving. Here, geometric brick building followed geometric brick building, separated only by growing torrents of mud. Drawn shades clotted pallid windows; leaves like faded clay clung to half-dead grass. London was sterile. The rain had washed away all but the most persistent of the city’s fabricated smells—the stink of coal and the scent of cold, wet stone.

If the city was desolate, its inhabitants were worse. He’d left London eleven years ago because polite society nearly suffocated him. It was the rigor of scientific thought, the clarity of observation, the control he gained over the universe as his understanding bloomed, that kept some vital part of himself in motion since his return. He had realized long ago that he would never really fit in. During these last months, the mornings he spent sorting through the naturalist’s journal he’d kept in Brazil were all that helped him hold tight to some notion of who Gareth was. Without it, he would have drowned everything real about himself in Lord Blakely’s unending responsibilities.

Gareth shook the rain from his shoulders and, sighing, looked up. He’d been trudging through muddy puddles for nearly half an hour. He was soaked to the bone; were it not for the furious whirl in his mind and the fast pace he’d been keeping, he’d have been chilled.

Unconsciously, his feet had traced the steps to the neighborhood where Madame Esmerelda lived. The streets were decidedly dingier than Gareth’s own address, brown rivulets of running water skirting slushy horse dung strewn about the cobblestones. But the area was by no means dangerous. Families here hovered below respectability, but somewhat above poverty.

He found her windows. Tucked in the basement, down a flight of stairs. They glowed with an orange light that put him in mind of hot tea and a hearth. Anger, hot and irrational, welled up as he thought of her ensconced in a warm, comfortable room, while he prowled outside in the rain like some kind of bedraggled panther.

His whole response to her was as irrational as the idea of a fortune-teller consulting the spirits about the future. It was as stupid as the concept of wooing women with ebony elephants. It was, he admitted, as incomprehensible as a fraud refusing an offer of several hundred guineas in exchange for doing nothing. Perhaps that was why he drifted toward her door, his boots clomping heavily against the cold, wet stairs leading down.

He had a sudden image of confronting her, of explaining scientific thought and rigor. He wanted to knock the wind out of her with his words, as she had from him. He wanted her to feel as off balance as he did now. He wanted to win, to prove to her she was wrong and he was right. How idiotic of him. How unthinking. And yet—

He knocked.

And he waited.

Madame Esmerelda opened the door. She was carrying a tallow candle. It smoked and illuminated her face; he could see her pupils dilate in shock when she saw who stood on her doorstep. She didn’t say a word—didn’t invite him in, just blocked the opening and looked up at him in openmouthed surprise.

She hadn’t donned that ridiculous costume again. Instead, a simple robe of thick, dark wool covered her. The thin white line of her chemise peeked over the neckline. That hint of muslin forcibly reminded Gareth of the afternoon. Of the expanse of soft flesh separated from his hands by two cloth layers and so much dampened air. A fist-size lump lodged itself in his throat and a dark mist formed in his mind, blanketing his carefully planned diatribe.

She curled one arm around herself, as if it were somehow she who needed protection from him.

“Do you know how I can tell you’re a fraud?” he croaked.

>

She gazed up at him.

“Because you’re wrong. You’re completely wrong.”

He fumbled in his mind for his prepared speech. Science is about answers. It raises us above those who do not question.

But before he could start, Gareth made a colossal mistake: He looked into Madame Esmerelda’s eyes. He’d thought she was black-eyed as a Ggypsy. But from eighteen inches away, with the candle so close to her face, he realized her eyes were in fact a very dark blue.

With that simple observation, the blood drained from his brain. Gareth’s structured defense of scientific thinking washed from his head. Instead, he took a step toward her. He let the veil drop from his eyes, let her see the inferno raging inside him.

She sucked in air. “Why do you say I’m wrong?” Her voice quavered on the last word.

“I’m not an automaton.” The words came from some vital place deep inside him—his solar plexus, perhaps, rather than his uncooperative brain.

Gareth took another step closer. She continued to hold his gaze, as incapable of looking away as he. The white vapor of her breath swirled in the cold night air. Its cadence kept time with the rise and fall of her chest. He could taste every one of her exhalations, sweetness coalescing against his mouth.

It was an act of self-preservation to reach out and pinch the candle flame. To stop the flow of sensual images before they seared themselves permanently into his flesh. The wick sizzled and the light died between his wet fingers. Her eyes disappeared into the navy darkness of nighttime.

It didn’t help. He could still smell her. He could taste the honey of her breath on the tip of his tongue. And the distant streetlamp cast enough illumination for him to see when she licked her lips. Heat seared him.