The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (43 page)
Read The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) Online
Authors: Courtney Milan
Tags: #feminist romance, #historical romance, #suffragette, #victorian, #sexy historical romance, #heiress, #scoundrel, #victorian romance, #courtney milan
Her slide rule won. She grabbed hold of it with her fingertips just before it hit the ground.
Her other burdens were not so lucky.
Splat
went the book. The shopping landed with a more complex sound—one that reminded her a little too much of breaking eggs.
Mr. Stephen Shaughnessy stood two doors down from her. His eyebrows rose in alarm as her groceries spilled. Three oranges bounced crazily down the pavement.
Rose gave him her most brilliant smile and waved her slide rule. “Good afternoon, Mr. Shaughnessy.”
Mr. Shaughnessy had taken the house just down from her sister’s three months ago. In all that time, she’d never managed to shake the nerves she felt around him. He had never done anything to warrant that nervousness, unfortunately; he was unfailingly polite.
In witness of that, he didn’t abuse her for her clumsiness now. He didn’t even remark on it. He simply came toward her. He’d taken three steps forward—and she’d drawn back one—before she realized that he only intended to pick up her oranges.
Any other reason he might have drawn close to her? That was all in her imagination.
She set down her slide rule carefully and picked up her shopping bag. It was canvas, and most of the contents hadn’t spilled. The meat, wrapped in waxed paper, was still at the bottom. The eggs…well, she’d check them once they were inside, but she had a sneaking suspicion that she and her sister would be having omelets for dinner tonight. Only the fruit had gone awry. She picked up an apple, not looking in his direction.
But she didn’t have to look directly at him to be aware of him. Mr. Shaughnessy was a young man—scarcely a few years older than Rose. He was tall and thin. He had a friendly smile, the sort that made a woman want to smile in response, and the faintest hint of an Irish accent. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a much darker reputation.
But he picked up one of the offending fruits and smiled in her direction. “Why is it that the oranges bounced, but the apples did not?”
His smile felt like an arrow, one that hit her straight in the solar plexus. And so Rose adjusted her spectacles on her nose and said the first thing that came into her mind.
Unfortunately, the first thing that came into her mind was…
“It’s Newton’s Third Law. Upon collision, the apple exerts a force on the pavement, and so the pavement must exert an equal and opposite force on the apple. The structure of the apple is inelastic, and so the apple bruises. The orange, by contrast…” She swallowed, realized that she was babbling, and shut her mouth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Shaughnessy. I don’t think that’s what you meant to ask, was it?”
He straightened. Oh, he was dreadfully handsome. He put a casual care into his appearance, and it showed now. He was clean-shaven, even though it was three in the afternoon. His cravat looked as crisp as if it had been pressed just now, not at six in the morning. Nothing about Mr. Shaughnessy suggested that he was a degenerate of the first order. Nothing, that was, except his line of work and the persistent gossip in the papers.
“You don’t need to let me natter on when I get distracted that way,” she told him. “Everyone else stops me. In these parts, it’s considered polite to interrupt Miss Sweetly when she’s on a tear.”
“Nonsense,” Mr. Shaughnessy said. He took a step toward her, and then another. Her chest constricted—he was standing so dreadfully, deliciously close—and then he held out the oranges he’d gathered.
For one moment, as she took them from him, their hands brushed. Neither of them were wearing gloves: she, because she couldn’t have found her keys while wearing them; he because…well, the heavens alone knew, and she was not about to ask. His fingers were warm and pale and against hers.
“I would never interrupt you,” he told her. “I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.”
She yanked her hand away. “You mustn’t say things like that, Mr. Shaughnessy. Someone might overhear and mistake your meaning.”
His eyes met hers. For the briefest second, she imagined a spark in them—as if some imp inside him whispered that anyone who heard what he’d said would understand it perfectly. He’d intended to flirt with her, and he knew precisely how he’d flustered her.
But he didn’t say that. He simply shrugged. “We wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand.” If there had been an ounce of sarcasm in his voice, she would have walked away right then and there. But there wasn’t. “So let me say it better. If I didn’t want to hear you talk about your opposite and equal reactions, I wouldn’t ask about your star charts. What are you computing this time?”
“Oh, it’s not star charts, not today. It’s the Great Comet.”
His eyebrows rose. “There’s a great comet?”
“Do you not read any scientific papers? It may be the brightest comet ever observed. You can still see it with the naked eye against the sun itself.”
He glanced upward at the sun overhead, unobscured by any cometary tail. “If you can see it with the naked eye, how is it that I’ve never caught a glimpse of it?”
She huffed. “Because London is not in the Southern hemisphere.”
“Ah.”
“In any event, Finlay in Capetown wired his measurements to Dr. Barnstable, and he’s set me to do the computing.”
“So what does it look like?”
She got out her notebook, opened it to the appropriate page.
“Here we are. The comet transited the sun a month ago.”
He pointed to an orange in her bag. “So let’s say that is the sun. Then where is the comet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Shaughnessy. If that orange represents the sun, we here on earth would be standing seventy-one feet away.”
“Seventy-one?” he asked mildly.
“Seventy-one point five eight three, but I try not to be pedantic. It makes people laugh at me.” Rose pointed to a dot on her notebook page. “Imagine that
this
is the sun. Then we are a speck of unimaginable smallness here.” She indicated a spot some inches away. “The comet, then, went along this path…” Her finger, dark against the white page, etched an elliptical curve. “But that’s not the exciting part. You see, anyone can calculate the path of a comet given enough data.”
“Not anyone,” he murmured.
She waved this away. “From all accounts, the nucleus of this comet split sometime after perihelion. Dr. Barnstable believes that we can predict the path of each piece—and since they’re so close to each other now, it will be no simple matter. It’s a three-body problem, which means it’s impossible to predict with equations. He’s asked me to work it out for him.” She beamed up at him.
He smiled back. “That’s brilliant, Miss Sweetly.”
And then the door opened behind them. Rose jumped again. This time, she managed to keep hold of her shopping bag. She turned to see her sister standing in the doorway. Patricia had one hand on the door handle; the other was placed in the small of her back. She was wearing a voluminous pink gown and a matching kerchief covering her hair. Her eyebrows rose at the scene in front of her, but her dark eyes sparkled in amusement.
“And here I thought I heard you at the door ages ago,” Patricia said. She gave her a head an exasperated shake, but Rose was certain—mostly certain—that she smiled as she did it. Patricia stooped as best as she could. Her heavy belly made her awkward, but she plucked Rose’s key off the ground. “Ah. I see that I did.”
“I…dropped some things,” Rose said, flushing all over again. “I was picking them up.”
Patricia looked at Rose’s notebook, open in her hands. She looked at Mr. Shaughnessy, standing not two feet away. And then she glanced at the pavement, where Rose’s other packages—the mail, the paper, the wrapped-up book—still lay scattered. “Yes,” she said dryly. “I can see that. That explains everything.”
“I’ll let you go, then.” Mr. Shaughnessy said. He tipped his hat. “Miss Sweetly. Mrs. Wells.”
“Mr. Shaughnessy.” Rose nodded her head. “I would curtsey, but I’m still holding the shopping, and the apples cannot withstand another inelastic collision.”
Beside her, Patricia made a noise in protest. But she held out her hands, gesturing. Rose gave her the book and her slide rule. While Mr. Shaughnessy disappeared around the corner of the street, she picked up the last of her scattered things.
Patricia did not berate her immediately. She did not, in fact berate her at all. She would normally have offered to help Rose, but she was eight months along, ungainly and awkward, and bending over did not come easily to her. When they’d gathered everything, they retreated inside the house—Rose at a walk, and Patricia at a waddle.
Patricia did not say anything as they traversed the front drawing room and went into the back pantry. She didn’t speak until Rose had the shopping spread out in front of them.
“Rose,” Patricia said quietly, “have you considered going back to Papa?”
Rose had not. Her stomach clenched at the very thought. “How could I leave you, when Doctor Wells will not return from his tour of duty for weeks yet?”
Patricia’s husband was a naval physician. He’d been sent to Sierra Leone before they’d known Patricia was with child, and Rose had lived with her sister ever since. But it wasn’t just her sister’s welfare that had Rose worried. Their parents lived in London—so close, and yet impossibly far from the Royal Observatory. At her father’s house, there would be no computations, no comets.
No Mr. Shaughnessy to set her nerves on edge.
“You know,” Patricia said, “you
know
that he is the most incredible rake.” She did not say who
he
was. She didn’t need to.
Rose set the oranges in a bowl, refusing to look at her sister. “He’s never once offered to seduce me. I don’t even think he’s thought of it.”
“He’s thought of it,” Patricia said dryly. “And…frankly, Rose, the way he’s talking to you? I don’t think he’ll even need to offer.”
Rose let out a long breath and shut her eyes. It, was, unfortunately, true. Mr. Shaughnessy was…well, he just
was.
His name had been on all the ladies’ lips since Rose was seventeen, when he’d earned renown—or infamy, depending on who was speaking—as the first man to write a column of advice for the
Women’s Free Press
, a radical paper that Rose should not have enjoyed nearly as much as she did. In the five years since then, he’d only built upon that reputation. He’d published four novels. His books were called “masterpieces of satire” by some, and “dangerous rubbish that was best burned unread” by others.
They had, by all accounts, sold well—even to those who harrumphed about setting bonfires with them.
Mooning after Mr. Stephen Shaughnessy was foolish. She knew how the two of them looked, sketched to scale. Socially speaking, if he were an orange in Westminster, she was…an elderberry, somewhere in the vicinity of Zanzibar.
“I love you, Rose.” Patricia sighed. “And I know you’ll make a good marriage, one as brilliant as mine. But you have to remember that most of the men who look at you won’t be seeing
you.
They won’t see that you’re clever and amusing.” Her sister came forward and took Rose’s hand in her own. “They’ll see
this.”
She rubbed the back of Rose’s palm. Dark skin pressed against dark skin. “It doesn’t matter how respectably you dress, or how much you insist. Most men who see you will see that you’re black, and they’ll think you’re available. So please take care, Rose. I don’t wish you hurt.”
Rose took her hand away and picked up another apple. She polished it with a towel, rubbing until it was red and shiny. “Don’t worry about that,” she said softly. “I won’t do anything foolish.”
She didn’t say anything about getting hurt. She thought of the letter she’d brought home—still folded in her pocket. Of the book wrapped in paper, waiting for her eager perusal. Patricia didn’t know the half of what Rose had got herself into.
At this point, pain was already inevitable.
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Talk Sweetly to Me
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Other Books by Courtney
The Worth Saga
Coming late 2014
Not in any series
The Carhart Series
Author’s Note
