“I beg your pardon?” Her shoulders were rigid, but her voice had dropped to a quaver.
Her nearness ambushed his faculties. Her body felt supple and feminine against his, and her eyes were wide and uncertain. The scent of roses drifted over him, followed by a sharp desire to cover her mouth with his. The first time he’d kissed Minerva, he felt as though he were inhaling sunshine itself. Her soft lips had been sweet and innocent, and he’d wished the moment could last forever. Now those lips hovered nearby, as irresistible as ever, but this time he knew she was anything but sweet or innocent. Abruptly he released her.
“If you’d get off your high horse for one minute, I might be able to help you.”
“You—you have an idea?” She rubbed her arm where he’d held her, still looking troubled.
“I do, but I won’t go into the specifics. Suffice it to say you’ll have a millennium machine that will fool all but the keenest of observers.”
Her face brightened. “When?”
“I should have it done by tomorrow noon.”
“That is…most kind. More than I expected…or deserved.” Her voice fractured as emotion threatened to engulf her. “I can’t begin to tell you what this means to me.”
Asher shifted his feet. “You’ll stay the night here, of course,” he said gruffly. “Cheeves will prepare a room for you.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip, looking disconcerted.
They both knew how unconventional his proposition was. Unmarried, unaccompanied young women simply did not sleep overnight in the house of an unmarried, unaccompanied man. Even a gentleman’s mistress was visited in her boudoir and would never presume to frequent his home.
But Minerva was not a well-born lady or a conventional woman. And besides, he had already lain with her. It wasn’t as if she had a reputation to protect from him.
“The guest rooms are on a separate floor.” He didn’t know why he added that, as if he needed to underscore the fact he had no intention of visiting her room during the night. Which, of course, he didn’t.
She barely blushed. “Then I should be happy to accept.”
Her reply made his stomach clench. Hadn’t she used the exact same words when he had proposed marriage to her? At first she’d put on a good show of shock and reluctance. After all, their stations in life were so different, and she knew as well as he the objections his family would raise. But she had accepted him. Had swayed into his arms, hesitant formality crumbling away, and returned his kisses with such surprising and delightful warmth. She’d seemed ecstatic. Ecstatic enough to let him undress her and make love to her on the chaise longue in her attic workshop. The memory of her creamy, naked body unfolding against the midnight-blue velvet flared through his brain. She’d been extraordinary, beyond his imagination, and he’d never been able to forget that night, no matter how hard he tried.
He spun away and yanked on the bellpull until Cheeves came running in.
Chapter Three
In the depths of the night, Minerva woke up. She tried to recall what had roused her. Her sleep had been fitful, as it had been for several nights, and the bedclothes were rumpled and creased from her uneasy tossing. But something other than a bad dream had woken her. Ignoring the frigid air, she slipped from the bedcovers and padded across to the window. At this hour, the garden at the back of Asher’s house was dark and shrouded in thick mist. She couldn’t see a thing, yet she sensed whatever had started her awake had come from outside.
Dull moonlight sifted through the haze. For a moment, the mist thinned, and she made out the rough outline of some sort of stable block at the far end of the garden. The large structure had a solid door and a row of south-facing windows along its roofline. As she watched, a faint glow lit up the windows before the entire building disappeared behind the rolling mist.
Someone was working late.
She knew it was none of her business. She knew it was wrong of her. But she did it anyway. She pulled on the plush flannel dressing gown and the richly embroidered slippers that had been thoughtfully provided, and tiptoed into the pitch-black corridor outside her room. Feeling her way downstairs, she unbolted a side door and exited the house.
Within seconds, the wet lawns soaked her flimsy slippers and the hem of her dressing gown. The mist wrapped its wraithlike fingers around her, as if trying to hold her back. Shivering, she pushed on until she reached the building at the end of the garden. Rough-hewn wood prickled her palms as she found the door. Faint banging noises emanated from inside, and a bar of light marked the gap beneath the door.
Knowing she was inviting trouble yet unable to stem her curiosity, she opened the door an inch and fitted her eye to the crack. Just as she’d first surmised, the building housed Asher’s workshop. She spied him immediately, wielding a small blowtorch as he bent over a cluttered workbench. The expression of utter concentration on his face gripped her attention. For once he seemed just like the dynamic young man she had known, absorbed in his task to the exclusion of everything else. He’d brought this fervid energy to her father’s workshop, and from the very beginning she’d been entranced. Not just by his enthusiasm, but also by his intelligence, his focus, his principles. And his swoon-worthy looks.
She had always thought herself too pragmatic to fall in love, but suddenly she’d fallen victim to all the symptoms. Heart palpitations, palsied hands, lack of appetite and a tendency to daydream over his sublime beauty—to her he resembled a magnificent Greek statue of Hermes—had seized her like an attack of ague. She had loved him unreservedly, and though time had crusted over that wound, it had not healed it.
A sudden breeze eddied past her ankles and swirled into the building. The flame on Asher’s blowtorch wavered. He lifted his head and locked eyes with Minerva. In an instant, his face darkened.
“Stop skulking in the shadows and show yourself.” He glowered at her from his bench.
Feeling gauche, she entered the workshop properly and shut the door behind her. “Please excuse me for disturbing you. I couldn’t sleep—”
“So you thought you’d do a bit of spying on me?”
She puffed out her cheeks. “Must you always think the worst of me?”
“All I have is past history to guide me.”
“History is seldom unbiased.”
“I should have said ‘facts,’ then. Those are undisputed.”
She shook her head and sighed. “Your offer of assistance grows less generous with each aspersion you pile on me. Surely we can reach some sort of cease-fire between us?”
At this, he had the grace to study his boots for some moments, and when he finally looked at her, the initial hostility had faded from his expression.
“Touché. You’re right. If I’m to help you, then I can’t rake up the past at every opportunity.” He turned down his blowtorch and gave her the faintest of smiles. “From now on, consider our past differences set aside. At least for the moment.”
His smile, the first she’d seen on this visit, and muted though it was, reached far into her and tugged at her vital organs, squeezing the breath from her lungs and leaving her witless.
“G-good,” she stammered.
As he continued to study her, she grew conscious of her dishabille. Her loose hair streamed down her back, and she was clad only in her flimsy night things. Abashed, she hugged the collar of her dressing gown closer to her neck.
He cleared his throat. “You must be cold. You should return to your bed.”
The prospect of her bed held no appeal, unless… Mercilessly she slew that train of thought. Entertaining notions of Asher in her bed would profit no one.
“In our new spirit of cooperation, might I not watch what you’re doing just for a few minutes?”
He frowned and ran his fingers through his long dark hair, and she thought he would refuse her, but instead he nodded. “Why don’t you take a seat near the fire?”
He pointed toward the cast-iron heater crouched in the corner. As she took a stool next to the heater, she inspected the spacious, well-equipped workshop. Shelves running the length of all four walls were packed with supplies. She recognized many of the machines—there were machines for grinding, turning, cutting and milling—but some remained intriguing mysteries.
“You didn’t tell me this replica would take so long to build.” From her vantage point, she could see more clearly what he’d been working on. A cube of brass about a foot long and high sat on the workbench, surrounded by a collection of magnets and coils. “Is that the correct size?”
“That’s the size I’d calculated would be large enough to deliver ten horsepower of energy.”
Ten horsepower for a thousand years. An almost endless supply of free energy. The stuff of legends. Asher had told her everything about his vision. While at Oxford, he’d studied the papers of Fordor, the first man to stumble across the existence of the aethersphere, the mysterious fabled substance dubbed the fifth element by the ancient Greeks. Using Fordor’s findings, Asher had made an astonishing discovery. When a circle of promethium magnets was correctly and precisely placed, their combined magnetic fields unlocked the power of the aethersphere in the form of an electromagnetic current, which could then be harnessed through a series of copper coils. The theory worked perfectly in miniature form, but not in any scaled-up version.