Chemistry of Magic: Unexpected Magic Book Five (Unexpected Magic #5)(2)
“Don’t be improper, Dare,” his mother scolded. “You must at least come into the sitting room where you can be chaperoned.”
Wiping his face with his shirt tail, Lord Dare gazed upon his mother with a droll expression. “I think a dying man can be trusted to behave with all due respect for fear of what waits on the other side, don’t you agree, Miss McDowell?”
She did not, but she’d been the one to suggest a private discussion. Lady Dare had some notion of her mission since she and Emilia’s mother had discussed the problem of their recalcitrant offspring in advance. But Emilia preferred the terms of her proposal to be private.
“I think I can trust you to be a gentleman in your own home, under the same roof as your mother and sisters,” she replied primly, avoiding the subject of what awaited on the other side of death. “Although I’m not at all certain that I can trust the room won’t explode again.”
“I’ve turned off the burners. You’ll be safe.” Lord Dare caught her elbow—he caught her elbow!—and dragged her inside the dimly lit chamber, closing the door on his mother.
He was fortunate she did not expire on the spot. The discomfort of his disease shot straight up her arm in pinpricks of warning.
“We won’t be safe, not in this cesspool,” the tall, be-flowered lady argued, rather dramatically wrenching her arm from Dare’s hold and putting distance between them. “You cannot breathe properly in this soot. Where is the sitting room?” She looked about as if she might find a magic door.
“I’m covered in grime. I can’t pollute the sitting room. Tell me your business and you needn’t admire my décor for long.” Dare grabbed cleaning rags from his desk drawer and began wiping down his glass beakers. At least, this time, he’d not set the draperies on fire, since there were none. He’d had the window boarded.
His damnable coughing started up again. He had no clean handkerchiefs left, so he used his shirt tail. Bad choice. When he came up for air, the lady was looking at him with a glimmer of sympathy. That was the look he despised most. He wanted to prove to her that he wasn’t exactly dead yet, except he’d more or less promised his mother to behave while they shared the same roof.
That he had sacrificed his private quarters and laboratory grated, but his remaining time in this world shouldn’t be selfishly spent sending good money after bad.
“You must lie down,” his guest said, blessedly not offering the usual weeping platitudes. “Your lungs and heart work harder when you stand. Lie down on that filthy piece of furniture over there and give your organs a rest.” She pointed at the settee that had once been a silly bit of green silk when his mother had installed it a year ago, after the last fire.
Organs? The lady dared say organs? Impressed, Dare still ignored her admonitions and returned to polishing.
She returned the horrid hat to her lustrous black hair. “We will discuss nothing unless you exhibit a modicum of good sense. I cannot deal with a suicidal madman. I apologize if I’ve wasted your time and raised your mother’s hopes.”
“I need the glassware to be clean, and it won’t be if I lie about admiring ceilings. You may speak or leave, it’s no matter to me.” Dare knew he was being abominably rude, but faced with the kind of woman he could no longer have, he’d rather she walked out than taunt him with his fate.
To his surprise, she took the beaker from his hand. “Do you keep vinegar or alcohol in here?”
His nose had almost lost its ability to smell, but she carried an air of. . . freshness. . . with her, as if the stench of his work didn’t touch her. Out of curiosity, he located the bottle of clear alcohol and handed it to her.
“Go lie down. I will clean and we will talk.”
Dare watched in fascination as the lady stripped off her gloves, expertly dipped a rag in a bowl of alcohol, and began vigorously polishing the glass as if she’d been doing it all her life. Those soft hands had most definitely not spent hours cleaning glass. They did, however, raise lewd notions of better uses for those slender fingers. In shock, he thought he needed a good lie-down. To his knowledge, ladies did not clean glass or even recognize the need for glass to be cleaned.
His reaction to her unusual beauty was far less surprising. The combination of gleaming black hair, brilliant purple eyes, and fair skin reminded him of a common flower he’d seen in the market—not glamorous but striking.
Coughing again, he did as told and crumpled onto the settee. In truth, he needed to find breath for a discussion, and it was damned hard while breathing heavily down her delightfully long throat. Not that he was capable of breathing heavily any longer.
“That’s better,” she said in satisfaction, setting aside the sparkling beaker and picking up the difficult-to-clean, extremely expensive glass tubing.
Dare didn’t know if she referred to the glass or his position. He leaned against the pillows on the high end of the cushioned settee so he could watch her. She was tall for a woman, but the rest of her was disguised in sleeves wider than she seemed to be and skirts that belled out from her too-slender waist. “You can lose the hat. I can’t discuss business with someone whose face is concealed by all that flummery.”
She pinched the hat brim delicately between two fingers so as not to add filth to the lavender, removed it, then looked around for a safe place to set it down. There wasn’t any.