Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister #4.5)(9)

“I have another question about that last probability.”

She set down her pen. “Go ahead.”

“You are always very exacting about the numbers you use. When you said I was forty percent likely to be charming…”

She blinked up at him. “I haven’t done an accurate calculation, but yes. About forty percent. If you wish, I could collate—”

He shook his head. “I don’t need a list. It’s just to satisfy my own curiosity. Why only forty percent?”

She looked down. “My personal tastes—nothing you should worry over, really—”

“If I have not made it clear, Miss Sweetly, I take an avid interest in your personal tastes.”

She let out a long breath. “I don’t trust you,” she said simply. “If you had half a chance, you’d take me to bed.”

He could have denied it. But truthfully? He wasn’t trying to shove her in that direction, but would he say no? Of course he wouldn’t.

“Ah.” He picked up the next sheet of problems she’d written out for him, found the next number on the slide. “Then you have nothing to worry about, not according to your calculations. You could find me charming all the time, and according to you, I’d still only have a chance of…of…” He fumbled.

She took pity on him. “One in forty billion.”

“There, you see? I don’t have half a chance. I’m not even within spitting range of a hundredth of a chance. So there can be no harm in your allowing yourself to be charmed by me all the time.” So saying, he gave her a brilliant smile.

It affected her. It obviously affected her. Her hands tangled in her lap; she glanced down, not in demure deflection, but as if to avert her eyes from the sun. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if her spectacles chafed.

“You’re trying to charm me with mathematics,” she said.

“Is it working?”

She looked up at him. Yes, said her dark eyes, shining at him. Yes, said the part of her lips, the fingers that drew up to brush her hair. Yes, said the tilt of her body in his direction.

“No,” she told him with a firm shake of her head. “It isn’t.”

Chapter Three

THAT NIGHT, ROSE DREAMED that a column of numbers was chasing her through some odd, non-Cartesian landscape, a vista of lines and swirling colors. In the distance, someone was laughing—not a cruel laugh, or even a laugh at her expense. Just a friendly, welcoming laugh.

The numbers caught her, taking hold of her shoulder. She jerked away, but they held her fast.

How did numbers grip? She turned to them, fascinated…and very groggily came awake.

The room was dark; the only illumination was a pale stripe of moonlight, filtered through an inch-wide gap in her curtains. No sound rose from the street; it was the dead of night indeed.

But there was a hand, warm, on Rose’s shoulder. It gave her a little shake.

“Rose,” Patricia whispered, “are you awake?”

“Patricia?” Rose turned to find her sister sitting on the bed next to her, her form dim in the night.

“It’s started.” Her sister’s voice crackled with excitement, but the hand on Rose seemed tense, almost fearful.

Rose didn’t need to ask what it was. There was only one it in the household these days.

She sat bolt upright in her bed. “What? Already? It’s too soon.”

“Thirty-six weeks, by Doctor Chillingsworth’s count. It is too early—but I felt a most definite contraction. It’s starting.”

“It can’t start. Isaac is—”

She cut herself off. Her sister’s husband was not yet home. They’d been so sure he would have returned by the time the baby came. They’d charted the remaining weeks of Patricia’s pregnancy against the expected return of his ship with a sigh of relief.

When they’d found out that Patricia was with child—days before Dr. Wells was scheduled to leave—he’d been upset at missing the majority of her pregnancy. Rose had promised to write to him, to tell him the day-to-day occurrences.

“Take care of her for me,” Dr. Isaac Wells had told her in return. “If I can’t be there, you’ll have to stand in my stead.”

Rose was the younger sister; Patricia had always taken care of her. But somehow, that solemn request, made by a brother-in-law that she liked, had only firmed her resolve. If Patricia had always taken care of Rose, that only meant that Rose now had a chance to return the favor.

And so she wrote to Isaac regularly, telling him everything that transpired. She’d reported faithfully every morning when Patricia felt poorly. She’d described the baby’s first tentative flutters, barely detectable, up through the more recent kicks that had drummed against Rose’s hand. She’d told him all…but it didn’t change a thing. Patricia wished her husband would come back before the baby was born, and Isaac wanted the same thing. He was a little more than a week away now. To have the baby come so close to his arrival would be…

…A blessing, Rose told herself firmly. No matter when it came.

So she swallowed what she had been about to say.

“Have you sent for Chillingsworth?” she asked instead.

“Josephs left a few minutes past. He should be back soon.”