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He wanted to lean over to inhale the scent of her hair, the fresh scent he remembered too well. He sat straight and gazed straight ahead over the tops of his shoes.
“It’s meant to allow the invalid more independence of movement,” he said. “My grandmother took herself over lawn and gravel and every sort of surface. I believe there was some sort of joking theory about attaching a steam engine to it, to move individuals hither and yon without manual or animal labor. She’d still be racketing about in it, I daresay, if she hadn’t succumbed to a vicious fever.”
The same fever had, he’d been told, left his father a shockingly changed man. Though Ripley had been ten years old at the time, he barely remembered the person his father had been before, the witty, charming fellow his mother spoke of sometimes, the gentleman who’d won her heart. The miserable miser had crushed all happier memories.
“Uncle Charles must have been chagrined to have to use it himself,” he said. “As I am chagrined. But there’s no help for it. The ladies of this house scold me deaf and witless if I try to walk. And with my bad foot, I’m not fast enough to outrun them.”
She stood up and smoothed her skirts. “Such a tragic, tortured life you live.”
“I never thought I’d see the day I’d be henpecked and rolling about in an invalid chair. But my time has come, it seems. I feel a touch of gout coming on. Maybe I’ll wear a wig and false teeth.”
She straightened her spectacles, though they were perfectly straight. “And so many have believed you’d never live long enough to suffer from gout or need a wig and false teeth.”
“Did your ladyship only come here to mock my infirmity or had you another ulterior motive?”
She set her hands on her hips and surveyed the library. “Your aunt happened to mention that Lord Charles’s more recent acquisitions were never entered in the library records. They’re in a heap somewhere in this room. I offered to make myself useful.”
Ripley turned the handles of the chair and it began to roll backward. “Down here.”
“Do you have to do it the hard way?” she said.
“It’s boring the other way.”
“Or maybe you don’t know how to make that thing go forward.”
“Of course I do. Nothing to it.” He turned the winches and the chair began to go in circles. He heard something thump onto the rug.
“For heavens’ sake, Ripley, you’re knocking books off—look out for the footstool!”
He dodged the footstool, but turned the handles too quickly, because the chair started to spin, and she cried, “Not the vase!” and jumped to catch it at the same time he spun the opposite way. She stumbled and fell across the chair . . . over his lap . . . vase in her hands and arse upward.
For one endless moment, neither of them moved. He was acutely aware of her body’s warmth and the pomatum’s scent rising from her hair. His head dipped downward and he inhaled, closing his eyes.
“It’s heavy,” came her muffled voice.
He lifted his head, cursing himself.
“If you can keep this thing perfectly still,” she said, “I can set the vase down on the floor.”
“I’m not sure about ‘perfectly still,’” he said. His nether regions were alert to the female body in close proximity. He could feel her breast against his arm.
“Can you take it?” she said.
“What?”
“The vase. Can you take it from me?”
He reached cautiously with one hand. The chair rolled backward.
“Put on the brake,” she said.
“I’m not sure it has a brake,” he said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Of course it does.”
It was hard not to be an idiot when one had a shapely woman more or less in one’s lap and one did not happen to be remotely saintlike.
“It’s on your right,” she said. “On the curving bit the arm’s attached to. The smaller rod. You had to lift it to allow the chair to move.”
“Ah, yes. Forgot.” He pushed down the rod and locked the wheels.
She carefully set down the vase. This wasn’t as easy as one would think. She had to shift her body from an awkward position to one not much less awkward. Though it would be wiser to look elsewhere—upward for instance—he wasn’t wise. His gaze became riveted on her bottom, insufficiently hidden under a too-thin petticoat. Moving in an unbearably lascivious manner, it was mere inches from the hand holding the rod.
He gripped the rod more tightly.
She began to climb off him, cautiously turning to face away.
Too cautiously, because every small move set off powerful sensations in his breeding parts, which cared nothing for friends, let alone propriety. All they cared about was the curving feminine body moving against his arms and chest and in his lap. His heart rate shot up and other sensations shot through him. His hand, gripping the rod so tightly, jerked it upward.
The chair began rolling, swiftly, toward the windows.
“Ripley, stop playing!”
“Stop wriggling.”
“I’m trying to get off without hurting your foot. Or falling on my head. Stop the chair before we go through the window!”
He pulled on the handles and the chair spun rightward.
She was scrambling to get off him, and the chair kept moving because of her movement. “Stop it, Ripley.”
“I can’t get hold of the rod,” he said. “Your skirt’s in the way.” Also her fine bottom, now resting against his stomach, was in the way of something. Clear thinking, absolutely.
She wriggled some more, and got herself awkwardly arranged with her bottom in his lap and her legs hanging over his knees. “Stop it so I can get off, will you?” she said.
He stopped the chair. He didn’t want to.
He told himself to behave, but that went against years of doing the opposite. He looked down the long, obstacle-ridden library and something in his mind shifted.
As she cautiously began to get off his lap, he turned the handles.
The chair started moving again. She reached for the rod to stop the wheels, but his thigh was in her way. She grabbed his right hand, trying to turn the handle, but he held on, immovable.
She bit her lip. Her face was flushed and her breath was coming faster and her spectacles had tipped to one side.
He pulled the handles and the chair rolled forward.
She grabbed his arm. “Ripley!”
“After a false start, they’re off, in good style!” he said. “Ripley in front, jockey Lady O holding on for dear life. But Chair and Other Chair follow close behind. Table inches up round the clump, but Ripley remains in the lead. The steed’s speed is phenomenal!”
He went on as though shouting race proceedings to an eager crowd behind a peephole, while he turned both handles, and the chair rolled swiftly toward the southern end of the library.
“Ripley!”
He narrowly missed a footstool and rolled on. “Will Ripley crash into the chest King James I gave somebody who’s been dead some hundreds of years? But no, clever Ripley misses by an inch, and now heads down the course to King Charles II’s writing desk—”
“Left, you lunatic!” she cried. “Left!”
He made a sharp left, then more sharp turns, this way and that, going backward and in circles and zigzags, narrating all the while. He felt her back shaking against him, then it broke from her: a peal of laughter.
The world changed and brightened, and his heart lifted. He laughed, too.
“Here’s a tricky turn,” he said. “Will Ripley make it, or lose his footing—his wheeling—and pitch his rider onto the turf?”
“Left!” she ordered, laughing. “Sharp left. Now right. Faster, Ripley. Red Footstool is gaining on us. Watch out! Vase trying to break onto course. Don’t be thrown off stride. That’s the way! Faster, Ripley!” She pretended to whip his knees, and he laughed so hard he nearly toppled them both out of the chair.
On and on it went, up one side of the library
, and down another, narrowly missing a king’s ransom in ancient furnishings. They never saw the door open or the face peering in. They didn’t see the door close, quickly and quietly, as the mechanical chair rolled that way.
