Page 18 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

“Joseph Priestley. Quite a grasp on natural philosophy, that one. I read his essay on different types of air a year or so ago. But this one is discussing Hartley’s theories of mind, and he describes the principle of association better than anyone else has.”

“Oh.” Inez didn’t understand a word of his speech, though she’d lived in Britain for ten years at that point and her English was fluent. She slid her tray onto a corner of his wide, sturdy desk. “Miss Amaranthe thought you’d like tea.”

She hovered, self-conscious as he studied her with that dark, unreadable gaze. She resisted touching her linen cap to see if her hair was misbehaving again, or trying to rearrange the kerchief crossed over her bodice. She didn’t want him to think she was trying to draw his attention to her breasts, though she was all of a sudden very aware of them. Her entire body prickled, as if held to a fire, yet there was no coal in the small grate.

“Shall I pour for you?”

“Yes, please.” He watched as she tipped a bit of milk into the porcelain cup, then poured out the tea. “Just a bit of sugar, no bigger than your thumbnail. Thank you.”

His fingers touched hers as she handed him the cup, and Inez nearly jumped out of her skin. He wasn’t leering. He wasn’t aggressive. He looked like he’d been far away and she’d surprised him, and he was trying to orient himself to the physical world and her place in it.

“Are you new?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes, sir.” This time she couldn’t resist tugging at her linen apron, nervous she wouldn’t pass muster. “I’ve been here a week, sir.”

“That accent.” His eyes narrowed slightly in thought. “Spanish?”

“Portuguese.”

“Ah.” His sharply defined lips stretched into a smile, at least on one side of his mouth. Inez told herself to stop staring at his mouth.

“My mother’s family was from Portugal, long ago,” he remarked. His voice hummed in the air around her, rich, resonating.

Inez twisted a hand in her apron. This man made her feel her insides had been tied into knots. “Miss Amaranthe said as much.”

He turned back to his desk, the delicate cup dwarfed in his hands. Once again Inez found herself entranced by his long, strong fingers, the turn of his wrist and the lean muscle of his forearms, lightly dusted with hair. “What is your name?”

She swallowed hard. “Inez.”

“Well. Bem-vinda à minha casa, Inez.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and suddenly wanted to cry at his words of welcome. When had she ever been welcomed anywhere?

He said no more to her, caught up again in his book. Inez already knew that Miss Amaranthe paid the rent on the house, though of course it was in her brother’s name, she being a woman. She knew that Miss Amaranthe ordered her whole life around providing comfort and ease for her brother, and Inez understood. She too felt the same inexplicable wish to ease the way for this man, to keep the space around him soft and quiet while his mind worked, for she sensed that his was extraordinary.

And because he never once looked at her with lust—was never other than scrupulously polite to her, when he noted her presence—Inez was nearly mad with the wish to make him see her.

She, who for years had worked and wished to make herself invisible to men. She, who had gratefully decided after she buried her husband that she need never notice a man again, had been hooked like a fish at her first sight of Joseph Illingworth and would never be able to forget him.

She’d never again meet a man whose mind worked like his, a swift and efficient machine, so stimulated by the world of ideas. She’d never meet a man whose character was so deeply sweet and untroubled, though he was stubborn and astonishingly dense in his understanding of people.

She’d never meet a man she so ached to touch, and be touched by. So much so that sometimes at night she lay on her narrow cot in the room that was once a dressing room, kept awake by the empty ache in her body, the longing that arrowed down to the bone.

So focused was Inez on the things she wouldn’t have that she forgot what she did have: the warning from Ceres that the lord she’d wronged was looking for her. And so it was no fault but her own that she plunged without thinking through the servant’s door into the long hallway where the Vestals entertained and came face to face with a man emerging from one of the rooms.

She recognized him instantly: the Roman nose with the indent at the top as if he’d taken a blow there when the flesh was being formed. The thin, leering lips and watery eyes. The pigtail of his wig lying over the shoulder of his coat, a lustrous and heavily embroidered silk lined with rows of heavy buttons.

“You!” The word leapt from him like an accusation, a feral snarl.

Inez, fingers frozen, dropped the tray. All she could think in that terrified moment was how Bessie’s chocolate would stain the carpet, but her body would barely leave an imprint once he’d strangled and left her for dead.