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Edward cleared his throat to catch the attention of the man whose face he was unable to note. But he didn’t listen. Edward stepped closer and knocked on the top smooth surface of the wooden apparatus. This seemed to have caught the workman’s attention because Edward heard him curse. It took a few minutes, but finally, he shimmied himself from beneath the apparatus. He was wearing an old shirt and breeches and his hair was covered in some kind of protective covering.
Only, as the man sat up and peeled the cover back and shook their hair out of it, Edward realized that it wasn’t a man at all. It was—
“Ariadne?” he said in shock and awe. She looked up and her face mirrored the same surprise that Edward had on his face. Her clothes and face were covered in grease. “What are you doing?”
Her mouth opened and closed as if she was unable to put out a coherent reply. Finally, she shook herself out of the trance and stood up. The rest of her brown hair tumbled out of the cover and down her back. Despite the mess she was in, Edward deeply ached to put his fingers into her hair and draw her closer.
“What areyoudoing here?” she asked. Edward caught the wariness in her voice and her tone was anything but welcoming. “How did you even find this studio?”
“Are you an assistant here?” Edward asked. He looked around trying to find the man who ran the studio. “Your master shouldn’t make you do things like this.”
“Things like what?” she asked, her voice becoming colder and colder. “I work for no man. This studio belongs to me, my father left it in bequest after he passed away.”
Edward blinked for a few seconds before he burst out laughing. It sounded so ridiculous when she said that. “You mean to say that you run this place?” he managed to say between fits of laughter.
Ariadne scowled at him. “What do you mean?”
Edward stopped laughing when he noticed that it was doing nothing but further irking Ariadne, and he wasn’t here to face her anger. She was starting to resemble a fiery goddess ready to rain her wrath upon him. He cleared his throat. “What I mean to say is that—”
“This is a man’s job?” she finished his sentence.
“Yes—no,” he began.
“I knew what you meant,my Lord,” she said, her voice rising with every word. She addressed him respectfully but her tone was anything but. “That’s what your lot does. You go around thinking you own anything and everything in this world. It’s a man’s world, after all. All must happen as you please.”
“What I meant is simply that a woman in a room full of machinations is an odd sight indeed,” he said.
“What you mean is that this isn’t a woman’s job!” Ariadne exclaimed.
“You misunderstand me. I was in awe to see you here. My apologies but I didn’t mean to mock you at all. You surprised me. That is all.” Edward said, his hands splayed out. Everything he was telling her was just making the situation worse. But some of the odd things he had noted before were making sense now. Ariadne was quick with her tools—needle to hammer. She was skilled, in more ways he could imagine. “You never told me you were an inventor.”
“My father was,” Ariadne said quietly. The words of the hawker came back to him. He had called him something…Mad Davy…that must be her father, the one whose shirt she had given him. “I’m not half as good as him but I’m trying to make something for myself.”
“And this place?” he asked.
“This is my father’s studio. He taught me everything I need to know. It belongs to me now,” Ariadne said. She was seething. “No one can take that away from me. Not men who think themselves superior to me because I’m poor and a woman.”
Edward realized that her anger wasn’t just toward him, something else had happened to set off this behavior. He stepped closer to her and she took a step back.
“Don’t draw near me, my Lord,” she said coldly. Behind her countenance was a flicker of uncertainty and disappointment. Edward could tell she was still upset about what had happened the day he left.
“I know I shouldn’t have left like that,” he said, trying to make amends. “I know that what happened then was wrong. But I swear on Lords above if I could change the past, I would.”
“Then you wouldn’t have lied to me about your identity?” she asked, wiping her hands with a rag. “Then you would summon one iota of trust toward me after I made it clear that you were safe and welcome in my house despite the threat I faced for harboring you?”
Edward nodded. He didn’t have the first idea how he was going to make amends to her but the pulsing beat of his heart made him want to draw her close to him and keep her there. What was this tempestuous feeling inside him? Her clothes were covered in dirt and her cheeks were smudged. And yet Edward only saw how beautiful she looked now that she had let her hair out of her headcover.
“I didn’t hide my identity because of you. It was more to do with the circumstances themselves. Besides, you were more comfortable with a sea merchant than you are with a Marquess. Here, you shirk away from me.”
Ariadne’s eyes flashed. “I’m not afraid of you.” To make her point, she stood her ground as Edward closed the distance between them. He knew how difficult it was for her. She wanted to lash out at him again. Edward could tell that in the tremble of her lips and how she tightly clenched her fists at her side. Ariadne Davy was a proud woman and she was nothing like anyone else out there. Edward was ready to face the eye of the storm.
He walked closer than propriety would allow a man and a woman. He expected her to put up some resistance at their closeness but she merely stared up at him sullenly. Her beautiful eyes were fringed with anger and something else.
“You can tell me what’s wrong,” he said. His words caressed the hair on her forehead.
She closed her eyes for a second and he thought she would curl into his touch, but instead, she turned away from him. “Leave,” she said, but the single word hitched at the back of her throat. It was a lie.
“No,” Edward said firmly. He wasn’t leaving like this, not again. Edward caught her, pinning her wrist in his grip, and pulled her back toward him.
“Let me go,” Ariadne said in a huff, her hot breath fanning over his face. She struggled in his arms and that made him clasp her harder, her bosom now crushed to his chest. A great heat unfurled within him and he hadn’t even kissed her yet. She looked up at him in defiance, continuing to struggle but she was no match for him.
Kiss.
“Stop it, Ariadne,” Edward commanded, his voice barely a low growl. She went limp in his arms and blinked at him in surprise, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks. His eyes dropped to her pillowy pink lips and Edward was unable to tear his eyes away from her. He simply enclosed his fingers around both of her hands and held her there. Edward knew he had to taste her because if he didn’t, he would die inside.
He leaned down and kissed her.
