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He wouldn’t miss a volume or two.
She passed a footman standing sentry outside a room and gave him a confident nod, as if to say:yes, I have business here, no cause for alarm.
She peeked into the library. There were lamps burning on the tables and a fire lit in the grate.
How extravagant.
Checking to make certain there were no dukes or model engines in her path, Mari entered the room, leaving the door ajar.
Wouldn’t do for the footmen to think she was trying to hide something.
A noise made her jump but it was only the chiming from a clock standing against the wall.
Lamplight flickered over metal tracks and engines on the table that held the model of his proposed railway. Drawn by curiosity, she ventured closer.
Miniature trees flanked the tracks that snaked around the table. He’d even fashioned miniature estates, painted to look like stone, complete with coats of arms over the doorways and pennants flying on the battlements.
The engines were platforms mounted on metal wheels with staffs and barrels bristling out of them. Tiny men in even tinier top hats stood atop the locomotives, feeding their engines with little shovels.
Wouldn’t Michel and Adele love to play with these?
A whole new world. The world the duke wanted to create. Engines carrying goods and passengers of all social classes across England.
It would change everything.
An image rose in her mind of Banksford painting each figure with longing and precision.
His huge hands performing the most delicate of tasks.
They’d been stained with ink, his hands, and she’d noticed several burn marks.
Working with steam and combustion must be dangerous.
Whenever she thought about his hands, warmth ignited in the pit of her stomach.
He’d lifted her so easily, circling her waist in an iron grip. And when his fingers had brushed her calf, the touch had spread through her whole body like wildfire.
Right here, in this very room, a commanding duke had knelt at her feet.
Not something she’d ever pictured happening to her.
None of this was how she’d thought her life would progress.
She pushed one of the locomotives and it slid along the rail, its wheels somehow staying on the tracks.
Her life in London was supposed to have been a difficult and trying one.
The engine under her fingers ran smoothly along the tracks, passing trees and country estates.
At Mr. Folsom’s house she would have been little more than a nursemaid. Her bed would have been tucked into the garret. She would have dined on leftovers.
But here... she lifted the model engine off the tracks.
Here, she’d gone off the rails of her prescribed life. Living in luxury, treated with respect.
This was completely new terrain, uncharted and filled with both great potential... and even greater pitfalls.
Pretending to be upper class. Letting the duke assume that she’d been educated at an elite private academy.
