Beauty and the Duke by Melody Thomas Page B

at the very least, she owed him back his fossils. For that reason alone, she chose not to argue with his presence. She could manage herself around him for one more day.
    She cast off like a ship setting out to sea. “I am on my way to my laboratory. Your sister’s fossils are there.”
    She walked in silence, staying ahead of him, conscious of the sound of twigs breaking against the weight of his boots, aware of the rasp of his clothes and his eyes on her back. At the back of the house, they descended into the stone stairwell until they reached the basement door. She stopped and withdrew a key. “If you will wait here a moment.” The metallic click of a lock sounded. “I need to go inside first.”
    Before he could reply, she disappeared through the postern.
    Adjusting the weight of the books in his arms, Erik looked back up the stairs behind him. Water dripped from a pipe to his left. He stood on a layer of greenmoss that had grown on the walk. He studied the stone enclosure where it met an ivy-covered wall, and he noticed structural cracks that came with age. He peered up at a second-story window with yellow curtains, then at the doorway as he heard Christine return.
    “I have traps set up around my laboratory,” she explained.
    He stepped into the vestibule. “Rats?”
    She reached around him, her skirts whispering against his legs as she shut the door behind him. “You can say that. One can never be too careful of wily family members.” She led him down a short corridor and stopped at another heavy oak door that would have required a battering ram to break down. “Unfortunately, the only culprit I have thus far ensnared is my cat. Poor Beast has yet to forgive me for turning him green.”
    “ Beast ?”
    The first hint of a smile turned up her lips. “If you see him, he will probably startle you,” she said as if she were his own proud mam. “I had one occasion where a lady fainted. But he really is a pussy cat.”
    “Indeed.”
    “The fairer feline population loves him. His orange progeny run rampant on the Abbey grounds. He has helped us control our rat population.”
    Once inside the sizeable room that could pass for a vault, she lit two lamps, the smell of sulphur briefly eclipsing the other unpleasant smells that came with being around dead creatures and relics of the past. The walls were lined with wooden shelves bowed by the weight of dusty artifacts and wooden crates filled with petrified bones.
    “I have to keep everything down on this stone floor,” she said as if in explanation of the visual chaos surrounding him. She shut the door behind him. “The weight of all of this petrified bone would cause the floor above to collapse.”
    His interest moved to the surrounding workbenches. They were standing on a dais that looked as if this room had once served as a classroom. Four rows of parallel wooden workbenches ran thirty feet deep into the room.
    “You will have to pardon the smell,” she said, sliding out of her cloak and laying it on the table next to the door. “I don’t usually bring anyone here. The dust makes people sneeze. Twice a year, I have to bomb the place with a cyanic compound to kill the vermin or they will eat everything. Once, they ate Aunt Sophie’s mummy.”
    Shaking his head, Erik laughed. “And to think your family looks perfectly normal on the outside.”
    She suddenly stood in front of him, her chin level with his shoulders. “I’ll take the books now.”
    Her hands brushed his. Just a whisper of a touch, yet, even through his gloves, he felt warmth flow through him. He did not pull back. “Tell me where you want them,” he said.
    He thought she might balk. She pointed to a cluttered table against the wall. “Over here.”
    He set down the books and she stood each one perfectly aligned with the others, certainly not concordant to the disorder surrounding him. But some people’s chaos was another’s harmony. He had a feeling everything in this lab, as in her