Page 112 of Affair

“No. Please come to see me tonight when you’ve accomplished your task. I do not care how late it is. I will not sleep until I know that you and Hamilton are safely away from The Green Table.”

“Very well.” He looked down at her gloved hand resting on the black fabric of his coat. A flash of intense sensation went through him.

She cares.

For all her wariness of the male sex, Charlotte seemed to trust him. And for all his years of self-imposed solitude, he suddenly knew that he would be very lonely when Charlotte went out of his life.

Whatever this emotion was that had so disrupted his orderly, peaceful existence, it was more than fleeting passion.

An overwhelming sense of urgency gripped him. It had nothing to do with The Green Table. He closed his own hand tightly over Charlotte’s.

“Baxter?” She gave him a quizzical glance. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Yes.” He struggled to find the words he needed to argue his point in a logical fashion. “When this is finished, I wish to speak to you about the future of our liaison.”

She blinked. “The future?”

“Bloody hell, Charlotte, we cannot go on like this. Surely you can comprehend that.”

“I thought everything was going quite smoothly.”

“An affair is all very well for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks?”

“Perhaps even a few months,” he conceded. “But in the end the whole thing becomes quite tedious.”

A great stillness came over her. “Yes, of course. Tedious.”

Relieved that she had grasped the point so quickly, Baxter plunged on. “There is the enormous inconvenience, for one thing.”

“Inconvenience.”

“All that damned scurrying about to find a suitable place to, uh, display our mutual feelings,” he explained. “I mean, it’s all very well to use a laboratory bench, or the carriage, or the library sofa on occasion, but over the long term, I suspect it will prove extremely tiresome.”

“I see. Tiresome.”

“A man of my years prefers the comfort of his own bed.” He had a sudden, extremely vivid recollection of how little a bed had mattered on the few occasions when he had made love to Charlotte. “In the main.”

“Baxter, you’re only thirty-two.”

“Age has nothing to do with it. I was never inclined toward a career as an acrobat.”

She lowered her eyes. “I have always found you to be quite agile, sir.”

He decided to ignore that. “And then there is the constant threat of gossip. It can be quite unpleasant. As we discussed, it might well have an ill effect on your business.”

She pursed her lips. “Yes, I suppose so.”

He cudgeled his brain for other arguments. The most obvious one hit him with a force that twisted his insides. He drew a breath to steady himself. “And you must consider the possibility of pregnancy.”

“I understand that there are devices that a gentleman can wear that will prevent that sort of thing.”

“It may very well be entirely too late,” he said grimly. “That is the great difficulty with an affair, you see. One cannot always control the situation. Charlotte, there are any number of reasons why our liaison cannot go on indefinitely.”

She gazed at him and said not a word. At that moment Baxter would have bargained away the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone to be able to read the expression in her eyes. And then she glanced past his shoulder and smiled.

Hamilton coughed discreetly. “Baxter? According to our plans, it’s time for us to leave.”

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