Page 16 of Anything But a Duke
“Slammed onto the polished marble of the main lobby.”
“I did apologize.” He squared his gaze on her narrowed one. “I regret the accident, Miss Ashby.”
“Not as much as I do, Mr. Iverson.”
Aidan swallowed hard as she glared at him. He wondered if she regretted all of it. Rushing in to help a stranger. Holding on to each other for far too long on that year-ago rainy night. The brush of her mouth against his.
He turned his gaze toward Huntley and then Tremayne one chair down. “This should not impact our judgment regarding Miss Ashby’s device. The blame is mine.”
Tremayne nodded and Huntley pursed his mouth thoughtfully.
“Perhaps we could just—” Her brother pulled various tubes and cables out of the box.
“No.” Miss Ashby spoke the single word like a judge issuing her final edict. “We mustn’t waste any more of your time, gentlemen.” She snapped the lid shut on her contraption, then turned to face them.
Her expression made something pinch behind Aidan’s middle waistcoat button. The intensity had dimmed. She offered no more bold stares. In fact, her gaze seemed to fix on the wall at their backs.
“If there is anything else you wish to know about my mechanism, I’m willing to answer any question put to me.”
“Where does it all go?” Aidan asked her. The one matter she hadn’t addressed was disposal of all the dirt her device would so efficiently collect.
Instantly, her gaze met his, her eyes lit with a blaze of irritation that tightened her heart-shaped face, sharpening the soft curve of her jaw.
“Can you be more specific, Mr. Iverson?”
“You’ve spoken quite eloquently of the benefits of your cleaning mechanism. Ideally, you envision a tube system in every household, which can be used for disposing of dust and other refuse. But where does it all go?”
“Did you not read my notes, sir?”
“Noteveryword, Miss Ashby.” He glanced at Tremayne and scoffed. “We are petitioned by hundreds of applicants.”
“I imagine you are. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and I am grateful.”
The moment Aidan started to speak, she cut in.
“Yet how can you adequately judge the merit of our inventions if you do not read each word of our applications?”
Aidan inhaled sharply and narrowed an eye at Diana Ashby. He’d just been chastised.
He sat up in his chair and resisted the ridiculous urge to straighten his necktie.
“To answer your question, Mr. Iverson, I propose a central facility with furnaces that would incinerate the refuse.”
“That’s quite brilliant.” Huntley edged forward on his chair again.
Aidan rolled his eyes.
“Furnaces,” Huntley continued, “create more dust, which will cause Londoners to need a system like yours even more. It’s almost diabolical.”
Huntley was the one Diana Ashby had looked to with hopefulness. He’d expressed the most interest in her design, though Aidan feared the man’s eagerness had as much to do with the lady’s beauty as her invention’s profitability.
Now she looked at him in shock, eyes wide, her expression pained.
“You mistake me, my lord.” Lines formed on her pinched brow, and the pink ruffles lining the pleats across her shoulders drooped as she let out a sigh. Softly, she added, “I wish to help people.”
The five words landed like a blow. Miss Ashby’s drive to succeed, he understood. But her desire to help others, that was a need—almost a compulsion—that rode his shoulders every day.
Their reasons could not be the same. She was probably an inveterate do-gooder. He was a man with a terrible sin to make up for. But he understood her goal, nonetheless.
