Page 4 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
He was—there was no way around it, as much as Lawrence might have wished—ridiculously beautiful, with fine features that looked carved out of ivory. Black hair and eyes that were blacker still, cool and polished and fixed on Lawrence. Lawrence wanted to stare, to admire this man the way one might admire a sketch tacked to the wall of a prison cell, an unlooked-for reprieve from the dismalness that surrounded him.
Then he remembered himself.
“To hell with you and your impertinent questions,” Lawrence snarled.
They were still standing too close. Turner tipped his head against the wall and looked up at Lawrence with lazy indifference. Most unsecretarial. But Turner didn’t seem afraid, and Lawrence didn’t know how to feel about that. He was so accustomed to fear that the absence of it was unsettling.
“I thought you were an intruder.” Lawrence took a full step backwards, bringing them to what he hoped was a normal conversational distance. “I might have hurt you.”
“I’m not easily hurt. Are you expecting intruders? I should have thought any burglars would be quite satisfied to make off with the contents of the rest of your house. What do you have up here besides . . . ?” He gestured around the room, as if indicating that there was nothing worth stealing.
Lawrence watched him survey his surroundings, one finely arched eyebrow lifting ever so slightly when he noticed the stacks of papers littering the floor, his slender frame going momentarily rigid when a mouse scurried clear across the middle of the room, nimbly darting between bits of debris as if it had made this journey often, which it likely had.
“We have another hour or so of daylight, such as it is,” Turner said, and his voice was as cool and remote as the rest of him. “Shall I get to work straightaway, or would you have me wait until tomorrow?”
At the reminder that he would have to actually work with Turner, Lawrence felt the too-familiar sense of rising panic, that even in this room he was not safe from the chaos of the outside world. The man meant to stay here, to meddle and talk and distract; he planned to smell good and be handsome and obviously Lawrence should never have agreed to any of this. “I told you to leave.”
When Turner still did not move, Lawrence felt his chest tighten, his lungs constrict, as if he were being buried alive. He needed to be alone, to be in control, to do whatever he needed to make these sensations stop. Blindly, he reached for the first book he laid his hands on and threw it at the wall beside Turner’s head.
Turner neatly sidestepped the book, as if he were used to people throwing things at him. A man so glaringly useless, so pointedly ornamental, shouldn’t know how to avoid getting hit by books thrown by madmen. Every inch of him was neat and tidy, despite having undoubtedly traveled by the common stage. He smelled clean and cool too. Lawrence found his thoughts drifting in a decidedly unclean and uncool direction before remembering that this way lay madness. Literally.
Turner flicked a bored glance at the book, now lying in a heap on the floor, and then idly examined his fingernails. It ought to be easy enough to get rid of this fellow. The last secretary had been a mousy thing who packed his bags after the first faulty fuse, and he had come with references testifying to his diligence. Turner didn’t look like he had ever worked a day in his life. It really wasn’t possible to imagine a man like this even existing in the same world as Penkellis, let alone standing amidst the wreckage of Lawrence’s study.
Barnabus, who had slept through the arrival of an intruder and the clunk of a book hitting the wall, now stretched lazily before the hearth. He must have finally grasped that there was a stranger in his midst, because he suddenly became a furry blur headed in the direction of George Turner.
“Please have your mongrel desist,” Turner said, sounding slightly shaken. Good. Perhaps Barnabus would succeed where Lawrence had failed and send this distractingly exquisite specimen away from here.
“He likes you,” said Lawrence, not moving to help. Barnabus might look like a hell hound, but really he was harmless.
“He’d like to eat me, you mean,” Turner replied acidly. “Ha!” he said, finally getting a grip on the dog’s scruff and holding him at arm’s length. Barnabus shot his master a helpless look.
“Come, Barnabus.” The dog wriggled free of Turner’s grasp and came, panting and confused, to Lawrence’s side. “Good dog,” he said, crouching to nuzzle the animal.
When he looked up, he saw that the other man was staring at him. Well, there was a lot to stare at, so it stood to reason. Lawrence and Barnabus together exceeded twenty-two stone, and it was anybody’s guess which of them was hairier at this point. It had been a while since Lawrence had bothered with having his hair cut or shaving regularly.
But it wasn’t fear or curiosity that Lawrence read in Turner’s gaze. He was familiar with both those expressions, and this wasn’t either of them. Lawrence might not have any interest in interacting with his fellow man, but he was a student of science and he liked being able to classify and categorize. This look of Turner’s didn’t fit into any of the looks he was accustomed to receiving. It was something darker and lighter and colder and warmer all at once.
Disconcerted, Lawrence looked away. “Get out. We’ll start work in the morning.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Turner step over the ruined book and slip noiselessly out the door.
Lawrence momentarily regretted having damaged the book, but he didn’t bother picking it up. It could join the collection of flotsam on the floor. When he stood, he thought he caught a trace of an unfamiliar scent, something refined and clean that didn’t belong in this musty study. Lawrence had become accustomed to the smell of dogs and explosives, with an undercurrent of dust and damp. This scent came from a bottle and had been carried in by Mr. George Turner.
He was visited by the image of his new secretary readying himself this morning at an inn, stripping before the fire and sponging off before splashing himself with that eau de cologne. Lawrence couldn’t get his imaginings beyond a rough and unsatisfying sketch of slender limbs and graceful movements.
Even after he set about lighting candles to work by, that half-formed image wafted across his thoughts as surely as the man’s scent had wafted into his nose. The picture would not shake loose from his mind.
CHAPTERTHREE
Lawrence was trimming what had to be the hundredth wool disk when a gust of wind blew his bedchamber door open, sending each painstakingly cut-out circle scattering across the floor. Damn it. The secretary must have opened or shut a window, or tampered with the flue, or done any of the dozen other things that caused draughts to turn into gusts in this house.
Fuming, Lawrence stormed into the study, where he found Turner sitting amidst stacks of paper. “What the bloody hell are you about in here?” he growled.
Turner flicked him a cool glance. “Sorting through your correspondence, my lord. Were those bedclothes especially unsatisfactory?”
Lawrence looked down at the quilt and scissors he still held. “Electrolyte,” he muttered, not intending to deliver a lecture about voltaic piles or anything else. “You’d better not have lost or ruined anything.”
“My dear fellow”—and why did such cheek sound more fitting than the correctmy lord?—“half these papers are already ruined. I think a good number of them have been ruined for years. At least if you consider evidence of rat droppings to indicate ruin, which I do.”
