As if she’d ever enjoy dancing again. Well, that wasn’t true. There was some pleasure in it, but she’d only truly loved it when she’d waltzed with Trevor, but that was over now. He’d never take her in his arms again.
The scream in her thoughts grew louder again, so she focused on a new way to silence it. Or at least distract herself. Since dancing was an appropriate way to meet gentlemen, she would do it now. Perhaps someone else would be as successful as Mr. Rausch had been in temporarily grabbing her attention.
With that thought fixed in her mind, she headed inside to meet men.
* * *
Four weeks went by. A whole month, and not a single man measured up. Each day, each ball, each conversation added one more layer to the encrusted boredom of her existence. At least at home she had her laboratory experiments. She could always lose herself in science, but not here. Here she was on a husband-hunting mission, and the entire process bored her to the point of madness.
Two moments lightened the crushing sameness of it all. The first had been a visit from her uncle and father. Her uncle had repeated his request for the cosmetic formula. She had merely shaken her head. She intended that to be her dowry if her father decided to throw her over entirely. Then her father had asked if she wished to come home.
She nearly said yes. At least at home, she had her lab. But in London she had hopes of something better. At home, there was merely more of the same. And after her time with Trevor, she knew that she could never be content with the nothing of her existence before. Science could fill her mind, but she wanted something to fill the yawning blackness of her heart.
Once she had thought it would be love and children. Now she longed for something—anything—that would make it better. The only thing she knew for sure was that it couldn’t be found at home. Which meant her only hope was in London at least for the rest of the Season. So she had sent her father and uncle home and turned her attention to yet another round of excruciatingly similar balls.
The second moment was more of a series of sparks of interest, like tiny flickers of possibility, before her raised hopes inevitably fell flat. And every one of those moments came from Mr. Rausch.
He had made a point of attracting her attention. He was unfailingly polite, unless Lady Eleanor was around. Then he was sarcastic and rude. But mostly he worked to entertain her with scientific tidbits, unusual people, and once, a trained dog.
She inevitably smiled at something that happened. Her mood lightened for perhaps as much as ten minutes. But in the end, she fell back into the sameness of it all. The people he called friends were interesting, but there was only so much one could explore in the middle of a society function without other people intruding. And even the trained dog was just…well, a dog. It performed nicely, but still sat down at the end and licked its own balls. She didn’t even find that offensive, just very doglike in a very boring way.
So it was that on the return from her umpteenth ball with aching feet and a splitting headache that Mellie finally faced the truth.
She missed Trevor. More than that, she loved him, and he was an idiot for thinking she didn’t know her own mind. And lest he suggest that her attraction to him was simply the novelty of sexuality, she had spent every night of the last weeks trying a different form of masturbation. It was nothing like what she experienced with him. It had its moments, certainly, but she wanted him.
She was in love with him.
And she’d be damned if she let him hold her heart without making some attempt to capture his.
The problem was that she never saw him. He was never at any function she attended. Never. That was probably Eleanor’s doing, but it meant that she had only one choice. She had to go to his home at the only time she wasn’t being shuttled from one event to the next. Which meant now.
Right now.
In the middle of the night.
By herself.
Odd how just making the decision sped her heart to a frighteningly excited pace.
Twenty
When you risk everything on a rake, be sure he makes an equal wager.
Trevor was not a man who enjoyed drinking. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He liked the taste of it. He liked the sociability of it. Some of his best memories were of sitting with his mates drinking brandy. Sometimes they smoked, but he’d never acquired an appreciation of it. Sometimes they gambled as they played cards, but he’d never seen the full sense in that either. He simply enjoyed a good drink with his friends without becoming stupid.
Tonight he was spinning drunk.
Tonight—and for the last many nights—he’d stumbled home while singing a German drinking song with his closest friends. One had helped him up the stairs. Another had helped him out of his clothes. Then they all left, but not before repeating the phrase they’d been saying for a month now.
“Forget her, Trev. Don’t let a country cit be the ruin of you.”
It was that last phrase that upset him. Mellie wasn’t the ruin of him. At times he wondered if she might be the making of him. She had a way of making his path obvious. He thought more clearly when she was around. He could talk things through with her. He could sit with her in that beautiful house of hers and allow the quiet order of the place to clear the cobwebs from his mind.
For years he’d thought it was her father who did that, but Mr. Smithson was as cluttered as it was possible for a brilliant scientist to be. His lab was a mess, and his thoughts often skittered in different directions at once. But his notes and his experiments were usually pristine, the science behind them crystal clear. It was only now that he realized Mr. Smithson’s notes were in Mellie’s precise hand. Likely she helped her father organize his thoughts enough that everything else rolled out in neat lines.
Which is what she did. She made nice homes. She made people feel comfortable. She made him feel like he was a lazy, useless aristocrat because he’d had all the opportunity in the world but spent his days bouncing from party to party only sporadically doing his own research.
Hence the drinking. He’d known before that he wasn’t worthy of her. Now he saw how very much he wanted her and couldn’t have her. She had thrown him over and was daily courted by men who were smarter than him, whose family and friends weren’t desperately trying to break them apart, and who had at least a courtesy title, if not the real one.