head was bent, her tumble of long hair partially obscuring her features, her lashes lowered.
“Mutually inverse functions,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what marriage should be like,” she continued. “Mutually inverse functions. Suppose a function travels from point A to point B. An inverse function moves in the opposite direction, from B to A, with the idea that each element returns to itself, so if you were to—”
“Stop.”
She looked up at him, her dark-fringed eyes wide. “It’s a mathematical way of—”
Alexander strode forward and grasped her shoulders, pulling her from the chair and against his body. “No. There are no mathematics to this, Lydia.”
Her generous breasts pressed against his chest, firing his blood all over again. He gathered the folds of her shift and pulled it up to expose her legs, her rounded hips. Lydia softened, her palms splaying against his chest as her breathing quickened.
“You can’t formulate an equation to explain this,” Alexander whispered, stroking one hand along the slope of her waist, the curve of her hip, down to the warmth between her thighs. “You can’t find a pattern in love, in desire. You can’t calculate what makes a man want a woman. You can’t quantify attraction and passion. All you can do is feel it.”
Lydia gasped as his fingers explored farther. Her blue eyes darkened, her hands tightening on his shoulders.
“I… I just meant that if you—”
“Feel it, Lydia.” Alexander cupped his hand beneath her chin and lowered his mouth to hers. “Just feel it. Do you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her body fitting with ease against his, as graceful as an elongating flower stem. “Oh, yes.”
Hot anticipation seeped into Alexander’s blood, inundating the growing awareness that this woman had filled a place inside him he hadn’t even known was empty.
And when she was beneath him, her body lush and supple under his, her broken gasps hot against his ear, he fought the urge to demand her surrender again, fought the compulsion to make her admit she belonged to him. That she would only, could only, ever be his.
Chapter Nineteen
The faint sound of hammers and saws echoed through St. Martin’s Hall and against the walls of the Society of Arts meeting room. Five men sat opposite Alexander at the council table, each reviewing papers and occasionally marking them with a pencil.
Alexander didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be back in London. A week after returning from Devon, he’d received notification about the Society of Arts’ urgent meeting. And he had a sinking feeling he already knew the reason for the council summons.
He fisted his hands on his knees as he waited for the Marquess of Hadley to speak.
“I’m afraid we’ve increasing cause for concern, Lord Northwood.” Hadley’s frown slashed across his face, wrinkled his forehead. He looked up from his notes. “You’ve two brothers still residing in St. Petersburg, do you not?”
“One.” I think. He didn’t know where Nicholas was, couldn’t remember the last time they’d received a letter from him. Alexander tried to keep his voice level. “I fail to see what this has to do with the exhibition.”
“Then you’d best look more closely, Lord Northwood.” Sir George Cooke thumped a fat finger on the table. “Your brother is considered an enemy of the state.”
“My brother is not a soldier, not in politics—”
“You think anyone cares what he does?” Lord Hadley asked. “We’ve already received numerous objections to the extent of the Russian display in the exhibition, and we’ve not even received most of the objects yet.”
Lord Wiltshire coughed. “And, forgive me, Lord Northwood, but no one has forgotten the unfortunate circumstances surrounding your mother and the divorce of your parents. Owing to your support and the strength of your work with the Society, we’ve been willing to overlook it up to this point, but I’m afraid the increasing hostilities with the Russian Empire force us to take it into account once again.”
Alexander’s back teeth snapped together. “What my mother has to do with—”
“Lord Northwood, please.” Sir George held up his hand. “You are not on trial. We are not asking you to defend yourself or your family. We are simply stating the facts, and I venture to suggest that even you yourself cannot disagree with them.”
Alexander sat back, detesting the helplessness that swamped his chest.
“There is a great deal of anti-Russian public sentiment in France,” Sir George continued, “and it is beginning to flourish here. We dare not risk causing tension with the French and other foreign commissioners to the exhibition by suggesting that we sympathize with the