The Countess Conspiracy

“Violet,” he said softly. “I know what you’re going to say. You want me to do it. But…” He swallowed. “It hasn’t changed. Nothing has changed. I know how important this discovery is, but it ruins things between us, those lies.”

Violet took his hand and turned him toward the mirror. “I know who’s going to take credit for this discovery,” she whispered. And then she lifted her free hand and pointed at her own reflection, so terribly disarranged and yet so utterly right. “She is.”

He let out a breath into the silence that followed. Their eyes met in the mirror. Violet realized that she was still holding his hand, still touching him. That his fingers were warm against hers, that his body was close, so close to hers. It was a strangely, starkly intimate moment.

“Violet,” he whispered.

She had gone mad, and she steeled herself to hear all of the ways she was being a fool.

They’ll never let you present it.

Nobody will listen.

Think of what it will mean to your family.

They all came down to the same thing: Selfish, selfish. You don’t deserve recognition. You don’t deserve anything.

But this was Sebastian, and Sebastian didn’t say any of those things. He simply turned to her. Violet didn’t want to look into his eyes. Exchanging glances through a mirror was one thing, but he was holding her hand, standing so close to her. She tried to look away, but he set his hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she looked up.

Her whole body was on fire. Gazing into his eyes… Oh, that was a mistake. Not when he was holding her hand. Not when they were so close that they could trade breaths the way they had once traded sentences, finishing each other’s inhalations and exhalations as if their entire beings were twined together.

Sebastian always smiled—it was one of his hallmarks. He wasn’t smiling now. He was watching her, looking at her, drinking her in. And she wasn’t flinching from him. God, what a terrible mistake. She couldn’t do this.

But he raised his hand to her face and brushed his palm against her cheek, and she didn’t pull away. She might even have leaned into him.

It was going to be hard. Impossible, in fact. She didn’t have the slightest idea how to go forward from here. Her sister was going to hate her. Her mother was…what word had she used? Disgusted by her. The entire world was going to despise her.

But not Sebastian. Sebastian just touched her forehead with his. “Bully for you, Violet,” he whispered. “This time, I can make them pay attention to you. And believe me, I will.”

She didn’t care about the rest of the world.

He brought his other hand up, running his thumb along her jaw. Her whole being sparked at that. He wanted her…and oh, she wanted him.

She wanted him so much.

He was leaning in now, his breath on her face, his lips mere inches from hers. He was going to kiss her. He was going to kiss her.

A stab of panic shot through her.

He was going to kiss her.

She pulled away. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t think of anything more than those words. “I’m sorry. I have to go—I have to go—” She pointed wordlessly at the door. “I’m sorry.” She backed to the door. “I have to go think.”

And with that, she fled.

Chapter Seventeen

VIOLET THOUGHT.

She thought about kissing Sebastian as she fled to the upstairs room that had been set aside for her use. She thought about kissing him as she called for her maid. Louisa undid her buttons, but Violet could only think of the warmth of his hand on her shoulder. That wall that she’d built, the one she’d used to protect herself for so long—it had been breached. There was no safety any longer.

She called for a bath, and when it came, she sent her maid away.

She thought about his lips on hers when she stepped into the large copper tub filled with steaming water. She thought about his hands, the faint dusting of dark hairs that brushed the backs of them. She thought about them drifting over her thighs.

And she thought about what Sebastian looked like when he wasn’t smiling—darkly intent on her, as if she were all that mattered. She swallowed and shifted, and when she rubbed the soap between her hands and washed her legs, she didn’t feel her own skin. In her imagination, she felt his.

The liquid heat of the water surrounded her—almost too hot to bear, the way she liked it. She lathered the soap into a frenzy of suds and then slipped beneath the heated surface, holding her nose as she went under. It didn’t help. The water was like a full-body embrace. It made her aware of her skin, so aware of Sebastian.

He probably wasn’t where she’d left him. He’d have gone to change. He might take a bath of his own.

Not good to think of him unclothed. Very not good.

Thinking, Violet realized, wasn’t doing any good. Thinking was treacherous. Her thoughts wandered into his room, into his very bath. She imagined herself wrapped in nothing but a towel, opening his door and tiptoeing in…

Thinking wasn’t the answer. It wouldn’t do.

Not thinking had served her as well as anything could. “You idiot,” she admonished her body. “You don’t want this. This could kill you.”

She washed her hair and made herself think cold, rational thoughts. She thought about all the cats she had ever owned, and how many of them had had four versus five or six toes. She scrubbed between her toes and thought about the process for creating cold-pressed soap. And when those things didn’t help, she got out of the warm bath and stood in the cold air and made herself remember a set of autopsy woodcuts reproduced in one of the articles she’d read. The human heart, she admonished herself, was a disgusting organ, all ventricles and chambers and atria, a big ugly lump of muscle.

The heart was one of the most disgusting pieces of meat in the body. Even the intestines were better looking. She wasn’t going to let something so ridiculous make her decisions.

She nodded, in control of herself finally.

She called for her maid. When Louisa dressed her again—in a high-necked long-sleeved gown of dark purple with gloves to match—Violet had no errant thoughts. She was better, entirely better. She’d talk to Sebastian. She’d apologize—after all, she ought not to have taken his hand or turned to him. She shouldn’t have almost-kissed him. She certainly should not be having these thoughts.

She would apologize, and they’d go back to being friends. All the stupid flapping valves in her heart could keep on flapping, for all Violet cared. The heart was a muscle like any other muscle in her body.