Talk Sweetly to Me

“Ooh.” She winced. “That’s a very small number. I’m exceedingly sorry for you, Mr. Shaughnessy.”

“It is.” He looked at the figure. “What, precisely, was I calculating?”

She looked up at him. For one moment, he thought she was going to be shy again—that she would move away and shake her head rather than answer. But even though her voice was low, she still said the words.

“That,” she told him, “is the chance that you’ll be able to seduce me.”

His mouth went dry, and he coughed heavily. “A slide rule to the heart,” he heard himself say. “Ouch. Is that what you think of me? That I’m trying to get you alone so that I can seduce you?”

She met his eyes. “What else am I supposed to think when you show up at my place of work, pretend not to know me, and inveigle lessons with me from my employer? What else would you be trying to do, Mr. Shaughnessy?”

He blinked. He opened his mouth and then very slowly closed it again.

“I don’t know.”

She scoffed.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “But coming here, lying to Dr. Barnstable, lying to you just to seduce you—that sounds like a sinister plot. I don’t have sinister plots, Miss Sweetly; they take too much work. I’m here because I would like to spend more time with you, and because I love listening to you talk about mathematics. Nothing more villainous than that.”

She clearly didn’t believe him. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly; she turned away, setting her hand between them.

“Speaking of mathematics,” he said, “why did an anvil appear in the midst of that calculation? I’ve done a great many things and even I have never had call to use an anvil.”

She looked up into his eyes. “How else was I to acquire amnesia?” she asked shyly.

He blinked in confusion, then burst into laughter as he realized what she meant.

She frowned. “I’m not attempting to amuse you. I would need to forget not only my own moral sense, but my work, my family, my future—everything I would give up if you succeeded in such an aim.”

“In that case,” he promised, “let me set your mind at ease. I hereby adopt a strict no-anvil policy. If I ever have you in my bed, I want you to remember yourself. I like you. There’s no point having your body if you’re not included.”

She should have smacked him for that, or at the very least, ordered him away. Instead, she touched her slide rule, moving the metal cursor back and forth.

“Then there’s no point at all,” she whispered.

Behind them, Mrs. Barnstable gave a snort. They both jumped, but the older woman only turned her head from side to side before subsiding once more.

“Haven’t you been listening?” he asked in a low voice. “This—talking to you, just like this—is already the point. I like you. I like talking to you. If you don’t like me, send me off.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. And then, without answering, she began to write another set of numbers on a sheet of paper.

“Let’s practice division,” she said.

Anyone who heard her patient explanation might have thought her cool and earnest. Stephen knew better. She hadn’t sent him off, and no matter what she was saying, the message was clear. She liked him—unwillingly, perhaps—but she still liked him.

He waited until he’d started on the problems she’d set for him, until she had picked up her pen and restarted her own calculations, before he spoke again.

“I have another question about that last probability.”

She set down her pen. “Go ahead.”

“You are always very exacting about the numbers you use. When you said I was forty percent likely to be charming…”

She blinked up at him. “I haven’t done an accurate calculation, but yes. About forty percent. If you wish, I could collate—”

He shook his head. “I don’t need a list. It’s just to satisfy my own curiosity. Why only forty percent?”

She looked down. “My personal tastes—nothing you should worry over, really—”

“If I have not made it clear, Miss Sweetly, I take an avid interest in your personal tastes.”

She let out a long breath. “I don’t trust you,” she said simply. “If you had half a chance, you’d take me to bed.”

He could have denied it. But truthfully? He wasn’t trying to shove her in that direction, but would he say no? Of course he wouldn’t.

“Ah.” He picked up the next sheet of problems she’d written out for him, found the next number on the slide. “Then you have nothing to worry about, not according to your calculations. You could find me charming all the time, and according to you, I’d still only have a chance of…of…” He fumbled.

She took pity on him. “One in forty billion.”

“There, you see? I don’t have half a chance. I’m not even within spitting range of a hundredth of a chance. So there can be no harm in your allowing yourself to be charmed by me all the time.” So saying, he gave her a brilliant smile.

It affected her. It obviously affected her. Her hands tangled in her lap; she glanced down, not in demure deflection, but as if to avert her eyes from the sun. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if her spectacles chafed.

“You’re trying to charm me with mathematics,” she said.

“Is it working?”

She looked up at him. Yes, said her dark eyes, shining at him. Yes, said the part of her lips, the fingers that drew up to brush her hair. Yes, said the tilt of her body in his direction.

“No,” she told him with a firm shake of her head. “It isn’t.”

Chapter Three

THAT NIGHT, ROSE DREAMED that a column of numbers was chasing her through some odd, non-Cartesian landscape, a vista of lines and swirling colors. In the distance, someone was laughing—not a cruel laugh, or even a laugh at her expense. Just a friendly, welcoming laugh.

The numbers caught her, taking hold of her shoulder. She jerked away, but they held her fast.

How did numbers grip? She turned to them, fascinated…and very groggily came awake.

The room was dark; the only illumination was a pale stripe of moonlight, filtered through an inch-wide gap in her curtains. No sound rose from the street; it was the dead of night indeed.

But there was a hand, warm, on Rose’s shoulder. It gave her a little shake.

“Rose,” Patricia whispered, “are you awake?”