Chapter 5 #3
“Must be nice. I’ve always got to be doing something or I go mad.”
“You don’t sleep?”
“I sleep fine. I just exhaust myself first.”
She regarded him quizzically. “What do you do to rest, then? To relax?”
He shook his head, trying to remember the meaning of the words. “I’m not sure I’m good at relaxing. An easy day for me is working from sunup and allowing myself to quit at sundown. That’s how money is made in America. Here, too, these days.”
“I’ve—I’ve heard you’ve amassed plenty.” She put her pencil down, a pretty peach blush spreading over her cheeks. “Morley said they call you King Midas.”
“Just Midas,” he snorted. “We got no kings where I’m from.”
“I wonder what that’s like.”
“It’s fine, I guess… I mean, there are always captains of industry. Power is forever up for grabs. And those with the money have the power, so someone’s always waiting in the wings to take it from you. To steal or siphon what you have for their own gain.”
Both her brows and her lips tilted down. “Sounds…exhausting.”
“It can be,” he shrugged.
“Well, perhaps since you’ll be a married man, you can take up a relaxing hobby of some sort.
” She turned this way and that, as if looking for an extra idea that might have dropped on the floor.
“Perhaps you might attend lectures on geology since you are so intent upon what is found in the earth. Or even astronomy if you find that you fancy it.”
Sounded like a great way to work a nap into his day.
Eli’s mouth twisted as he paused before replying.
He was too rich to care what people thought.
Too ambitious to mind what they felt. So why did he hesitate to tell her the truth?
Because he wanted her approval? Wasn’t much a call for that now.
If he put on airs and graces, he’d only disappoint her in the future when she discovered what he really was.
“I don’t know if I’d do so well at educational pursuits, seeing as how I have no education to speak of. ”
She lifted a hand to her mouth. “You never went to school?”
Scratching at an itch behind his ear, he shifted uncomfortably. “I learned my letters and numbers well enough, but not so much in a schoolroom. When other kids went, I had to work to keep myself fed.”
“Oh. I—I’m so sorry.” Her gaze broke away, and she chewed on the inside of her cheek as if doing so might save her from an uncomfortable conversation.
Or an unwanted marriage?
God, they were as unsuitable as the proverbial fish and bird. He’d spent his life in the dirt and she with her head in the clouds. No, further than that. The stars.
With a giant sigh, he motioned to the telescope. “Show me what’s so amazing up there that you’d risk your life and freedom to watch it.”
Closing one eye, she checked the lens and broke into the most genuine smile he’d ever seen.
“This is perfect timing. The Andromedids are so active! I think the shower is peaking just about now.” She lingered over the lens, tendrils of her hair sliding over her shoulder as she bent forward.
“Extraordinary. I’ve never seen it like this. ”
Straightening, she beckoned to him with several flaps of her hand. “Come. Come. Bend here and use your dominant eye, as it’ll blink less. Careful not to bump it too hard. Here you are. That’s the way.”
As he levered at the waist, he had to bend down much further than she did to press his eye to the scope. Once he’d positioned himself, her hand fluttered like a moth over his shoulder blade. As though she wanted to encourage him but was uncertain where to land.
He found his back ever so slightly arching toward the touch, much like a cat might search for a stroke.
Whether she meant to or not, her hand splayed just behind his shoulder, and his entire being became focused on the place where she touched him. A light touch. Maybe one she was unaware of.
He couldn’t see her to tell. But with the tense and twitching muscles in his back, he could make out the delineations of each individual finger. Could sense some sort of energy arcing over his flesh, expanding from where she touched down his spine and landing in his cock.
From his shoulder blade. His goddamned motherfucking perfectly proper shoulder.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, what was the matter with him? He’d barely been this randy as a teen. Hell, it’d been at least twenty years since he worried that a stiff wind and a soft touch would make him come in his trousers.
“What do you think?” she pressed, tapping his back like one of her enthusiastic kittens. “Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Oh. Right. Shit. The stars—er—meteors. Focusing his eye into the lens, he looked up into the rare, clear night sky. It didn’t look much different through a scope. Just closer. It wasn’t disagreeable or anything, but he couldn’t see the big deal—
“Holy shit.” He caught his breath as a bright orb with a definitive tail streaked across the scope. Another to the left. Two in tandem. Then a barrage of maybe five falling and glowing and burning out like a brilliant sprinkle of rain. “There are so many.”
“And the Andromedids is one of the lesser events. Just wait until next month when the Geminids are visible… You’ll never be the same.”
He could say that about tonight. Right now. A shift was taking place inside him, nudged along by the soft pressure of her hand.
Eli remembered something. Something he’d buried away for several years as he’d done his level best to wrestle an entire industry from the clutches of greedy men who would see their employees die before their profit margins were lowered.
“I did look for sky when I was a boy,” he murmured.
“For the stars. After a long day down in the mine digging deep enough to reach the ninth circle of hell and nearly shitting myself each time I heard a rumble. Wondering if I’d be buried again before the sun had a chance to shine on my face.
After breathing in the Sulfur, sweat, dust, and God knows what else.
A dozen men would climb into a lift, and we’d turn our faces to the sky.
Once we reached the surface, we’d stand there for a long time.
Breathing the air. Feeling safe knowing that the sky wouldn’t fall on us. Except here it is, doing just that.”
She didn’t respond immediately, and he didn’t much care as he gazed into the glass, watching the lovely event in brilliant intervals.
“We’re just lucky, I suppose, that the sky falls so far beyond our reach,” she murmured.
“Do they know how far?”
“Actually, yes. Though these showers are sort of optical illusions. You see, the meteors are close enough to enter our atmosphere, but the stars behind them are light-years away.”
“What years, now?” He sent her a quizzical look before reclaiming the lens. He didn’t want to miss one. “That makes no sense.”
Her voice became dreamier, further away as if she’d lifted her head to gaze out the observatory ceiling. “Did you know that when you’re looking into the sky, you’re also looking at the past?”
He shook his head, following a particularly interesting streak in a strange and synchronous cluster.
“Some astronomers believe that the stars we see now, existed as we see them at least five hundred light-years ago. A light-year is the distance they measure in the time it takes for light to move through space in a year. Can you imagine time as distance?”
He furrowed his brow. “Not until today.”
The hand on his shoulder increased pressure and he’d the sense she’d bent closer. “Directly in the middle of your lens, you’ll see a constellation of overlapping stars that looks like a woman standing with chains at her wrists that connect to nothing. Do you see?”
Not really, but he checked again until he found some of the brighter stars that might have been a figure if a toddler had drawn it, with something attached to hands that didn’t exist. “I think I found it.”
“They’ve measured that constellation as something like two hundred million light-years away.
” Her lips came closer to his ear. “Two hundred million! Think of how fast light moves. Of how far it must reach in an entire year. Of how vast that distance truly is…” She sighed, and he convulsed in a delicious shudder as her breath feathered over the downy hairs on the back of his neck as her voice lowered to reverential tones.
“Have you ever felt so insignificant? So small and yet so miraculous?”
Turning his head toward her voice, Eli found her huddled beside him, patiently waiting her turn.
The answer to her question was hell no. So he didn’t speak it.
He felt large and hard and very fucking significant right now. Vital. Alive. Infused with whatever mysterious force hurled those chunks of fire across the sky, and burning just as hot.
Honeysuckle and herbs. Skin smooth as porcelain, even this close. Soft eyes. Warm, sweet breath from plump peach lips. The kind of lips that would look perfect stretched around his—
“Here.” He straightened and backed away from the telescope. “It’s your meteor shower. You can watch it now.”
Her eyes crinkled with a pleased smile as she took his place, bending over the telescope in a position that didn’t help his predicament in the slightest.
“It’s not my meteor shower, it’s Andromeda’s.”
“Who?”
“Andromeda. The Chained Lady.” She fiddled with a knob, and he saw the edge of the telescope grow in length.
Which reminded him of his own state of affairs.
“In Greek mythology, Andromeda was a princess of Ethiopia,” Rosaline continued, blithely unaware of his present state of abject arousal.
“Her mother, Cassiopeia, told everyone she was more beautiful than the Nereids, so Poseidon, the sea god, punished the entire kingdom and demanded sacrifice. The people chained Andromeda to the rocks to sacrifice her to a sea monster, but Perseus saved her life and married her, making her his queen.”