There Will Be Phlogiston by Riptide Publishing

all
these secret, forbidden things. The glide of skin between a man’s
fingers as he caressed himself. The pearly moisture that gathered
to his touching. The helpless curl of his toes. The hitch of his
breath. The closed door of masculinity thrown wide, just for
her.
    “Oh . . . God . . . Ros.”
    His voice was little more than a scratchy growl.
Exhilarating. Stirring reactions in places that should surely have
been replete.
    Wanting to kiss him, but not wanting to miss a
single moment of his climax, she touched her hand to his lips, and
that was how he found completion, his groan smothered against her
palm like the roughest, sweetest of kisses.
    She gazed at him, absurdly, helplessly enamoured.
Slightly stunned by the realisation that she did, indeed, find him
beautiful. Or that the word itself was lacking if she could not
apply it to Anstruther Jones. A man of scars and wounds and gold,
garlanded in the pearls of his own pleasure.
    “Oh my—” she swallowed a gasp of her own “—you are
most extravagantly bedewed.”
    He laughed, and pulled her down, tucking her against
his side, her head nestled to his shoulder. And they lay there
awhile in love and bliss and silence.
    “You were right,” she said, finally. “We should not
do this again. It . . . it would be too painful.”
    He made a soft sound, frustration she thought, and
longing perhaps. “Or you could be with me. However you want.”
    “Is . . . is that some fashion of proposal?” She
tried to make it a joke, but her voice trembled and betrayed
her.
    “Yes.”
    “It is not a very creditable one.”
    “No, but it’s sincere. I’d like to make you happy,
Ros. I know you’d do the same for me.”
    “What can possibly have given you that idea? We have
already established that I am spoiled, headstrong, stubborn,
and—”
    “And I like you.”
    Oh, why did she feel like crying? “I can’t. I’m
engaged to a marquess. To jilt him for you would ruin me.”
    “And marrying him won’t?”
    It was at once a reasonable question, and terribly
unfair. “You don’t understand.” She pushed away his arms, and the
world felt colder outside their circle. “It’s easy for you. You
don’t have anything to lose, and you only have to think of
yourself. I have my family.”
    “Yes.” He still did not flinch from her. “Yes, you
do.”
    Fuck . Fuck fuck fuck. “I did not mean . . .
That is . . . I was clumsy.”
    “It’s all right, Ros. I just think a family should
do more than take from you.”
    She tried to smooth her hair into some semblance of
order. “I should like you to take me back now.”
    His hands were gentle against hers as he helped her
corral her wayward tresses. “Anything you want.”
    It took less time than she would have imagined for
them to make themselves respectable again. As if everything they’d
done, everything they’d said, was already slipping away from
her.
    The journey back was somehow quite different.
    And she rather feared she was too.

Rosamond was not enjoying anything.
    The visits. The dinners. The balls.
    They whirled around her like a carousel until they
were nothing but a moving haze, the colour of the Gaslight
smog.
    Lack of enjoyment had somehow developed from a
passive state to an active one. And was manifesting in
headaches.
    She was on her way to the retiring room—where she
had been spending increasing amounts of her time—when voices in the
antechamber arrested her retreat. She was not a natural
eavesdropper, being insufficiently interested in the lives others,
but she hesitated when she recognised the marquess’s southern
drawl. It was surely just prejudice for an unfamiliar accent, but
it was hard not to perceive an undertone of contempt when one
lengthened one’s As so excessively.
    “—return soon,” he was saying. “And thank God for
that. I cannot abide this pissant little backwater with its
delusions of grandeur.”
    “Ah, but you’ll be a married man.” That was one of
his friends, the