His interest was piqued now. He had no idea what she was computing, but he’d be happy to find her alone and charm her into whatever number she wished. He leaned forward. “Tell me. What is the chance that you’ll find me charming?”
“I’d approximate it as…” She looked across the room thoughtfully, her finger tapping against her lips. “I suppose I should be generous; you are paying for these lessons. So let us say forty percent.”
“A mere forty percent?” Stephen clutched his chest dramatically. “A knife to the heart! You slay me, Miss Sweetly.”
Her finger did not stop tapping, but she smiled as shyly as if he’d offered her a compliment. “You misidentify the weapon. It’s not a knife.”
“No?”
Miss Sweetly shook her head. “It’s a double slide rule from Elliots, and I have found it extremely useful in dispatching all manner of men. Especially the ones given to excess histrionics. Now shall we continue the calculation?”
He sat back, smiling faintly. “By all means. I can see where this is heading. I have always wanted to be abused with numbers.”
She huffed. “The chance that my father would not discover the whole thing before it proved too late is one in ten, and the possibility that I should be hit on the head with an anvil, or a similarly heavy item, is perhaps one in a million. Tell me, Mr. Shaughnessy, what is the probability of all those things occurring in conjunction?”
“Ah…” He had to use paper to keep track. “That would be…a chance of one in…a hundred billion?”
“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.”