Courting Trouble Read Online Free

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    Toad-in-the-hole, probably. Jed shook his head. Swan River was a confusing place for an American. As a British colony, it faithfully reproduced the home country’s dishes. He should be thankful for small mercies—stargazy pie, with fish heads sticking out of the pie crust, was even worse than toad-in-the-hole.
    But Swan River was more than British. It also had a substantial Indian community living north of the river. Bombaytown, much like Chinatown in San Francisco, was a little piece of India transported to west Australian shores. Sometimes, as with Lajli, trouble followed them to the new land.
    He’d been wrong to think Gupta and Lajli were young lovers. They were more like sister and long-suffering brother. It just went to show that when a man became lovesick, he saw romance everywhere.
    Or maybe he wanted to see romance everywhere because he was mishandling his own?
    Darn it. Gupta’s earnest youthfulness amused him, but there was much he could learn from the boy. At least Gupta hadn’t made the mistake of trying to manhandle his feminine handful into behaving sensibly.
    He’d send Esme flowers, tomorrow. Roses, perhaps. They were the gift of determined suitors and errant men everywhere.
    A scornful voice in his mind hooted derision. Yeah, as if flowers are going to make up for what you did. Esme doesn’t want to be wooed as a woman. She wants to be respected as a person.
    Don’t we all. Couldn’t Esme see his side of the situation? It was damnably difficult, courting her. All his instincts were to be her knight in tarnished armor. But would she let him slay her dragons? No. If he faced a dragon, she’d insist on being there, fighting beside him.
    Maybe I should challenge her to court me? He grinned and began unbuttoning his coat as he climbed the stairs.
    The buttons were the clever creation of a Polish inventor living in exile in France. Each contained a useful gadget hidden beneath the smooth birchwood facing. The top button contained a tiny mirror that could be used to catch the light and signal a message in Morse code. Then there were a couple of picklocks, a magnifying glass, a compass and a small container designed to hold snuff or something less socially acceptable—sleeping powders, drugs or poison.
    He hung his coat on the hook at the back of the door and tossed the packet of papers onto his desk. The locked top drawer of the desk held his pistol and old design notebooks. He carried the current notebook in his coat pocket to record ideas and progress. The second desk drawer, unlocked, held correspondence with inventors from around the word. An unfinished letter to his mother lay on the top. He’d been writing her about Esme’s latest political adventures. Esme crept into every letter he wrote.
    He took a firelighter from the mantelpiece, crouched and lit the waiting kindling. The fire caught. Returning the firelighter to the mantel, his hand knocked the goggles lying there. He caught them as they fell and weighed them in his hand.
    The goggles were made of brass and smoked glass. They represented a dream, a promise he’d made to himself—that one day he’d travel fast enough in his kangaroo-inspired bounding-vehicle to require protection from the high-speed wind of his journey. He turned them over in his hands. He really ought to see about getting Esme a matching pair.
    Would goggles make a better forgive-me gift than flowers? Would Esme even care that he wanted her to share his dreams?
    He replaced the goggles on the mantelpiece beside the replica brass model of Dayenne’s groundbreaking mechanical analysis of speed and motion in the animal world. Gears and pistons worked as muscles. It was the inspiration for Jed’s own work.
    Not that his work was proceeding as quickly as he’d hoped. First there had been the distraction of becoming acquainted with Esme. She’d mistaken him for a smooth-talking scoundrel and offered him employment to front her Women’s Advancement League and