Gossamer Wing by Delphine Dryden

big friendly bear of a man, with curious eyes and gentle paws, who looked like he might crush a teacup with two fingers, or break a chair by sitting on it.
    He didn’t fit into her world.
    Oh, he was a gentleman. His ancestry was every bit as elevated as her own. He hadn’t snapped the handle from the teacup, nor had he allowed his weight to pull so much as a squeak of complaint from the poor little chair in the solarium. He knew what he ought to say and do, whether or not he always chose to say and do it.
    But he had made choices in his life that baffled her. He seemed so large, and easy, and . . .
free
.
    His bulk was all muscle, she could tell, and mostly evident in his shoulders and the powerful muscles of his thighs that she could see when he knelt to help her with the airship. They stood out in sharp relief, despite the tasteful tailoring of his clothing. His hands had felt strong enough to twist her head from her neck in one swift go. But the way he touched her was so considerate, he might have been holding something as fragile as a robin’s egg.
    Charlotte was never one for poetics, and she wasn’t inclined to begin now. More importantly, the man now knew a secret that might be vital to her own interest, no less than that of the Crown.
    “You won’t tell my father,” she stated firmly. “About the implants not working as well as they might. They’re modified to mark the altitude as well, they’re necessary to my task. They might also be useful if I needed to pilot another sort of pressurized craft in the future. Submersibles, for instance.”
    “It’s not a question of them not working as well as they might, it’s a question of them not working at all, if you’re still getting motion sickness.”
    “Usually only on the airship,” she assured him. “And possibly at sea, but that remains to be seen. They’ve cured my motion sickness in steam cars entirely, and it used to be quite severe. I’ve consulted Dr. Alvarez and she’s had the implants out and in again. It’s her opinion that they’re functioning properly and the real problem isn’t with the equipment.”
    “She thinks it’s all in your head?”
    He was too quick, and she didn’t like the way he’d smiled when he said it.
    “My father can’t know. The implants are another factor in the Crown’s accepting me for this piece of work. If he got wind of this he would have word to Whitehall in a heartbeat.”
    The great bear of a smith was thinking, very obviously, while running his gentle, callused fingertips over the lower half of the dirigible’s framework. Corset boning. She might have told him whalebone, and it would have been as accurate. Things seemed to slip out of her mouth around him. Charlotte had been far too long out of the society of men younger than her father, and this particular man was so very much to take in all at once. He seemed twice the size of Reginald. Familiar, unobtrusive, reserved Reginald who was dead, making any comparison suspect due to the passage of time and its effect on memory.
    “So it’s also about submersibles?”
    It took her a moment to catch the drift of his thoughts. “Yes. In a sense. He hasn’t told you about your part yet, has he?”
    “The Viscount? No. We’re set to meet tomorrow if I agree to this, apparently he intends to make a formal presentation. But you know.”
    She nodded, unsure whether to tell him more than she already had. She knew she shouldn’t, but she also knew he had worked on classified government projects before. He had also passed a rigorous security clearance before her father had ever approached him, and the particulars of the mission might be enough on their own to convince him to say yes. “Tomorrow when you meet with my father again, you must pretend never to have heard this. As I said, my part is straightforward. They need a packet retrieved, and they need more information on this man Dubois. It’s just chance that I’m to be spying on him in the same