Steampunk Romance: Gas Light (Mystery Suspense Romance Short Stories)

By Rose Haven

Rosalie Lapointe loves to tinker. She loves it so much that she occasionally forgets to eat.

She finds it easier to occupy her mind with blueprints and spanner sizes than the deep, agonizing pain of losing her mother many years ago. Her father indulges her hobbies even as he works to find her a mate who will care for her when she cannot care for herself.

When she refuses all of his suitors, Mr Lapointe hires a new manservant as a last resort. But Rosalie’s hobby may be more dangerous than she realised; as she tries to work out the kinks in her new steam engine prototype, she discovers that poisonous carbon monoxide may not the biggest threat to her safety.

The distractingly handsome new manservant, Edmund Price, is not helping matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: kindledromance
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311159946

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© Copyright 2015 by Rose Haven - All rights reserved.

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Steampunk Romance

Gas Light

Book One

Rose Haven

Steampunk Romance: Gas Light

Chapter One

I was nearly asphyxiated the morning Father gave me the news.

In my defence, I was wearing the gas mask I’d built myself after the airborne cyanide incident. The rubber had apparently become brittle during my experiments with liquid nitrogen, and I hadn’t realised until the carbon monoxide from my prototype steam engine had begun to make me light-headed.

I was bent over the machine, watching the pistons whirring and feeling the heat on my exposed cheeks, when I realised my mistake. The combination of fumes and an empty stomach sent me teetering forward and nearly plunged me face-first into the exhaust fan.

None of that now, I scolded myself, dashing over to the window to let some fresh air into the room. Can’t be having fainting spells on the brink of an important discovery. My stomach growled. I tried to remember when I’d last eaten. Yesterday? Probably yesterday evening. I hadn’t had the time for breakfast that morning and I didn’t think I would have time for lunch either. I was so close to making this work.

My male colleagues preferred to work in basement labs, but I’d always preferred a cool breeze in the afternoons, and so I’d set up my personal laboratory in the attic of my father’s house. The window overlooked beautifully maintained flower gardens and pristine lawns which adorned his home – an exercise in indulgence I’d never understood no matter how often he tried to explain the importance of ‘keeping up appearances’. He would have preferred to see me heavy with children instead of tinkering over clockwork with my corsets loosened, but as my mother always said, we cannot have everything our hearts desire. So he’d set aside room in the attic for me to continue my work and, as far as I knew, encouraged rumours that I had taken ill in my early years and had never quite recovered.

Since then, I’d tinkered and toyed with different inventions. Some mornings I would wake up with my mind bursting with fresh ideas, and I would need to rush to a desk and scratch them onto paper before they vanished into the ether. Some mornings it would be pictures,