Sam withdrew his attention from the discussion. There was no need for him to be involved in the money talks, and he’d just had an interesting idea about a lamp containing linked carbon blocks. He settled back in his chair and idly scanned the opulent room, feeling vaguely smothered by the dark green surroundings. The trick would be choosing the right material to sandwich between the blocks, he thought, patting his jacket idly for his notebook and looking down in confusion when the familiar lump failed to appear. It obviously hadn’t made the transition between his normal clothes and the ridiculous formal suit Henry had turned up with tonight.

“Henry,” he said, interrupting some point the elder Denton was making about commodity trading. “Do you have a pen?”

Henry pulled out a pen from the inside of his jacket and handed it to Sam without missing a beat in the conversation. Sam looked around for his napkin, found it on the floor by his feet, smoothed it carefully out on the table, and began to sketch.

“Err—” Denton senior leaned across the table and lowered his voice, incorrectly assuming, like many before him, that Sam’s lack of attention denoted a lack of hearing. “Is he always like this?”

“You know how genius operates,” Henry said, falling into the practiced words with ease. “Their intellect engages with the world in a different way from our own.…”

Sam let the conversation fade again. Perhaps the blocks could be held vertically, like so, and the fuse wire attached there, like that.… He nodded to himself and leaned back, tipping his chair onto its hind legs and letting his eyes wander the room while he thought. There was really only one thing in the restaurant worth looking at, and he let his gaze travel there again.

He wasn’t the only one looking at her, either, which Sam didn’t find at all surprising. When she’d entered the restaurant an hour ago—an agonizing three hours into his own torturous meal—the whole room had started buzzing like someone had knocked over a hive of bees. It made sense. She was … magnetic.

Her hair was dark, pulled away from her face in a complicated, severe knot that made her look elegant yet somehow fierce. She was all contrasts, this woman—Sam amused himself by counting them. Her red velvet dress, simple and bold, against her pale skin. Her straight, almost rigid posture, against the light laughter that drifted towards him across the room. The determination of her chin and the softness of her mouth. He wondered what color her eyes were—

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” the younger Denton said, leaning across the table. Sam looked back in confusion, but it seemed the man was indeed addressing him.

“What is?”

“The Webster woman,” he said. “Should have stayed in Paris. They tolerate behavior like that over there, you know.”