A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man
Read A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man Online
Authors: Celeste Bradley,Susan Donovan
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Vicki L. Boone for information on museum operations and Frank Mangine for information on airport security. Also, the input of Darbi Gill and Joy Stefan was most appreciated.
And to our agent, Irene Goodman, go our heartfelt thanks for the unfailing support and for repeatedly scraping us off our respective ceilings.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
—Muriel Rukeyser
Contents
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Celeste Bradley and Susan Donovan
Praise for the novels of Susan Donovan
Praise for the novels of Celeste Bradley
VOLUME I
One
Boston, Present Day
This time, she really meant it. She would read just one more page and call it a night:
A large, masculine hand ran up the bare flesh of my thigh. The masked lover I knew only as “Sir” whispered into my ear, his breath hot. “I have taught you everything I can. Tomorrow you will choose your first protector.”
My teacher kissed me then, more tenderly than at any time during his instruction in the Seven Sins of the Courtesan. “Are you certain this is what you wish?” he asked. “Once you enter this world you may never return to the life you’ve always known.”
“I know what I want,” I told him, luxuriating in the nest of silken sheets, a woman now, not the girl who had come to this bed a week prior. “Only as a courtesan can I be truly free to decide my own destiny.”
Piper Chase-Pierpont placed a white-gloved finger on the musty diary and slid it to the far edge of the museum workroom desk, providing some distance between herself and the devastatingly erotic secrets of a woman long dead. She needed to think. She needed to figure out how to handle this unexpected development, this sudden twist of truth.
Obviously, the first shock was that these diaries existed at all. But the story they told was nothing short of … well … frankly … this was the most triple-X, crazy-assed, explicit tale she’d ever read.
Piper’s head buzzed. She craved a large alcoholic beverage, and she didn’t even drink. She wanted to wolf down a Three Musketeers bar, though she knew it would only disrupt her endocrine system with free radicals, preservatives, and high-fructose corn syrup. She needed a little fresh air. Water. An ice-cold shower. She was short-circuiting. She tried to calm herself. It wasn’t working.
Oh God! What am I supposed to do with this stuff?
Through the broken lenses of her glasses, Piper glanced at the clock on the basement workroom wall. It was after 1
A.M.
, which meant she’d been held spellbound by these documents for more than five hours, her thighs clenched together in the desk chair, barely moving, breathing hard. She’d only skimmed through the three diaries—out of order, she now realized—but it had been enough to understand that she’d unearthed a secret so outrageous it would rock the known historical record, jeopardize the reputation of her museum, and maybe even give her boss the excuse he needed to cut her position.
And let’s face it, Piper thought—if she let this information out, everyone in town would hate her. What city wants to learn that their most beloved and righteous folk heroine spent her youth as a high-class hooker and accused murderess? Not Boston, Massachusetts, that was certain.
Maybe she should just pretend she never found the journals. She could simply take the diaries and run. But how would she live with herself? Piper was a senior curator at the Boston Museum of Culture and Society. Her job was to interpret history, not shove it in a shoebox and hide it under her bed.
Oh, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. The story she’d just read hadn’t only left her shocked—she was restless. Overheated. It felt as if the two-hundred-year-old words had been written just for her, Piper Chase-Pierpont, Ph.D., a sex-starved, uptight, overworked, and underpaid woman standing alone, looking down into the abyss of her thirtieth birthday.
God help her, but she wasn’t ready to share these journals with anyone. Not yet. Not until she understood the full historical—and personal—import of what she’d stumbled upon. Literally.
Piper’s glance went to the center of the basement workroom floor, where it all began. It had been seven in the evening. A Friday in midsummer, which meant the rest of the staff had long ago gone home to their lives. She’d been sitting cross-legged with her notes and sketches for the Ophelia Harrington exhibit spread out around her. Filling the room’s shelves and floor were nearly four hundred catalogued family artifacts on loan to the museum. Piper had been soaking it all in, desperately hoping a theme for the exhibit would gel in her mind. The Fall Gala was only three months away, and that made her nervous. She began to chew on an ink pen.
Sure, it was a terrible habit (one that her mother abhorred) but it’s what she’d been doing since middle school—when she thought hard, she chewed on a pen.
But this time, the pen snapped. Foul-tasting ink trickled into her mouth. One violent shake of her head and her glasses went flying. Piper jumped to her feet and lurched toward the restroom, stepping on her glasses in the process. In her half-blind state she tripped over Ophelia Harrington’s 187-year-old leather and cedar travel trunk, and when she returned from her scrubbing sojourn at the bathroom sink, she discovered that she’d knocked the trunk on its side, exposing a secret compartment. And the journals.
Piper smiled to herself at the irony. Despite her years of experience and a doctorate from Harvard, she had only luck to thank for this particular bonanza. Luck and clumsiness.
And now there they were, three small, innocent-looking journals bound in cracked brown leather, their powder-fine deckle edges ragged with age, their pages packed with historical dynamite.
She considered her options. Piper could follow standard procedure and copy the journals in the museum’s document center. But since it was locked on weekends, she’d have to wait until Monday, when someone was bound to peer over her shoulder as she worked. And boy, wouldn’t that be fun? They’d see phrases such as “rosy red nipples,” and “the dark curls of my pubis peeked from between his fingertips.”
No, thanks. Piper had barely been able to read those words alone in her basement workroom in the middle of the night. No way was she about to share them in a 9
A.M.
staff meeting. The thought made her shudder.
What she’d do instead, she decided, was find an office-equipment vendor to deliver a professional-grade copier to her apartment on a Saturday. She’d pay out of pocket for it. Then she’d copy the diaries in private and study them at her leisure. She wouldn’t tell anyone a damn thing about the journals until she was good and ready, and that would be only once she’d verified the recounted events and could place the outrageous story in its proper historical context. Besides, at home she could apply cold showers as needed.
Piper frowned, suddenly aware of the appalling lack of professionalism in that line of reasoning. How could she even
think
of doing something so outrageous? What if she got caught? She’d always been more milquetoast than maverick. Certainly, these diaries weren’t worth losing her career and reputation over, were they?
She tipped her head and wondered.
Well? Were they?
The distant
ping!
of the basement elevator shocked Piper back to the here and now. The night security guard was on his way!
Oh God. Oh no.
Oh, the heck with it!
And her decision was made.
Piper shoved herself to a sudden stand on bloodless legs, nearly toppling over. She stomped her feet to get the circulation going, shook her arms and hands, rolled her head from side to side.
Get organized, fast. Get the journals and get out of here.
Footsteps came down the hall. Closer now. Heading her way.
Moving as fast as she could on feet that felt like concrete stumps, Piper began gathering everything she’d need—artifact tweezers, several more packages of lint-free white cotton gloves, acid-free paper, and Mylar storage sleeves, her favorite soft horsehair cleaning brush. Sometime in the future, she’d oversee the proper deacidification of the documents. Right now, she just had to get them home and get them copied.
And to think! Up until a few hours ago, her biggest challenge had been choosing a narrative theme for the Ophelia Harrington exhibit, finding a way to smoothly combine the public and private lives of one of the city’s most beloved nineteenth-century icons.
She kept moving. Gathering. Thinking.
Ha! Thanks to this shocking
wormhole
in history she’d just discovered, she was now faced with an inscrutable mystery:
how had a much-desired Regency London courtesan known as “the Blackbird” become the most fiery female abolitionist in America’s history?
Piper gathered all three journals into one big sheet of acid-free paper, and shoved the entire bundle into her brown leather messenger bag. It made her cringe to handle them like that, but there was no time for delicacy.
She staggered toward the travel trunk still lying on its side, righting it. Then she plopped down amid her notes and sketches, pretending to be lost in thought, only this time without a pen.
“Miss Piper?”
“Yes?” Piper looked up and smiled as the door to the basement workroom opened.
Night security supervisor Melvin Tostel poked his head inside and frowned. “You still here?”
“What?” Piper tried to adjust her skewed eyeglasses. She wished she’d had a few extra minutes to retape them. She probably looked like a madwoman. If she was lucky, she looked like the same nerdy, workaholic curator she always had been, just a little, well,
nerdier
.
“Are you okay there, Miss Piper?” Melvin’s frown deepened. “You got an exhibit opening or something? I haven’t seen you here this late since—” He stopped himself. Even the security guards at the BMCS knew that Piper’s last exhibit—one of the more costly in recent museum history—had “fallen short of expectations.” That’s how her father described the fiasco. Everyone else just called it what it was—a flop. A disaster. An embarrassment.
It was common knowledge that the Ophelia Harrington exhibit was Piper’s last chance. The museum trustees had already cut several vital positions, and they’d made it clear that one of the two remaining senior curators would be next—herself or the brown-nosing weasel boy Lincoln Northcutt.