“So would I,” I said, snuggling up against him. “Do you prefer grape or banana flavored raincoats?”
“It’s two in the morning,” he added, shaking his adorable head at me.
“I know. They made me come up here. Ray’s mad at you, you know.”
“You’re damned right I’m mad!” Ray nodded, then accepted the cup of tea Bert handed her. “No biscuits?”
“I’m sorry, I hadn’t planned on entertaining this morning,” Alex said acidly, giving me another hitch up his chest, the better to glare at me. “You are the most undisciplined, unsettling woman I’ve ever met. You have absolutely no inhibitions, do you?”
“I’m not the one who answers my door starkers,” I pointed out.
He took a deep breath. “Alix, you have to leave now. You’re not yourself.”
“Everyone rejects me,” I mumbled into his neck, dwelling on that fact. It suddenly seemed important, and very, very sad. Alex was my last hope, and now he, too, wanted nothing to do with me.
“Christ—”
“Is there a horsewhip around here?” Ray asked, peering around with an avid look in her eye.
“Now, Ray, he hasn’t done anything to deserve physical
violence,” Bert said. “Although if that mournful tone in Alix’s voice doesn’t tear at his heartstrings, it should. Imagine rejecting such a sweet, lovely girl.”
I sniffled my agreement.
“I didn’t reject her—”
“You didn’t boff her either, and that’s a rejection in my book!” Ray said over her shoulder as she poked around in the couple of kitchen cupboards above the two tiny counters. “There must be biscuits here. Everyone has biscuits. What sort of man doesn’t have biscuits?”
“Maybe he’s not interested in her.” Bert curled up on the white couch after setting two more mugs of tea on the end table.
I put one hand on Alex’s chin and turned his face until we were nose to nose again.
“Are you interested in me?”
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and frowned. “Alix, I am not going to discuss this with you now. I’m going to take you downstairs to your flat, and then you are going to sleep. We can talk about this—”
A hot tingle in my eye region heralded the formation of more tears.
“—later when you’re…ah, Alix, don’t cry.”
“Too late.” Two fat tears rolled down my cheeks.
Alex swore again, then turned around and carried me over to the door.
“Open it.”
Another tear tracked down my cheek as I grasped the doorknob and turned it.
“Good night, ladies.”
“What? What do you mean, good night?” Ray asked, her head in one of his cupboards.
“I mean just that. Good night. I want to talk to Alix,
and obviously I can’t do that with you here, so you will please leave now.”
Bert tipped her head to one side as she considered Alex, then nodded and called to Ray as she stood. “He’s right, Ray. This is between the two of them, and we should leave them alone.”
“Thank you,” Alex said gruffly. Bert smiled and tugged a resistant Ray past him and through the door.
“But I haven’t had my biscuit yet,” the latter said plaintively, still clutching her cup of tea.
“You can have a biscuit at home. Leave them to themselves, Ray.”
“Hrmph.” Ray stopped three steps down the stairs and turned back to Alex. “You’d just better not hurt her again or I’ll find a horsewhip and—”
“I haven’t done anything to hurt her,” Alex protested.
“Yes, you did,” I said softly to his neck, waving my fingers at Bert and Ray.
Alex dropped my legs but kept an arm around my waist as he closed the door behind us.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I answered the siren call of his bare collarbone, tracing the length of it with a finger. “You have a nice collarbone, too, Alex. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. It’s not your fault, really, no matter what Ray says. She’s just a little sizzled, you know.”
One warm hand cupped the side of my face and tipped my head back until I was looking straight into his green eyes. “I think you’re a bit sizzled yourself, Alix. I’m sorry you were hurt last night, but—”
I put two fingers across his lips. The lovely warm fuzzy feeling that had held me in its grip had started to evaporate
, and it struck me that Alex had been sorely treated this evening.
“I think I’m the one to give you an apology, what with us descending upon you and waking you up, and seeing you naked, and Ray demanding a horsewhip and biscuits. I’m sorry about that, Alex. Somehow she seemed to get the idea that you were at fault last night.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I shook my head. “Yes, it does matter. You have every right to be furious with me. I owe you for the trouble I’ve put you through after trying to seduce you and waking you up like this.”
“Alix?”
“Hmm?”
The look in his eyes warmed me to my toes. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and shook his head. “Never mind. I’ll take you downstairs now.”
He kept his arm around my waist, allowing me to relax against him as he walked me down the stairs. I was conscious of a terrible sense of injustice regarding Alex, and wondered what I could do to make it up to him, to try and show him how sorry I was for annoying him.
The image of a castle came to mind, pennants flying in the wind. Who wouldn’t like a visit to a castle? That was the perfect solution to my problem. “Windsor Castle!”
“What?”
“Windsor Castle. It’s a castle in…uh…Windsor, I think. That’s what I’ll do,” I said, trying to make him to understand that it was the answer to everything. “You can come with us tomorrow to Windsor Castle. You’ll like it, it’s historic. After Windsor, we’re going to look at the maze at Hampton Court. You’ll like that, too, it’s
perfect for a detective. You can use your skills to find a way out of the maze.”
Alex was shaking his head, but I ignored that as I reached up to the lintel for the key. “No, really, Alex, it’s perfect, just perfect. I’m sure Karl won’t mind if you come along, and it will relieve my mind greatly.”
“I have work to do this weekend, and I have no intention of being the third party on your date—”
“Oh, it’s not a date,” I said, smiling at him. “It’s just Karl, and you’ll have a wonderful time. We’ll look at Windsor and we’ll look at the castle, and we’ll have races in the maze, and I’ll feel much, much better after messing up your evening. Doesn’t that sound great? It’s Saturday tomorrow, so you won’t have to work or anything, but you have to be ready early because Karl’s picking me up at the street promptly at nine.”
“Alex, I can’t go. I’ve no interest in Windsor Castle, or Hampton Court for that matter.”
I stopped trying to unlock the door to my flat as the horrible truth struck me as I stood there full of glorious plans for spending the day with Alex. He didn’t want to spend it with me. He truly didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and that business about the stallion waiting at the door was all a sham. My shoulders sagged as I leaned my forehead on the panel of the door. It was nice and cool. “Oh.”
Two hands clamped down on my shoulders. “Alix—”
The last little bit of my heart fractured under that husky, sexy voice. “No, it’s OK. I thought we might…forget it. It was a stupid idea, you’re right to not want to come. We’ll forget the whole thing.”
I fumbled with the lock, unable to see it through the tears. It struck me that I was doing an awful lot of crying
since I had come to England, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. Maybe it was something in the water.
“No, I won’t forget it.” The hands on my shoulders tightened and turned me around until I was facing him. One long finger wiped away my tears.
“I’m sorry, I’m not usually such a watering pot.” It seemed like I was doing an awful lot of apologizing lately.
He leaned his head down and kissed me very gently. “If it means that much to you, I’ll ride to Windsor with you.”
I looked into those green eyes, those deep, mysterious, green eyes that seemed to hold all of the wonder and joy of the world locked within them, just waiting for me to discover them. A little flicker of hope flared in my chest. “Do you mean that? Truly? You changed your mind?”
“
You
changed my mind,” he corrected me, and breathed another kiss on my lips. I moaned softly and swayed into him, relishing the feeling of his strong arms sliding around behind me, pulling me closer to him, closer to the source of all the fires he built up within me.
“Alex,” I murmured, and drank in his kiss. It was hot and sultry and held so much sweetness it almost brought me to my knees.
“Alex,” I said again, unable to catch my breath. “Do you want to—”
“Yes,” he said, pulling my hips forward to rub his groin. He did want to. “But not now, not with so much unsettled between us.” He bent down and kissed away the objection I was about to make. “We’ll talk about it later, sweetheart.”
With a quick flick of his wrist he had my door unlocked
and held open for me. I walked past him, flipping on the lights, then stopped and turned back to face him. “Am I?”
One chestnut eyebrow rose a quarter inch. “Are you what?”
“Your sweetheart.”
I held myself still while he gazed at me with those unfathomable eyes, then sighed my relief when he wrapped one hand in my hair and held me while he ravaged my mouth with a kiss that not only took my breath away, but melted my knees and puddled my insides. When he released me I was panting for air, while he smiled a smug smile of complete male satisfaction.
“Good night, Alix.”
“Holy cow!” I gasped, clinging to the door to keep from collapsing from the effect of that kiss.
His smile deepened in its smugness. I closed the door and slid to the floor, fanning myself and wondering what the hell I’d done.
“You are mine, woman,” Lord Raoul growled, pulling Rowena to his manly chest and ripping her golden gown asunder. “All of you, you’re all mine! From your tawny crown, to your rose-tipped breasticles, to your ten delicious little toes. Mine, mine, mine!”
“Oh, Raoooooul!” Rowena swooned.
“Breasticles? What is a breasticle?”
I heaved a sigh and would have rolled my eyes, but the way they felt, I wasn’t entirely sure they wouldn’t roll right out of my head and across the ugly carpet, picking up lint and who knew what else. Come to think of it, my eyes already felt a bit linty. “It’s a silly word, Mom. It’s Raoul’s way of showing he’s playing with her. A love word, you know, the silly kind of talk lovers have with one another.” At least I think she knew—I didn’t want to inquire too closely into my mother’s love life. There
were just some things that were better left unknown.
“I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense. What does this agent you found think about breasticles? Does she have anything to say about it? Is it even in the dictionary? If it’s not in the dictionary, no publisher will publish it. You have to stick with words that are in the dictionary, Alix.”
“Mom, you know that it’s only six-eighteen in the morning here, don’t you?” I spoke softly, hoping the pounding in my head would lessen if I didn’t move anything but my lips.
“Of course I do, that’s why I waited until now to call you, and I have to say that I don’t appreciate that snippy tone. This is an expensive phone call, and I don’t expect you to waste my time with silliness like breasticles and such. Why do you sound so odd? Are you sick?”
I pressed two knuckles to my temple and wondered about those ancient cultures that believed drilling holes in the skull would let out the evil spirits. At the moment I would have paid good money to have someone drill a few escape holes in my head. “No, I’m fine, just tired.”
“Good. How far are you on the manuscript now?”
“Almost finished.” I yawned, trying to stifle it but not succeeding. Gingerly I touched my tongue. It felt like it had been dipped in wax. Furry wax. “I’m going to take in the part I have done to my agent and have her start editing it.”
“I wish you had mentioned that to me, before you spent your money,” my mother fretted. I curled my toes into the mattress and wondered how I was ever going to tell her that I’d cashed in my plane ticket to pay for the editing. “I would like to have checked out this agent before
you paid her. You said she has a real office, not just a rented room?”
“She has a real office, Mom, with her name on the door plate and everything. If that’s all you wanted, I really have to go.”
“Go?” The sharp tone in my mother’s voice sounded like it always did—like fingernails on a chalk board. I flinched and held the phone away from my ear. “Where can you possibly have to
go
at six in the morning? You’re not consorting with inappropriate people, are you?”
“No, Mother,” I sighed.
“I hope you’re not foolish enough to waste your precious time chasing after men when you should be writing.”
I mouthed the words I knew would be coming next just as she spoke them. “I didn’t spend all of my hardearned money just so you can waste your time.”
I stretched and braved twitching back the curtain just enough to let in a bit of air. Unfortunately, sunlight came with it. Drat the stuff. I closed my eyes and prayed for instantaneous death. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend, Mom. I’m writing. Don’t worry, I’ll have this book done and marketable by the time I come home.”
I had to. The future that faced me if I didn’t was too grisly to contemplate.
“I hope so.”
“Mom, I really have to go now…and that’s go to the bathroom, not go out, so if there’s nothing else, I’ll say ’bye.”
It took another five minutes of listening to my mother alternate between warnings to save my money and not go anywhere alone, and her predictions of doom and gloom connected with my agent, book, future, and pretty
much life as I knew it. Finally I told her I was about to wet the bed, and managed to hang up without annoying her too much.
“Twenty-nine years old and I’m still afraid to tell my mother off,” I grumbled to myself as I staggered barefoot to the tiny bathroom. The grumbling continued over the course of the next few hours while I took a couple of paracetamol for my killer headache, showered, dressed, took another paracetamol, tidied up the kitchen, avoided looking directly at any food substances, then, after consulting the paracetamol package and deciding I didn’t really need my kidneys as much as I needed to be able to blink without flinching, downed a couple more of the painkillers. That was followed by a half hour’s worth of yoga, most of which was spent in the Flattened Roadkill position—that’s lying prone on the floor while breathing very, very carefully (moan as you inhale, groan as you exhale).
By the time nine o’clock rolled around, I was feeling less like a Klingon having a bad day and more like someone who was going to spend the day touring around a castle with two handsome men in attendance. I grabbed my purse and notebook, turned around twice before the little mirror to make sure my chic retro 1950’s black-and-white polka dot chiffon dress wasn’t tucked up in my underwear, and toddled off to meet Karl.
“Lovely morning, isn’t it?” I called to Ray as I trotted downstairs, adjusting a straw hat I had picked up the day before from a shop around the corner. “I’m going to see Windsor Castle. Shall I remember you to the queen?”
“Urgh.”
The sound was halfway between a cat retching up a hairball and a death rattle.
“Ray, you OK there? Are you having some problem with your key, or are you trying to listen through the door? Wood usually isn’t conducive to passing sounds.”
Silence greeted my chirpy attempt at humor. I stopped my descent down the stairs and took another look. “Ray?”
“Mwah.”
“Ah,” I said, and hopped back up a handful of stairs. Ray was plastered to the door, waving a hand ineffectually toward the latch as she clutched a small carton of milk to her chest. “I know that sound, I was making it earlier. Before the paracetamol, that is. Ray, honey, I’ll help you open the door if you can peel yourself off it. There we go, now if you’ll just hand me your key…Lord, you look terrible!”
Ray was dressed in a khaki T-shirt and matching shorts, which would have been all right except her complexion matched the ensemble. I hesitated to peer under the big, black sunglasses she wore, but that gruesome curiosity that makes people look at traffic accidents forced me to peek.
“O-o-oh, not good. Let’s get you inside. I hope Bert’s not in the same condition. Key?”
“Nnnng.”
Poor Ray. I scratched gently at the door, and turned her over to Bert when she answered.
“I was wondering where she had gone,” Bert said with a sympathetic smile. “Thank you, Alix. That’s a charming dress—is it new?”
I gave a little twirl and struck a pose. “It’s my retro fifties dress. It’s kicky, huh? I’m going to Windsor Castle with Karl, a friend of Isabella’s, the one she thought was perfect for me.”
“Very nice,” she said, bundling Ray over to a chair. “I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time.”
I turned to start back down the stairs when Bert called out to me. “Oh, Alix, did…ah…everything go all right last night?”
“Last night? Oh, you mean with Alex? Everything is just peachy. He’s going with us to Windsor.”
Bert pried the carton of milk from Ray’s stiff fingers and glanced at me where I stood in the doorway. “With you? He’s going with you and Karl?”
“Yup, it should be fun. Karl has a degree in history, so I’m sure he knows a lot about everything we’ll see.” I waved them both a cheery goodbye and trotted down the stairs and out the door.
A familiar leather satchel was sitting on the front steps. An even more familiar man was standing nearby, leaning on the railing and looking annoyed.
“Alex!”
He turned and gave me a stiff nod of the head in greeting. “Good morning.”
I grinned and skipped down the couple of steps to where he was standing. “My, so formal, and after you were so very”—my grin hitched up to a leer as I waggled my eyebrows at him—“
informal
last night. What do you have in your bag? Lunch? Champagne? Something naughty?”
His cheeks turned a dusky red. “I would prefer to forget about last night, as would, I assume, you, Bertrice, and Ray.”
I felt a little blush of my own creep up at the look he was bending upon me. “I
did
apologize, Alex, and if it makes you feel any better, I had a hell of a hangover this morning, so you needn’t be quite so snippy about the
whole thing. It’s a lovely day, and for once you’re not dressed in a suit—I like the linen look on you, by the way, you should wear it more often—and we’re going to have a marvelous time, so why don’t you lose that Eeyore gloom and show me what you have in your bag. Sandwiches? Fried chicken? Bread and cheese?”
He frowned. “My laptop.”
“Huh?” My determined smile lost significant wattage. “You’re bringing your laptop with you? To Windsor? How come?”
“I have work to do.”
“But you can’t! It’s Saturday! We’re going to a castle! You can’t compute in a castle, it’s against all the laws of nature!”
“Nonetheless, I have reports that I must have completed by Monday morning. I tried to warn you last night I would be unable to spend the day in a frivolous manner, but you were very insistent that I come with you.” He glared at me as if it were
my
fault he was going with us.
I glared back. “I wasn’t insistent! I told you it was OK if you didn’t come, that I understood if you didn’t want to spend the day with me—incidentally breaking my heart a second time, I might add, not that I’ll be foolish enough to ever give you the chance to do it again, Detective Inspector Tight Ass—but
you
changed your mind. You agreed to come with us!”
Alex waved away the last part of my sentence, narrowing his eyes and jutting his chin out at me. “Broke your heart? I haven’t broken your heart! You don’t have a heart to break, all you have is…” He waved a hand toward my groin.
“Oh!” I steamed, turning my back on the street in order to face him nose to nose. “Don’t you dare imply I
have no heart! I know I have one, because you broke it when you threw me out of your flat.” I thought for a few seconds. “Twice! You threw me out twice! You’re the one with no heart! And what’s worse, you don’t even have…”I waved at his crotch, doing a pretty good imitation of the disdainful look he had just given me.
“I bloody well do too have a…” he bellowed, waving at his fly. “And it must be a damned good one, since you were begging for it just two nights past!”
My mouth dropped open over the audacity of the man. “Begging for it?
Begging for it?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Begging for it. I seem to recall you promising me all sorts of things if I would give you what you wanted.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “Well, you wanted it, too, Mr. Greet People Naked at the Door with Your Lance Fewtered!”
That caught him by surprise. “My what?”
“Lance fewtered. Don’t you read any medieval books? You ought to read a little Roberta Gellis. You’d like her—she writes about all sorts of obstinate, pigheaded alpha males that I just bet you’d relate to.”
“I have no intention of reading anything with—”
“Of course, those men had sex with people, they didn’t just lead women on and then dump them the minute things got a bit steamy.”
“I have never led a woman on in my life—”
“You know what they call a woman who does that? A bimbo. Guess what? That makes you a mimbo!”
“Alix—”
“It’s not like I wrestled you to the ground and tore your clothes off, you know. You were right there with me, panting and heaving and nibbling and kissing, and
doing all of those things that indicated the stallion was not only at the door, he was ready for a long, hard gallop!”
“Alix—”
“Don’t you dare make
me
sound like a trollop! You were quick enough taking my dress off, and
you’re
the one who made sure he rubbed himself all over me when you peeled my underwear down, slowly, inch by inch!”
“ALIX!”
he roared.
“What?” I roared back, hands on my hips, my face thrust into his.
“Your boyfriend is here.”
“He’s not my boyfriend! You are!” I punched him dead in the chest, then winced when I realized what I had just said. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, then looked over my shoulder. “Oh, hi, Karl. You remember Alex, don’t you? I invited him to come with us today. Hope you don’t mind. Isn’t it a lovely day, though?”
Karl pursed his lips and looked thoughtful.
The drive to Windsor was, for the most part, a pleasant one. Karl did indeed know his history, and he pointed out all sorts of landmarks in London, as well as en route to the cute town of Windsor, home of the famous castle. I have to give him credit, Karl recovered quickly from the embarrassing scene on the front steps—which is more than I could say for Alex.
“You have to forgive Alex,” I said a short while after we set off. “He’s in a pissy mood today. He’s feeling guilty because he’s broken my heart—twice now—and doesn’t want to admit it.”
“Stop putting words in my mouth,” Alex growled from
the back seat of Karl’s Honda. The faint tickety-tickety sound of laptop keys being pressed confirmed my suspicion that he was back there working.
“One of the interesting locations you’ll see shortly is Runnymede,” Karl said, ignoring Alex’s bickering. “Just on the left ahead. You know about Runnymede, don’t you, Alix? That’s where King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215.”
“The Magna Carta. Fascinating,” I said, glancing out the window to a grassy parkland that looked no different from any other grassy parkland, then turning back to glare at Alex. “And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m simply explaining to Karl why you’re being such a pain in the patootie. He’s anal,” I confided to Karl. “Have you ever heard of a man who insists on working seven days a week?”
“Mmm. You know, of course, that the Magna Carta was used as a basis for your Constitution. In fact, the American Bar Association commemorated it by erecting a monument here in 1957.”