Private Research: An Erotic Novella (8 page)

Of those descendants who were easily found, I’d contacted several over the last few months. There were also a half dozen people whose genealogy I still needed to track. I was a little dizzy with the effort of keeping it all in order in my head.

“Going well?”

I looked up at Sebastian, blinking, as if I’d just risen out of a tub of mud. I hadn’t even heard him come back in.

“I’m just going to shower off, but . . .” I knew he was speaking, but the mere word
shower
had me thinking of him naked, of tasting him, holding him in my mouth.

He was silent. Waiting for some sort of response from me. I shook my head. “A shower would be good. No! I mean, yes, it’s going well.”

His lips curved into a bemused little smile and he left the room.

I looked back at my computer screen. Stared at the document open in front of me. Listened to the sounds of him moving about the apartment. Going into the bathroom. Turning the shower on. Naked by now, for sure. I blinked to refocus my eyes, to make the print on the screen turn into actual words in front of me. There would be time enough for sex later.

If I could only tell that to the growing heat between my legs.

I looked at the clock in the upper-right-hand corner of my computer screen. It was after ten already. What would Sebastian do when he got out of the shower? Sit down and read? Go to bed? Invite me to join him? I was in the middle of his living space. If he wanted to watch television, would he feel like he was disturbing me?

I heard the shower stop, him puttering around the bathroom, then the bathroom door opening and his footsteps into his bedroom. Then there was a sound that seemed a lot like him lying down on his bed. Hmm.

He’d mentioned earlier the clean sheets for the sofa bed. Maybe he really intended to sleep alone. To abstain from sex. Despite the fact that he’d half seduced me into staying with him last night.

I shut the laptop and stood up. We’d have to have this talk, awkward or not. It would be even more awkward if we let potential misunderstandings grow.

H
E WAS LYING
on his bed, over the covers, wearing nothing but low-slung pajama bottoms and reading a book. His hair was still damp from the shower, and he had a towel behind him protecting the two pillows he’d used to prop up his head.

He looked sexy and comfortable and . . .

“Hi,” I said. He looked up, interest clear in his gaze.

“You . . . don’t have to hide away in here if you want to use the living room for any reason.” I felt so stupid, like I was saying the wrong thing.

“I promised you a quiet space to work,” he said. He laid his book—something about artificial neural networks—flat on his chest. Which made me focus on that chest.

“Yes, but I also don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“You’re not. In fact, by helping me out, you’re giving me more time to work on other projects.”

Other projects? Like other secret clubs or things that had to do with that rather dense-looking book resting atop his body? But that wasn’t why I was standing in his room, very aware that he was watching me intently and that I was having trouble meeting his eyes.

“Also . . . about the sofa . . .”

“Oh.” He put the book aside and started to stand up. “Do you need me to show you how to open it?”

“No!” He stood still. Stared at me. “No,” I repeated more gently. “Are we really going to pretend?”

“Mina.” His expression was of the utmost seriousness and I started to regret the conversation. Maybe there was a more subtle way to have gone about this. But I was like a freight train—“I don’t want you to feel like you have to have sex with me because you’re staying here.”

My eyes widened. Like I
had
to have sex with him? Tell that to my libido. The part of me that had decided that since I’d already broken the seal, so to speak, on having sex with him, I might as well fully enjoy myself.

“Not that I don’t want to,” he said quickly. “But . . . I didn’t think last night about how everything might change.”

The politics of power. He wanted to make certain it was even, that I was making my own choices.

“I don’t really want to sleep on the sofa,” I said softly. “I want . . . what you promised me last night.”

He nodded and then smiled that small, secretive, little smile of his. “Excellent.”

The shift was instantaneous, a transformation from concerned, cautious, and respectful to sexually magnetic and demanding. Every inch of him radiated intensity as he stepped toward me. He lifted one hand to my cheek, stroked my skin. “This is it then, Mina. I won’t be so polite again.”

I shivered at his words, not from fear but from anticipation, and nodded. I’d consented to something unspoken, beyond what I even fully understood. But I wanted it. I wanted to know him at his most raw, his most animalistic. I wanted . . . everything.

Chapter Seven

A
S
I
WAS
going to be there indefinitely, or rather, as long as partway through August, I filled his fridge with all my favorite healthy snacks as well as food to cook for dinner. After all, we could hardly eat takeout every night. Then I’d spent the rest of the morning reorganizing my notes and rereading the rough sketches of chapters that might or might not make it into the final draft of my dissertation. Often I started in outline form, which quickly evolved into writing whole paragraphs.

By early afternoon I had three new pages full of questions that needed answering, loose ends and holes that needed filling. Above all, I still needed proof. But I was slowly building my case, even if it was mostly circumstantial.

I had a chronology of Anne’s life. Quotes from letters about her work. And there were snippets that referenced subjects touched only in the Mead books in the years directly before the first Mead book had been published. Not only that, but her life had changed. She’d lost a child. She and her husband had ended up on different ideological sides of social justice.

For the first time in a month, since I’d realized that my time in England was running out, I felt optimistic about succeeding. Thanks to Sebastian.

Maybe it rankled that I needed to accept his generosity and ambiguous employment, but it also was healing. This was the Sebastian I’d thought I knew.

Which made me feel guilty, and I turned my attention to the Harridan House project, as I’d coined it in my head.

I opened the document Sebastian had e-mailed me. Then laughed. Obsession was right. Sebastian was limited only by time, certainly not by creativity. He’d clearly spent the few hours he did have mining the Web for any snippet of info.

Apparently, he’d started with his family. There was a list of all living descendants of his grandfather and then a list of his grandfather’s sister’s living descendants, all of whom had denied knowledge of a club called Harridan House.

For a moment I lingered on the family tree. Sebastian was the youngest of three siblings, born a decade after the next youngest. His father and brother were no longer alive, but the reason wasn’t written anywhere. Which made sense in terms of the document’s purpose but certainly didn’t help satisfy my curiosity: When had his father died? When had his brother died? How had that loss affected him?

His sister had two children, but neither of them had been questioned. Presumably because they were still minors, and if their mother had no knowledge of Harridan House, then why would they?

There were no birth dates listed anywhere. I did a quick Web search to place his uncle, the current viscount, at sixty-eight years of age. He’d claimed no knowledge of the club and, if the place had been destroyed and never rebuilt or reestablished, why would he have? Why would either of his children? Nonetheless, Sebastian had been thorough and asked everyone. Everyone except his great-aunt, by whose name there was a question mark. Interesting.

I jotted her name down in my notebook: Rose Felch nee Bosworth. A loose end to tie up.

After the family, he’d listed the results he’d garnered from a basic Web search. Zero. Not on any discussion boards, or blogs, or searchable historical archives. He’d looked through London businesses from 1800 through 1945. He’d searched for a list of buildings destroyed in the Second World War. A Wikipedia page (which I quickly brought up as well), was limited in scope and considering that, according to the Museum of London’s Web site, one hundred thousand homes were destroyed in London during the war, Sebastian had determined this avenue useless.

Additionally, Harridan House wasn’t listed on any public list of private gentleman’s clubs or any list of brothels, including travelers’ guides to London.

A general search for Madame Rouge, as well, had unearthed nothing but a short story in a modern erotica collection that was unlikely to have any actual connection to the historical Madame Rouge.

I kept reading page after page, an outline of Sebastian’s very organized thoughts. He’d said he built algorithms, and from the little I understood of the work of quants in finance, it seemed as if I was gaining a window into the methodical, obsessive world of Sebastian’s mind.

A mind now obsessed with me. Or rather, with having sex with me.

I couldn’t stop the pleased little smile that curved up my lips. It stuck around even when I finally closed my computer and settled on the couch with the first of his grandfather’s journals to read.

I made it through a year of Oxford, through the account of his sleeping his way across the college town, then the young girl he’d gotten pregnant (
why didn’t Sebastian mention any of that fascinating gossip in his rundown about his grandfather?
), and the subsequent back-alley abortion that was discovered by his father, resulting in a huge fight and much adolescent raging upon the page. It hadn’t been the seventeen-year-old soon-to-be-viscount’s promiscuity that had brought down his father’s ire, but his carelessness with the family’s reputation.

Then the uncle stepped in, which led to the Honorable Colin Bosworth’s induction as a member of Harridan House so that he could do the proverbial sowing of his wild oats in a discreet place where there would be no unfortunate consequences.

It was like a television teen drama, full of wealth and vices, and by the time I heard the key turn in the lock shortly before eight in the evening, I was completely hooked. The energy I’d gained from reading redirected to the stunningly sexy man walking into the flat. My pulse raced with anticipation, like I was a newlywed housewife or something, not just a grad student crashing on a couch.

I sat up, placing the book aside on the coffee table as Sebastian closed the door behind him and dropped his messenger bag on what appeared to be its customary place on the floor.

“I see you met my grandfather,” he said wryly, sliding off his shoes and walking toward me. There was something about seeing him in just his trouser socks that made me feel like he was illicitly undressed. Ridiculously Jane Austenish of me considering I was wearing yoga shorts and a tank top, with no bra, and was decidedly more undressed than him.

Which he obviously noticed from the glint in his eyes. Already, I’d come to know that glint and recognize it for the sexual interest that it was.

“I can’t believe you didn’t mention the drama!”

He laughed, even as he knelt on the floor and pushed my knees apart. “Has he attended Harridan House yet?”

I sucked in my breath with anticipation and barely managed to shake my head. But his hands were on my bare thighs, his long fingers looking perfect there as they slid up over the skin.

“I bought food . . . for dinner,” I gasped.

His thumbs reached the outer seam of my shorts. What was with this guy and my hormones?

“That’s lovely,” he murmured, “but what I want from you right now is a bit”—his thumbs grazed over the junction of my legs—“different.” He bent down, and I stared at the back of his blond head just a moment before I felt his mouth on my inner thigh, oh God, and his tongue. I fell back against the sofa pillows and gave in. “You”—lick—“should wear”—lick—“these shorts”—lick—“every day.” Lick. “But as much as I”—lick—“like them”—his fingers hooked on to the waistband and tugged down—“I’d like them better off.”

I raised my hips, and he slid the offending cloth down, my panties with them. Then, he knelt back between my open legs. Lowered his head again. His mouth settled just above my knee, teasing me, as he started his impossibly slow but relentless journey up again.

I had no shame. Sitting there, bare-assed, on his couch, with him fully dressed in his suit, and his head nestled between my legs and his mouth—oh God, his mouth—

“
Y
O
U MENTIONED SOMETHIN
G
about dinner?”

I turned my head languidly on the pillow to look at him. Sometime in the last hour we’d moved to his bed. I felt sated, boneless, and nearly brainless too. I could so easily drift off to sleep.

But Sebastian seemed energized. Sometimes an orgasm worked that way.

“Just some salmon, lettuce . . .” I waved a limp hand like that gesture could list all the ingredients I’d purchased that morning with my well-used credit card.

“That sounds delicious.” As if he realized I had no intention of moving, he bent back over me and kissed me. Slowly, tantalizingly, until desire started humming through my body again. Then he broke away. “Up you go.”

I shook my head and pushed myself off the bed. Making dinner was the last thing I wanted to do, and yet . . . when I’d purchased the food that morning, I’d wanted to cook for him, in some weird, latently domestic, feminine way.

I looked around briefly. Then I remembered that all of my clothes were in the living room.

I gathered them, cleaned up, then went to the kitchen. It was small but immaculate, the counter space uncluttered by anything other than a coffee machine and an electric kettle. I rooted around in his cupboards for all the things I needed and then set up shop.

I was acutely aware of where Sebastian was at all times, the bathroom, back to the bedroom, then doing something in the living room.

Then, leaning against the wall in the kitchen watching me. Like having a woman cooking for him was the night’s entertainment.

“So, your grandfather,” I said as I slid the salmon fillets onto the pan. The smell of the hot oil and seasonings alone were making my stomach growl. “Does he ever go to Harridan House with friends?” I was already thinking of his grandfather as a character in a book, which meant eternal present tense.

I turned to look at Sebastian, who was staring up to his left, at space, but doing that eyes-glazed-over-thinking thing. “Yes, I’m fairly certain. I didn’t note those?”

I shrugged. “You might have. I’ll check after dinner. Maybe one of those friends is still alive.”

“Possibly.”

There was a slight sound of reticence in his voice. I remembered his reluctance to hire an outside researcher.

“You can’t be worried about your family’s reputation with them. After all, these men would be as complicit as your grandfather.”

“I wouldn’t wish to embarrass anyone who might have purposefully put that life behind him.”

“Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they stayed when your grandfather left. Maybe they know a bit more about what happened during and after the war. Why did Harridan House simply disappear? Or did it?”

As I flipped the salmon over, for the first time I considered the possibility of Harridan House simply having been moved. Perhaps it even still existed. Though how in today’s modern age of social media a club could remain so secret that no one knew of it would be beyond me. And made its continued existence less likely.

I turned back to Sebastian with a sudden thought. “That’s what you hope, isn’t it?” He raised an eyebrow in question, but I knew he understood what I meant. “That’s half your obsession. You
want
it to still exist.” A flicker crossed his face and I knew I was right. “What would you do then? Fuck your way through it the way your grandfather did? The way the last two centuries of ancestors did?”

“It would be tempting.” He took a step toward me. I held up the spatula like a shield.

“Uh-uh,” I said quickly. “You don’t get to deflect the conversation away by having sex with me
.
”

He grinned, a guilty-as-charged grin, and there was another little insight into Sebastian. He used sex as a sleight of hand as much as an obsession. Interesting.

He still stepped forward, took my wrists in his hands. “I admit, I’d hoped.” Somehow he had my hands, spatula and all, behind my back and his body pressed close to mine. It didn’t matter that we’d emerged from his bedroom barely half an hour before. My breath quickened. The mound between my legs grew heavy with need. “But now, with you here . . .”

“You’re an absolute slut,” I whispered.

His answer was to press his lips to mine, to tease mine open, to drug me with his taste. Through his boxer shorts, I could feel him hard against me.

“And you like me that way.”

I did, for now, as long as it didn’t hurt me, didn’t affect me in any way.

The scent of burning garlic made me twist away from him and pull the pan off the stove even as I turned off the burner.

“I think we should check into his friends,” I repeated, trying to calm my overactive libido. “I also wonder if your family has any household records or correspondence that might be useful. Do they keep archives?”

“There might be. Likely, actually. I’ll look into it.”

Satisfaction slid through me as I finished making dinner. One day and I’d been helpful already.