“Tilda. We are going to go back to your mother’s house and we are going to lie down for thirty minutes. If you want to come back before this late-night meal your mother’s calling a dinner, we’ll have plenty of time.”
She glanced in the plate-glass window of the antiques shop next to the cafe. Her skin was pale, and the shadows under her eyes weren’t just a trick of the light. “Thirty minutes,” she said.
He stood and held out his hand. She stuffed everything in her tote and took it. They hailed a cab on the corner and were back in Chelsea by five.
“Just taking a quick nap, Mum,” Tilda called as they opened the door.
“Lovely, darling,” her mother said.
“Has she moved from that office since we left?” Daniel asked as they climbed the stairs.
“Likely not,” Tilda said.
Daniel stripped to his boxers and a T-shirt, then set his phone alarm. Hands on his hips, he cocked one eyebrow toward the bed piled with throw pillows. “What do we do with these?”
Tilda thrust both arms into the mound and swept them off the end of the bed. Daniel chuckled as he pulled back the duvet, then stretched out on his stomach. Tilda undressed to her bra and knickers. He was asleep before she lay down beside him.
—
She dreamed, something she rarely did at night, let alone while napping. In her dream she sat alone in a sage silk-papered dining room, dressed in a denim microskirt and her wedding ring, eating bangers and mash off elegant china.
—
Daniel didn’t move when the alarm buzzed. She kissed his cheekbone, sandpaper-rough with stubble. “Daniel,” she whispered.
He didn’t even grunt. Amused, she pushed up the short sleeve of his T-shirt and kissed the bellied swell of his triceps. He had the lean look of a distance runner, his skeleton carrying nothing but skin and muscle. Tendons and veins stood out under the skin of his arm. In sleep, the furrow between his eyebrows had smoothed out, as had the tension around his mouth. He looked young, and vulnerable.
“Daniel,” she tried again.
Nothing. His breathing didn’t change, so she hooked one finger under the T-shirt’s hem and pulled it up to reveal the small of his back. She placed another kiss in the fine dusting of dark gold hair there, then the dimple to either side.
No movement at all. “Wake up,” she said in a singsong voice, and tugged down the wrinkled elastic edge of his boxers and kissed the place where his tailbone disappeared into the cleft of his buttocks. He really did have a very fine bottom. When she touched her tongue to the spot she just kissed, he shifted ever so slightly. She pulled the elastic down even more until it caught on either his hipbones or his erection, and continued to lick her way down the cleft, insinuating her hand under the elastic, between his thighs, to cup his balls.
At that touch he twitched and lifted his head to peer over his shoulder. His eyes were sleep-dazed, but arousal battled the exhaustion. She needed this. Sex with Daniel was rapidly becoming the only thing that grounded her in space and time. “Hi,” she said.
“Door locked?” he asked. Sleep transformed his normally low voice to the resting purr of a motorcycle engine.
“Yes.”
He rolled toward her, onto his back, revealing his torso. His body was built to go the distance, not bench-press a car, so he carried very little extra muscle, and almost no body fat. “Keep going,” he said.
So she did, primly kneeling beside him while she lifted the elastic waistband clear of his erection, working the cotton down to his upper thighs. His shaft, thick and blood-hot, strained to his hipbones. She stroked him slowly while his hand wandered down the length of her spine to her hip, and back up again. She kept her touch light until his hand, on a return trip to her nape, pressed ever so gently to urge her forward. Flashing him a quick smile, she bent and licked the salty fluid from the tip, then took him in her mouth.
The angle was awkward, preventing her from taking him deeply, but she compensated with a firm stroke in time with her shallow bobs. Heat simmered between her thighs when his breathing hitched into a low, rough rasp. She tongued over the head, used her hand to spread saliva down the shaft. He was stone-hard in her mouth, his grip on her hip almost painfully tight.
“C’mere,” he muttered when she pulled off to tease him.
He helped her get her panties off, then they shifted to give her room to straddle his shoulders. He ran his hands up her back to urge her forward, then grasped her hips and pulled her slick folds to his mouth. Even with the awkward angle his tongue quickly found her clit; he made a soft, rough, satisfied sound when she trembled in his grasp.
“God, Daniel,” she gasped, arching at the confident touch.
A lift of his hips reminded her of her role in this stolen, silent moment. She sucked the first couple of inches of his shaft into her mouth and followed his pace, far too slow for her liking. She curled her hand under his heavy thigh, pulled his legs further apart, and stroked the tender skin there, prompting him to lift his hips. Only her hand around the base of his cock kept him from sliding deep. She took advantage, sucked and squeezed and hummed, all at once, his answering groan muffled against her sex.
She began to subtly rock her hips, pushing her clit into his rapacious mouth. He flattened one palm against her lower spine and slid two fingers into her, then crooked them against the bundle of nerves inside. She exhaled shakily around his cock, half gasping and half sobbing as her muscles quivered. Her own technique grew sloppy but he didn’t seem to care in the slightest, rocking his cock through the tight circle of her hand, into her mouth in time to her own movements.
She came in a series of pulsing thuds, her cries muffled against his hipbone. She collapsed beside him, her head by his knees, her feet tucked under the overstuffed pillows. He turned and kissed her calf, then made a soft, humming noise and moved his fingers up to the crux of her thighs. “You in nothing but your bra is very hot,” he said.
“Not awkward?” she asked with a smile.
“It’s like I’ve left something undone,” he said, and rolled onto his side. His big hand curved along her hip and ribs to stroke the place where silk and elastic met skin. “You know how I hate loose ends.”
“My bra is a loose end, and this,” she said, squeezing his erection, “isn’t?”
He nodded, his smile now lifting the corners of his mouth. “Looks like we have several loose ends. How much time do we have?”
“Enough time for you to see to me properly,” she replied.
“There’s never enough time for that,” he said, and crawled up her body, poised on hands and knees over her. “Never. You can’t get enough of me.”
It should sound arrogant, or teasing. Instead he sounded professorial, distant and factual, which shouldn’t be hot, but was. She stared up at him, wondering how he’d managed to put his finger directly on the heart of the matter, wondering if he got the length and breadth of the truth he’d just brought out into the light. She couldn’t get enough of anything, and some days, she’d give her heart to be satisfied.
“It turns me on when you use that voice,” she said lightly.
“What voice?”
“That posh, distant voice. Like you’re untouchable.”
“I can work with that,” he said. “Hands to yourself, miss.”
She lay underneath him, let him draw desire up from the depths of her body to the surface of her skin, using only his mouth. He licked around the edges of her bra, shifted the straps from her shoulders to her upper arms with his teeth, leaving hot trails from the brush of stubble and skin. He kissed only what was exposed, leaving what lay hidden, the most sensitive flesh kept secret. By the time he set his mouth to her nipple through the silk covering it, the nub was taut and aching; by the time he left it to kiss along the dip of fabric, across her sternum, to her other nipple, the silk was saturated with his saliva and she could feel her sex grow heavy with longing. She writhed on the bed, her knees pushing against his until he obliging let her spread her legs, coming back to kneel between them.
That was better, until it was worse, because he gave her nothing, no pressure to grind against, nothing except his talented mouth on her nipples, and emptiness inside.
The doorbell rang. She stiffened, surfacing from the hot, edgy ache.
“Not our doorbell,” Daniel said. He nudged her head back, exposing her throat to his mouth.
The front door opened; Tilda heard her mother’s voice in conversation with someone. Then the door closed again, a car door slammed in the street outside.
“Who could that be?”
“Stop thinking about who’s at the door and start thinking about this,” he said. He captured her nipple between his teeth, pressure and hot breath against silk a tease when she wanted no barriers at all between his mouth and her skin. “I’m not going to make love to you until I take this off.”
She moaned and undulated under him, lifting her hips as she skated her hands down his ribs to his cock. The bare, thick shaft, so close to where she wanted it, so maddeningly out of reach. She flattened her palms on his bottom pulling and lifting at the same time.
“Hands to yourself, please,” he said again, rough amusement in his voice.
An expectant knock came from the rear of the town house. Another door opened, and this time the voices were louder, directly underneath them. A short conversation from which words like
oven
and
plates
rose through Tilda’s heated mind like bubbles in a sauce, then a pause.
“Tilda?”
She froze. Daniel lifted his head and looked at the door.
“Tilda, darling! The chef’s here!”
“Fuck,” Daniel said, with feeling. He leaned forward and rested his forehead on hers. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He almost never swore. Tilda giggled, the sound stopped by his mouth claiming hers.
“Tilda!”
She turned her head to the side. “Yes, Mum!” she shouted back. Daniel winced and leaned away.
“The chef’s here. Come down for a drink. When you’re ready,” she added as an afterthought.
“We’re just getting in the shower now,” Tilda called.
Daniel sat back on his heels and scrubbed his hands across his face. His erection jutted hard and flushed between his legs.
“A quickie,” she whispered, and reached for him.
“I’m not wasting that build,” he said. “I like the idea of sitting through dinner knowing you’re slick and ready for me.”
A slow smile spread across her face, because the idea appealed to her, too. “Fine,” she said archly. Then she straddled his hips and engulfed his cock, giving him three sultry thrusts before lifting herself off again. “Oops,” she said. His hands tightened at her waist; he groaned, but let her go.
She left her bra on while she cleaned her teeth and the water warmed, knowing he was watching her from his sprawl on the bed. The hot water streamed over her reddened nipples, prolonging the ebbing tide of arousal. Daniel’s electric razor whirred in the background as she washed and rinsed and shaved her legs. “Trade me,” she said.
When she opened the frosted glass door he was waiting with an open towel, and wrapped it around her before taking her place in the shower. She dried her hair, spritzed in a bit of shine and hold, then stepped into clean knickers and bra, then her wrap dress in shimmering gold silk, applied her makeup, darker around her eyes, a light gloss on her mouth. By the time she’d finished, Daniel had stepped out, dried off, and knotted the towel around his waist.
She watched him in the mirror as he shaved, the drops of water clinging to his cropped hair. He met her gaze. “You look like a bride should look,” he said, and scraped away more stubble.
She tilted her head and studied herself while he finished and patted his jaw dry. To her eyes she neither looked, nor felt different than she had earlier in the month. “Do I?”
His hands drew up from her shoulders to lie along her jaw. His index finger gently touched her mouth. “Thoroughly kissed,” he said, “and eager for more.”
In the time it took her to thread a pair of gold hoops through her ears, fasten her watch around her wrist, and straighten the covers on the bed, Daniel was dressed in dark brown trousers, a blue Oxford, and a jacket. He helped her throw the errant pillows back on the bed, and smiled when she rolled her eyes.
“It’s a boudoir.”
“A marriage bower,” he agreed.
“Imagine the same thing in lurid red satin,” she said.
“A saloon girl’s room,” he said, so she was laughing when she walked down the stairs to find her mother holding open the front door to Andrew.
H
er laugh didn’t pause. Like a jetliner, always in motion, the sound seemed to lift her off her feet and carry her down the remaining steps and across the foyer to the door. “Hello, Andrew,” she said, and presented her cheek for a kiss. “It’s been ages.”
“Over a decade, I believe,” he said after they switched sides. He gave her hand a familiar squeeze she did not return.
“Andrew, this is my husband, Daniel Logan. Daniel, Andrew Everett-Dunn. He’s a friend of Mum’s.”
“Nice to meet you,” Daniel said.
“I’m a friend of the family, really. I’ve known Tilda since she was in school,” Andrew said, shifting a silver-wrapped box to his left hand to shake Daniel’s. “Welcome to London.”
Her mother closed the door. “Can I get anyone a drink?”
“Love one,” Andrew said, still holding on to the gift. “Scotch, neat.”
“Daniel?”
“Sounds great,” he said.
“Tilda, darling?”
“White wine for me,” she said, and followed her mother to the drinks cabinet. “Mum, we said no gifts,” Tilda said quietly.
“I know, darling, but what can you do? People couldn’t show up without one. I thought we’d open them all together, darling, so Daniel feels more comfortable. That’s how it’s done in America, right?” The chef appeared with another bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and topped off her mother’s glass. “You’ve been away for so long, and of course one must celebrate one’s only daughter’s wedding. It’s such a surprise, too. These days so many people choose not to get married. Are you pregnant?”
“No, Mum,” she said. “I’m not pregnant.”
When they were all assembled in the reception room, they were a small but very prestigious group. Her mother; Andrew, who was now on faculty at Jesus College, Oxford; her long-standing research assistant after Andrew; Jessica, an archaeologist working in London; a writer for the
Guardian
; a novelist; her mother’s current editor; her mother’s prior editor; and her agent. They were evenly matched between men and women. The maid hired for the evening brought out trays of hors d’oeuvres. Daniel sat beside Tilda while she opened the presents: a lovely antique Tiffany silver picture frame, a pretty Wedgewood plate, a cheese board and knife. She peeked at a card written in her mother’s angular, sweeping hand, and then lifted the top to find folded paper. Legal size, standard printer. She unfolded it and began reading.
It was the deed to her town house, the mortgage paid off by her mother, the property deeded to her. Daniel nudged her shoulder. “What is it?”
“Mum’s given us the town house,” she said.
A low murmur rippled through the room. “I bought it during a downturn,” her mother said. “I expected to spend more time in America, and thought it would serve as a base, but New York is your home now, darling.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mum,” she said, and leaned over to kiss her mother’s cheek. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Elizabeth,” Daniel said.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
One last gift remained. A shiver chased across her nape when she picked it up, looked at the card, and saw Andrew’s casually elegant scrawl, handwriting she knew as well as she knew her own. She unwrapped the box and lifted the lid to reveal a stunning Baccarat paperweight with a lotus flower inside the dome.
Her mother’s face froze in a parody of a smile.
“It’s beautiful,” Tilda managed, turning it from side to side. The handiwork was exquisite, the flower suspended in the glass dome, the clear ground giving the sensation of weightlessness.
Daniel cupped his hand under hers and turned the paperweight to examine it more closely. “Beautiful,” he echoed. “It will look really nice on your desk.”
“Exactly what I thought. It seemed appropriate,” Andrew said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, a little smile on his face. “For your business, which, I hear, is on the verge of taking off.”
She looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”
—
After she opened the last present, little conversation groups formed while Tilda arranged the gifts on the drinks cabinet. She needed a moment to collect herself. She refilled her glass of wine, brushed the back of her hand over her forehead, and exhaled slowly. Dinner, then perhaps more conversation afterward, then everyone would leave and she could just sit down—
“Surely you don’t wear his ring.”
Andrew stood at her shoulder, his Scotch in his hand, smiling that familiar half smile that seemed to draw a curtain between them and the rest of the room. She straightened her shoulders and faced him. “I do. As you see.”
His gaze flicked over her. “Marriage hasn’t ruined you.”
She sipped her wine and watched Daniel’s conversation with the archaeologist, Daniel nodding and listening, the archaeologist gesturing expansively. “Pardon?”
“You’ve not transformed into a dull matron.”
“I’m twenty-eight. Give me a few years and see what happens,” she said, but even as she spoke, she couldn’t imagine herself celebrating a five-year anniversary.
“I can imagine you with a babe at your breast,” he mused, his voice a baritone rumble under the lighter conversation notes in the room. On the surface his voice was very similar to Daniel’s, but while Daniel’s tended toward a relatively even tone, Andrew’s was pliable, serpentine. Daniel spoke in a rough cat’s purr. Andrew’s voice slithered.
Her mother’s laugh tinkled down the scale, intruding into her thoughts. “Don’t,” she said.
He smiled. “Ten years and you’re still the same. Impulsive. Burning bright,” he said. His gaze lingered a moment too long on her mouth and throat, as if he could see the sex flush drawn to the surface of her skin by Daniel’s fingertips. The memory of Daniel swirled together with the scent of Daniel’s cologne, and her nipples tightened. “Does he know that about you?” Andrew asked, nodding at Daniel.
She sipped her wine and looked Andrew straight in the eye. “You shouldn’t have,” she said with a glance at the paperweight.
His gaze slid away for a split second. “Do you like it?”
“It’s exquisite,” she said. “Antique Baccarat. Where did you find it?” Knowing Andrew, it had been lying around the family pile since Baccarat manufactured it in the nineteenth century. But the green leaves and pink lotus flower hovering in the glass were entirely too coincidental.
“Picked it up at a church jumble sale in some village near Oxford,” he said carelessly, too carelessly for the emotion to be real, although the story probably was. She knew him as well as he knew her, something he seemed not to understand.
“It’s worth several thousand pounds,” she said. “You really shouldn’t have.”
He shrugged away the value. “I rather liked the thought of something I gave you sitting on your desk,” he said, trying for arch, not quite achieving it.
“You always were afraid of being forgotten,” she said.
“While you were afraid of being ignored,” he replied. “Have you forgotten me?”
Four sentences, less than five seconds, and the razor’s edge of what lay between them hovered over her composure. She swallowed a larger sip of wine than she should have. “Long ago, Andrew. Long ago. As I should have,” she said with a glance at his left hand. “You’re not wearing your ring?”
He followed her glance to his hand, then slid it into his pocket of his Savile Row suit. “Milla and I have an understanding.”
“I gathered as much,” she said with a look at the paperweight. “Excuse me,” she said.
—
The dinner tasted like sawdust to Tilda, but the rest of the room assured her mother it was delicious, seven courses with a palate-cleansing sorbet in between, served by the chef her mother hired. She and Daniel were seated next to each other in the center of the table draped in cream linen. Her mother sat at the head, with Rupert Bosworth-Jones, her agent, at the foot, an arrangement he rather wittily compared to the dynamics of their long-term relationship, which made everyone laugh. The chef placed plates in front of each person, then explained the ingredients and method of preparation, and withdrew.
Elizabeth brought everyone in the room up to speed on the current battle in Parliament to regulate the fisheries industry. When she paused to draw breath, Rupert cut in.
“Daniel,” he said, “I’m afraid I missed this over cocktails, but what do you do?”
“I’m with the FBI,” Daniel said.
“Ah,” Rupert said. “And how did you meet our fair Tilda?”
“On a ledge dangling her feet twenty-two stories over Park Avenue South,” Daniel said, prompting laughter.
“That’s our fair Tilda,” her mother said when the laughter subsided. “A fully developed flair for the dramatic.”
“And you arrested her, then saw the error of your ways and saved her from an uncomfortable night in jail. In gratitude she offered to take you to dinner?”
“No, I sat down next to her on the ledge and asked her out. Any woman willing to take that kind of risk was a woman I wanted to meet.”
More laughter. Tilda cut a tiny piece off her broiled salmon in lemon, tarragon, and garlic, let Daniel charm everyone, and did not look at Andrew.
“I hardly think that’s the correct protocol for finding a woman one stiff breeze from falling to her death,” Andrew said.
“That specific situation isn’t covered in the manual,” Daniel said. “And it got her off the ledge. Win-win.”
She didn’t need to glance up to see Andrew and Daniel exchanging looks.
“I knew where the real risk lay,” she said languidly, flicking Daniel a look under her lashes. The words cut through the tension, prompting another, more polite round of laughs.
“Tilda, I understand you’ve other business in London,” the agent said.
“I’m in talks with Quality Group to open boutiques in London and Tokyo as well as kiosks in their shops in airports in Europe and Asia,” she said. At
Tokyo
Andrew flicked a glance her way but went back to his salad.
A murmur of interest rippled through the guests. “Oh, well done,” the archaeologist said.
“Are multinational corporations really relevant to the future?” her mother asked.
“This is post-geographic,” Tilda said. “The concept of individuals and commodities tied to specific nations or economic alliances no longer fits the marketplace, hence the airport locations.”
“But London? And Tokyo?”
“Sophisticated diverse cities with their own brand,” Tilda said. “Transportation hubs. We’ll also have a presence at Kennedy.”
“LaGuardia certainly wouldn’t fit your brand,” Rupert said. “I’ve never flown through a first-world airport that feels more like a third-world government office. One expects to see goats herded through the terminal in exchange for tickets.”
“I’ve always loved beautiful stationery,” one of the writers said when the laughter died. “There’s nothing quite like the experience of pen and paper. It’s the pen that makes it, the sensation of the ink flowing into the fibers, of ideas coming clear where before there was nothing. It’s such an expression of the individual.”
She made a mental note to send the woman a box of really good notecards. “Of course, electronic communication dominates in the modern world. As well it should for simple things like making an appointment or arranging to meet a friend for a movie. But one can make art in the moments that remain, the moments that really matter.”
“But really, the ideas are the ultimate expression of the individual,” her mother said. “The medium in which they’re communicated is far less relevant. Blank paper and ink is merely a tool to be used by the individual to create her own world.”
“The medium of paper and ink and art becomes part of the message,” Tilda said. “It conveys something to the recipient, that care was taken with every step of the process. It suggests that the individual takes as much care with her life.”
“Well said, Matilda.” Andrew lifted his glass in her direction. Tilda didn’t need to look at her mother to know they wore the same expression.
“Well,” the archaeologist mused after an awkward pause, “did anyone else see the latest
Who Do You Think You Are?
It’s an historian’s guilty pleasure, I confess.”
“I’m always astonished people can lose track of their history so thoroughly,” Andrew said. “Imagine not knowing one’s grandfather stood with Richard II, or one’s descended from the Tudors on one’s mother’s side.”
“I can imagine that quite easily,” Daniel said. “My family doesn’t know our history beyond great-grandparents.”
“You must admit that history in America is dipping a toe in a paddling pool. But . . . Logan . . . immigration from Ireland after the famine?”
Tilda glared at Andrew, and got a ghost of a wink in return.
“That’s right,” Daniel said, giving no sign he was aware of the subtle slight in the question.
“You know,” the archaeologist said, “that show is a perfect example of the medium influencing the message. The visual impact of the individuals seeing their history unfold, in letters or diaries, or on beaches, adds such verisimilitude to the revelation, as if the human impact makes the story more real.”
“The medium is the message,” Rupert offered from the other end of the table. “Marshall McLuhan. The method of delivering the ideas shapes the ideas themselves, at the very least, their perception and reception. As anyone who’s attempted to formulate a thoughtful argument whilst appearing on a panel show will note.”
“Books were the most permanent form of communication,” the archaeologist said. “Electronic information could be lost forever, until endless backups made it impossible to lose anything, including moments we would love to forget. A rant in an airport—”
“Or an unfortunate tweet—”
“Our lives are constantly archived and on display. Somehow the most ephemeral of mediums has become the most permanent.”
“And yet we still appreciate a thank-you card on heavy paper, a handwritten note over a grammatical nightmare of a text. I received one from a student last term in which the entire content of the text consisted of the letters
t
and
u
. It feels rather hopeless to expect one’s students to construct an argument engaging ideas ranging the length and breadth of recorded human history when they can’t be bothered to properly capitalize and punctuate their texts.”