Masque of the Black Tulip pc-2

by Lauren Willig

  "This is not about the bloody spy," bit out Miles. Plop! A stone landed with unnecessary force in the murky waters.

  Henrietta marched militantly up to him, slippers crunching on the graveled ground, and poked him in the shoulder. Hard. "You were hoping the spy would have to pass through here on the way to the house, weren't you?"

  "This." Splish. "Is not." Plop. "About." Splash. "The spy."

  Miles brushed his hands off against his breeches. Henrietta grabbed him by the arm before he could sweep up another batch of projectiles, forcing him to face her.

  "Am I that repugnant to you that you can't stand the sight of me?"

  "Repugnant." Miles eyed her incredulously, his jaw hanging slightly open. "Oh, that's rich. Repugnant!"

  Henrietta felt the full force of his mockery, and her face contorted with hurt. "You needn't belabor the point," she snapped.

  "Do you know what you've been doing to me?" demanded Miles.

  "Me? To you! Ha!" exclaimed Henrietta articulately. As repartee, it wasn't her finest hour, but she was too furious to attempt words of more than one syllable.

  "Yes, you! Running around in my dreams, singing like that — I can't think. I can't sleep. I can't look my best friend in the eye. It's been sheer hell!"

  "Is that my fault?" exclaimed Henrietta. "You're the one who kissed me and then didn't bother to — wait. Your dreams? You've been dreaming about me?"

  Miles backed away, looking horrified. "Never mind. Forget I said that."

  Henrietta took a dangerous step forward. "Oh, no. There are no 'never minds.' You're not getting off that easily this time."

  "Damn," said Miles feelingly. "Fine." He took a step forward. "You want to know the truth? I don't find you repugnant." Another step. "If you must know, I find you the very opposite of repugnant." Another. "It's been all I can do to keep my hands bloody off you the past two days."

  One more step and Miles was so close to her that her breath stirred the stiff folds of his cravat. Henrietta cravenly sidled backwards, but the hedge was at her back, pricking her through the thin muslin of her dress, blocking retreat.

  "In fact" — Miles's hands closed around her shoulders as his head plummeted towards her — "you have been driving me absolutely bloody mad!"

  With a desperate sideways movement, Henrietta wrenched herself from his grasp, leaving Miles to stumble headlong into the hedge.

  "Oh, no," she panted. "I'm not playing that game again."

  Miles's eyes were glazed and his breath rasped in his throat. "Game?" he forced out.

  "Yes, game!" snapped Henrietta, tears of rage and frustration gathering in her hazel eyes. "The game where you kiss me and then run off and hide from me for a whole blasted week! It's — I just can't — if you're just looking for a bit of fun, you're going to have to find it somewhere else."

  Gathering her skirts in her hand, she whirled in the direction of the house, only to be jerked abruptly short as Miles grabbed her by the elbow.

  "That's not what I want!" Miles burst out, swinging her around to face him.

  "Then what do you want?" demanded Henrietta.

  "You, damn it!"

  The words hung there in the air between them.

  Each stared at the other, Miles's brown eyes locked with Henrietta's hazel, both frozen as still as Lot's wife's peering back into a forbidden land.

  Henrietta's heart surged with frenetic joy, before hiccupping to an abrupt stop, and swinging wildly back in the opposite direction. Of all the ambiguous statements! What exactly did he want? And if he wanted her, why on earth had he been hiding from her? An odd sort of wanting that drove the pursuer away from the object of desire!

  Henrietta waved her hands in the air in frustration. "What exactly is that supposed to mean?"

  "Uh…" Funny, it had seemed quite clear to him when he uttered it, but when forced to encapsulate the sense of it, Miles couldn't find any appropriate words. Somehow, he didn't think "I want to fling you down among the rosebushes and have my wicked way with you" would necessarily appease Hen's wrath. That was the problem with women; they always insisted on verbalizing everything. "Um…"

  Fortunately, Henrietta was still in full rant, so Miles was spared replying. "And why," she demanded, "have you been behaving like such an idiot?"

  Miles chose not to dispute the appellation, primarily because he agreed to it. In fact, he knew it was the height of idiocy to linger in the garden when what he ought to do was flee straight back to the safety of London, without passing the house, without collecting his belongings. To remain… the word "idiot" didn't even begin to encompass it.

  As much for himself as for her, Miles said forcefully, "You are my best friend's sister."

  Henrietta took a very deep breath. Miles struggled nobly to keep his eyes fixed above her bodice. It was a cause doomed to failure from its very inception.

  Henrietta's chest heaved to a stop, followed by an expectant silence.

  "What?" asked Miles.

  "I fail to see what that has to do with anything," repeated Henrietta through gritted teeth. Speaking through gritted teeth involved very little passage of air. Sanity — or some modicum thereof — returned to Miles, along with the capacity for speech.

  Miles ran his hands through his hair till it stood up like porcupine quills. "Do you know how many kinds of betrayal that would be? Forget Richard, even. Your parents raised me! And how do I repay them? By seducing their daughter."

  Henrietta swallowed painfully. "Is that all I am to you? Someone else's sister? Someone else's daughter?"

  Of its own volition, Miles's right hand rose to cup her face, gently tilting it back to face him.

  "Don't you know better than that, Hen?"

  Slowly, she shook her head. "No." Her voice broke, half-laugh, half-sob. "I don't know anything right now."

  "Funny," Miles whispered achingly, his warm breath feathering across her lips. "Neither do I."

  With infinite gentleness, his lips brushed hers. His hands slid softly into her hair, stroking her temples, easing away aches she hadn't realized she had. Letting her eyes drift closed, Henrietta leaned into the kiss, abandoning herself to the dreamlike unreality of it all. Henrietta's hands slid up to Miles's shoulders, feeling the warmth of his body through the fine wool of his coat as warmth of an entirely different kind spread through her. Around them, the garden was rich with the scent of early June roses, as lush and heavy as an old tapestry. It seemed as though the wind moved more delicately through the trees, and even the cranky old gentleman frog who lived in the pond gentled his croaking complaint. The whole world slowed and drifted in a measureless minuet.

  With a movement as soft as a sigh, Miles's lips slid away from hers. They remained suspended in time, Miles's lips a whisper above hers, her hands on his shoulders, his fingers still threaded in her hair. Miles smoothed his thumbs along her cheekbones, tracing the well-beloved contours of her face.

  "I missed you," Henrietta whispered.

  Miles pulled her tightly against him, rubbing his face in her hair. "Me too."

  "Then why did you hide from me all week?" asked Henrietta into his shoulder.

  For the life of him, Miles was having a very hard time remembering; the feel of Henrietta's body pressed against his was having a decidedly numbing effect on his brain, even as it brought other bits of his anatomy into acute relief. He dredged up the reason as if from a lifetime ago.

  "Because I was afraid I'd do this," he said, nuzzling back her hair, and running his tongue along the rim of her ear. He felt Henrietta shiver in his arms and stilled, giving her a space to protest, to walk away.

  Henrietta tilted her chin, leaving her throat bare for Miles's questing lips. "I don't understand," she said softly, "why that was cause for hiding."

  "Right now," admitted Miles, "neither can I."

  His lips followed the delicate curve of Henrietta's jaw, the rounded chin that looked so demure in repose but could be so stubborn in reality, the elegant line of her throat, pausi
ng to blow gently at the delicate hairs that curled at the base of her neck, where her hair had been swept up and away from her face.

  Henrietta didn't gasp; a gasp would have marred the dreamlike quality of the moment, like a leaf floating on a stream in a summer's day, utterly unmoored from responsibility, content to simply drift in the golden heat of the sun. But her fingers curled around Miles's shoulders as she marveled at the amazing sensations to be had from so prosaic an item as a neck. Miles's kisses she had been prepared for — well, as much as one could be prepared for something that made one's head spin like too much claret — there were novels and paintings and whispered discussions in the ladies' retiring room. But no one had ever told her about this. Necks were simply something on which to hang jewelry, to set off with a curl or a flounce; they were not supposed to send quivers of pleasure through one's entire body.

  In the spirit of experimentation, Henrietta locked her arms tighter around Miles's neck, stood on her tiptoes, and applied her lips to the underside of his chin — she had been aiming for the spot just at the parting of collar and cravat, but the combination of dizziness and half-closed eyes had a negative impact on her aim. His skin smelled of exotic aftershave, and a fascinating hint of stubble, so fair as to be almost invisible to the eye, grazed her lips.

  Miles's reaction was instantaneous, if not quite what Henrietta had hoped for. Recoiling backwards, he blinked several times, shook his head like a wet dog, and held Henrietta away from him.

  "Did I do something wrong?" asked Henrietta huskily.

  Miles's eyes had a distinctly wild cast, and his hair was even more disarranged than usual. Henrietta gave in to the impulse to smooth a lock back. Miles shied like a nervous horse. "Hell, no — er, I mean, no! That is, oh blast it, Hen — "

  Since he didn't seem to have anything particularly incisive to say, Henrietta decided to put an end to the conversation by the simple expedient of kissing him again. Miles's arms closed around her with enough force to knock any remaining air out of her lungs, but breathing really seemed quite a minor consideration under the circumstances. Who needed to breathe, anyhow? Lips were much more interesting, especially when they were Miles's lips, and they were doing such clever things to the sensitive hollow next to her collarbone. Henrietta hadn't realized before that the hollow was a sensitive one, but she was quite sure she would remember in the future. Miles's lips drifted even lower, following a slow path along her collarbone, down to the hollow between her breasts, and Henrietta stopped thinking in full sentences altogether, or even recognizable words.

  Miles was dimly aware that his brain had ceased working in concert with his body several moments since, but the worst of it was that he had ceased to care. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew there was a very valid reason that he wasn't supposed to be undressing Henrietta, but whatever insubstantial objection his conscious mind might urge upon him dissipated beside the far-more-compelling reality of Henrietta herself, warm and glowing in his arms, a thousand forbidden dreams made flesh.

  And what attractive flesh it was.

  Miles made one last effort to restrain his baser desires, one last effort to push Hen away into the little box in his head marked "best friend, sister of." But her hair whispered wantonly against his arm, and her lips were swollen with kisses — his kisses, thought Miles, with a fierce surge of pos-sessiveness. His, his, his. All his, from the long lashes that curved against her cheeks to the hint of a dimple that only appeared when she smiled or frowned very deeply, to the absolutely irresistible expanse of bosom revealed in agonizing detail by her position reclining against his arm.

  Even so, Miles might — it wasn't likely, but he might — have set her to her feet, tucked back her hair, and given them both a firm talking to, if, at that very moment, Henrietta hadn't sighed. It was just a little sigh, hardly louder than the brush of silk against skin, but it carried with it, an entire world of amorous innuendo. So might Heloise have sighed in the arms of Abelard or Juliet for her Romeo, begging night to gallop apace and veil their pleasures, Miles was undone.

  So was Henrietta's bodice. One gentle pull drew the fabric down to reveal the rosy aureoles, blushing above their fine veil of silk. Miles ran his tongue around first one, then the other, as Henrietta arched in his arms and dug her nails into his back.

  He eased the fabric the rest of the way, enjoying the way Henrietta squirmed in his arms as the silk brushed over her nipples. Miles was just lowering his head to replace the fabric with his mouth, when a voice with an edge like cut glass, a voice from very far away, cut through his consciousness.

  "What in the hell is going on here?"

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  If there were formal gardens at Donwell Abbey, we weren't in them. Clutching my borrowed pashmina around my shoulders, I stumbled along after Colin through a landscape pitted with potholes and littered with killer twigs. The bulk of the house loomed behind us, craggy and featureless in the dark night. Just the equivalent of a city block away, the noises, voices, and lights from the front of the house were completely obliterated, leaving only a landscape that would not have come amiss in a Bronte novel, or one of the wilder creations of Mary Shelley.

  We were crossing something that I had no doubt Joan would describe as "the park," conjuring up images of stately oaks and Little Lord Fauntleroy. At the moment, I would have happily traded all the grandeur of the park for the neon grime of Oxford Street, with loud music blasting out of storefronts, chattering pedestrians bustling past, and, most importantly, firm pavement beneath my feet. My shoes, designed for city wear, did not react well to the ground, softened by yesterday's rain and today's thaw. They sank.

  So much for a romantic stroll in the garden by moonlight.

  Even the moonlight wasn't obliging. Forget the trope of the moon as chaste goddess. A hopeless flirt, she was too busy playing peek-a-boo with the clouds to attend to illuminating the landscape. Instead of the scent of flowers, we were surrounded by the forlorn tang of November, compounded of decaying leaves and damp earth. A graveyard sort of smell. I cut that thought off before it could burgeon into the territory of Grade B horror movies, complete with zombie hands poking through the crumbling earth and vampires on the lookout for a midnight snack.

  It was all Henrietta's and Miles's fault, I ruminated darkly as I pried my heel out of the mud and hopped after Colin. I had been forced to leave off reading just as Henrietta and Miles kissed in the moon-silvered garden, and had dressed for Joan's party pursued by hopelessly romantic images of trellises and patterned garden paths, the song of the nightingale and the sigh of the gentle summer breeze. If the characters in that perfumed garden tended to assume features other than those of Henrietta and Miles… who was to know but me and the mirror in Colin's guest bedroom?

  I had neglected to take into account that that had been June and this was November.

  And then there was the fact that Miles had been rather madly attracted to Henrietta, while Colin… I snuck a glance at the shadowy figure next to me. I don't know why I even bothered with the sneaking; there was no way he could make out my expression any more than I could discern his, even if he were one of those annoying people with a cat's ability to see in the dark. Both his eyes and his flashlight were trained firmly forward, not at me.

  He hadn't said anything since that comment about chaperonage.

  Of course, neither had I, but that was immaterial.

  It wasn't that the silence was uncomfortable. Quite the contrary. It was the peaceful sort of silence that attends long acquaintance, the comfort that comes of knowing you don't need to say anything at all. And that very lack of discomfort made me profoundly uncomfortable.

  I pinned down that thought, and followed it, writhing and slippery, to its source. It was the sham of instant coupledom. That was the problem. That indefinable aura of being with someone when you know you're not. It's something that anyone who's been single for a time will recognize, the pretense of intimacy that comes of being the only two singles at a
couple-y dinner party, or, in this case, sharing a house for a weekend. It's an intensely seductive illusion — but only an illusion.

  I wondered if Colin had picked up on that, too; if he had been as besieged with "So… you and that American girl?" as I had with "So… you and Colin?" The arriving together; the knowledge that we'd be leaving together; the little checking-up glances across the room, all lending themselves to the fiction of togetherness.

  A fiction, I reminded myself, maintained for Joan's benefit. Was he trying to warn me off, remind me that I was only a guest under sufferance? I cast my mind anxiously back over the day, totting up points on both sides of the ledger. The walk in the garden could just have been to get me away from the tower. In fact, Colin had showed no interest in accompanying me anywhere until I started to lurk around potentially actionable bits of his property. I winced at the memory of that terse note on the kitchen table. "Out." That leant itself so well to other curt phrases, such as "stay out" and "keep away."

  As for agreeing to walk with me to the cloisters… I grimaced, as the obvious explanation hit me. Of course. Joan. It wasn't that he wanted to stroll through the moonlight — or what would have been moonlight if the moon had been a little more cooperative — with me. He just needed a pretext to flee his hostess's predatory grasp, and I had provided him with an ideal excuse. The visiting historian (in my mind's eye, I sprouted tweeds, brogues, and bifocals) needed to be taken to see local objects of historical interest. There was no other type of interest involved.

  The white wine I had drunk to keep the vicar company tasted sour on my tongue.

  Right. I gathered the tattered shreds of my ego around myself, even though they afforded even less shelter for my lacerated pride than Serena's pashmina did for my frozen arms. Well, I wasn't here to flirt with him, either. So there.

  I was beginning to regret the whole ill-conceived adventure. I should have behaved like a good little academic, and stayed back at the house, hunched over a table full of documents in the meager light of the desk lamp, rather than letting myself be drawn in by the echoes of long-dead romances and a strong dose of wishful thinking.