The Writer and the Rake

by Shehanne Moore

  “I warn you they’re somewhat different.”

  “Nudes in other words are they?”

  It was hard to tell what he was thinking. Where other people used words, he used stares. It probably explained the fact she’d gone from sheer idiocy to certifiable.

  A slosh as he refilled his glass. “Brittany Carter, brittle as porcelain, deadlier than shattered glass. An irresistible combination. Maybe I should paint that?”

  The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up, but then he stood beside her chair. She shrugged.

  “You know, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then that makes two of us. So maybe we should just dispense with the talking. I did send the servants away after all so we could be alone, away from that stuffy formality. You’ve no idea how much I’ve always loathed it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,”

  “But you want to inherit Killaine House. If that’s not stuffy informality, I don’t know—”

  His mouth brushed her hair and she nearly jumped out the chair. Was she calm enough to do this, or could she plead a headache so as not to hurt his feelings? A headache could be construed as manipulative, if the Time Mutants were watching and that was what she was doing wrong though. As things stood she hadn’t done a single thing to instigate this. Nor could she afford to hang about. His thoughts might be the same as hers, that things had gotten a tiny baby bit out of hand. Or maybe he was just annoyed she wouldn’t tell him things? Sensed she was edgy? Whatever, it was time to take control.

  She turned her head, met his mouth with hers, pulses beating beneath her skin. Fame. Success. Riches. Time Mutants. Kiss. Mort. That night on the dance floor with the spinning light, he’d said something about being related. To her. What if it was her and Mitchell Killgower? It meant one thing. She’d failed.

  Forget the electric charge of Mitchell Killgower’s lips, the provocative tang of his breath as it mixed with her own. The awareness of his body. A random wasn’t just safer. A random was probably what was meant. She wriggled her lips free, smiled.

  “Mitchell . . . Mitchell . . . what are you doing? This is the dining room.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem quite right. For one thing, we eat breakfast there. Well you do.”

  “So?”

  “Are you listening to me?” He wasn’t so she placed her palm on his chest. “Mitchell, I said . . . I said . . . At least, I think I said . . .”

  “I sent the stuffed trouts away.”

  “Will you stop kissing me?”

  The shove was harder than she intended but his voice was such a scorching rasp in her ear, it was harder than fighting someone off on a club floor. At least there were bouncers there. “I don’t want to end up pregnant. As it is, you can’t get along with the son you have. Please tell me you’re not the kind who—”

  “What?”

  “Can’t take no—”

  “Fine.”

  “For an answer. Get off. Now.”

  He straightened. “I’m not deaf, like you, Miss Carter. I can see I forgot myself. There’s no need to rub my nose in my failure.”

  The words crept up her spine, lodging between her shoulder blades. His voice came from caverns unknown to even the most distant traveller. As he looked at her, his eyes weren’t just distant outposts, they were unreachable stars, blurry blue ones. The words thudded into her brain. He needs saving from himself. Before she started feeling any kind of sorry for him, she should remember she couldn’t be the one to do that. Besides, how the hell could a man from whom power and arrogance rolled like fog off a river, need saving? The one who would need saving would be her if this continued.

  She lowered her gaze. Just think of the peace she could have here, alone, washing that quarter potato down with a large claret. It may have fallen on the floor it was probably still edible.

  “Your apology is accepted.”

  “Who says it was an apology?” He shrugged. “Especially when you’re not the first cock-tease I’ve known, and you won’t be the last.”

  “Me? Greater cheek has no—”

  “That’s as maybe.” The blue eyes skinned her. The worst thing was that he was always so cool. “Although you are certainly one thing.”

  “And what is that? Oh, please don’t spare yourself, or me. If you want to insult me, go right ahead. It will be riches coming from a man like you.”

  “Well, Miss Carter, a man like me has had you moaning in ecstasy in his bed.”

  “You think?”

  The wraith of a smile hovered on his lips. “If that’s the best you can do—”

  “It is.”

  “It’s unfair of me to stay here and take advantage. You won’t mind if I say goodnight?”

  The marble floor echoed with his hollow tread before she could say whether she minded or not. Now the door squeaked open, the door squeaked shut, she didn’t mind though, not the way he attempted to batter at her calm.

  She should pour herself a drink. She grasped the bottle. Blood red liquid spilled into the glass and she took a large mouthful. The seat by the fireplace was empty. She’d go sit there, drink the wine then go and kiss whoever the hell she was going to have to kiss to get back home since she was meant to do this dispassionately. The choice wasn’t exactly brilliant. She’d need a bloody drink. She rose, picked up the bottle. The thing to remember was she’d already cheated on him when she’d pulled that random guy.

  Examining her reflection in the walnut surface of the table, the cloud of shining chestnut hair wasn’t the only weight on her shoulders, though.

  His words. She’d had to stand up to them. She wasn’t a cock-tease.

  Brittle as porcelain, deadlier than shattered glass. These words now? That was one veil she couldn’t allow him to rip.

  Mitchell Killgower.

  Why the hell had she gone to the Swan yesterday? What Fleming had said had opened the tiniest chink in her armour.

  Mitchell Killgower.

  Sexy as hell. Difficult as . . . She set the glass down, picked it up, set it down.

  Was she completely, ragingly insane?

  She crossed the floor, opened the door. Maybe she was even ragingly, ragingly insane. This was the cavernous white hallway. Above her was the upstairs passageway, the one he’d dragged her along that first morning. Would she like to explain to herself why she felt the cool white of the unblemished marble banister beneath her palm?

  Brittle as porcelain, deadlier than shattered glass. Time to show him she wasn’t.

  Yes.

  An apology was in order. No more. No less.

  ~ ~ ~

  She threw the door open.

  “Mitchell . . .”

  Empty. The bed anyway. The easel? Nothing was blocking his bloody light, not even him. The brandy decanter? Untouched. The door to his dressing room was shut. Of course. How could she have thought he’d be sitting up in bed naked, smoking one of her cigarettes, which he’d probably stashed, just waiting for her to waltz in.

  “Mitchell . . .”

  Her footsteps echoed across the veins of candlelit marble. She grasped the handle. Only her hand froze. What if the door was locked? She’d look bloody stupid rattling it. What did she need to apologise for exactly? She was going to pull someone else. When she got back to her own time he’d have been dead for hundreds of years. Dead.

  Straightening, she turned the handle, threw the door open. “Mitchell.”

  He stood by the decanter, his back to her. When it came to body language, should she just say his hackles rose and he was far too much of a man to sigh, and leave it at that? At least he wasn’t lying on the couch. The one he’d slept on when he was married to Gabriella. The thought didn’t make i
t easier to do what she’d come to do. She just needed to stop thinking of how often Gabriella had probably told him to get off, much as Brittany had done downstairs and don her coldest mantle. She’d plenty time to. Brandy trickled as he poured himself a long, slow drink.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “I . . . I thought . . . Well no, no problem, actually, you left in such a hurry, I feared you had perhaps misunderstood me.”

  “What about?”

  His half turn was encouraging. But if she said, ‘you know perfectly well,’ that might lead to her having to prove it which would be in a different category from encouraging.

  “Oh, just . . . just this and that. So I just . . . well, I . . . I wanted to say . . . goodnight.”

  “So? You’ve said it.”

  She had. Brittle as porcelain, deadlier than shattered glass, or not, she’d made her apology. Difficult as he was, he’d accepted it. She could go now. She grasped her skirts, swung on her heel.

  “Close the door on your way out.”

  “You know, I’m tired of you telling me to close the door, especially when I came all the way up here—”

  “And I’m not just meaning that one.”

  “What?” She swung round. “You want me to go? Oh, the pigheadedness of those without a farthing to their name beggars belief.”

  While the thought of being flung out held no terrors, her jaw dropped. How could he prefer losing Killaine House to having her here? After what she’d done yesterday? Because she’d told him where to go at the dining table? What kind of fool was this? To let go of what he wanted most in life?

  “Maybe it does. It may also beggar me but I’m tired of you waltzing all over my sanctuary, Miss Carter.” He inclined his head, his eyes like cold crystal. “Now go.”

  “Me? Waltz?”

  To think she’d come up these stairs for nothing, leaving a quarter of a potato and a decanter full of wine she could have been enjoying. And once she’d had it, kissed a random servant, been home by now.

  She offered her coolest, vaguely amused stare. Maybe she had come here to apologise but why the hell should she? “I think you have me confused with one of your other floozies.”

  “Please don’t talk about yourself like that. Anyway you’re not the kind of woman it’s possible to confuse with anyone.”

  “While I should like very much to take that as a compliment—”

  “Who says it is?”

  “I came here in good faith to say I’m simply not used to men who can’t keep their hands to themselves at the dining table.”

  “And I’m not used to women like you.”

  Sebastian had once said that to her, after he’d flung a frying pan across the room at her in the middle of a heated exchange. He hadn’t looked so brutally handsome, or powerfully contained, this man’s trademarks, although he had been sober enough at the time to accuse her of something she wasn’t. Murder.

  Well, spray-painted, beaten into place, was the veneer she lived behind, a lacquered finish she knew. Her only regret was coming in here, abasing herself when she could have been arranging her next chat show appearance. She widened her eyes.

  “Obviously darling, because I’m one in a million. And if yesterday is anything to go by, we all know what you’re used to.”

  “Yesterday?” He swallowed a long satisfying slug of the brandy he was nursing. “What happened yesterday?”

  “You’ve forgotten? Well, do allow me to remind you. It’s the reason your own son thinks you need saving.”

  “Fleming said that to who? You?”

  “Well, let’s face it, who else has he got to say it to?”

  “He must have been desperate.”

  “Hmm.” She swallowed, as he poured another drink. Slowly, deliberately, without the temerity to even pretend to frown. She’d only to consider the blank wall of his face, a lock of coal black hair falling across his forehead, to know he wasn’t remotely fazed by her revelation. A man who wanted her out of here because she’d looked squint at him at supper would hardly be fazed by seeing his soul, along with his dirty laundry, displayed in the market. Fortunately she had expected it, or she’d be the one who was tearing her hair.

  “If it pleases you to think so?”

  “I think you’re the one it pleases, Brittany. The thing is you don’t want to believe everything he says. Fleming’s as fanciful as his mother was. In fact, a downright liar.”

  “Well, if he is, he’s certainly not the only one. But I suppose given the things Gabriella obviously told Christian about you, you’d want to believe she was fanciful, just as you’d want to believe Fleming is a liar, when he probably had your best interests to heart. It’s more than you do. Well, goodbye Mitchell.”

  It was time. He may be calmer than the surface of the moon, it wasn’t to say a 1765 equivalent of the frying pan wouldn’t clatter off the wall. She didn’t want to go home with a bloody great dent in her forehead.

  She was leaving here in the best way. Without a backwards glance. At him, his handsome face, or his unbridled cheek. In the years to come she would hate to think that any other reason than the need to apologise had drawn her up here. Especially when there had been one, or two, tiny baby seconds—she wouldn’t say it was more than that—when tiny, baby thoughts had sort of infiltrated her brain that way.

  She wheeled round. Now, which of the servants Christian had bestowed on them, excluding Dodson, would she pull?

  “Look, you were right downstairs. I see that now. I just should have seen it before.”

  “Me, right? Excuse me, Mitchell?” She darted her gaze to the side. “Did you just say something?”

  “Yes, I did. And I don’t just think you heard it perfectly, I think you know what it is, perfectly too. You’re as much a woman of the world as I’m a man.”

  Her face pulsed. It was joined by her brain as she turned round. Put aside the business that he had stated the obvious—she was always right. The brandy glass was still confidently in his hand. She refused to believe this was an apology, to take her barriers down, along with her knickers, which she wasn’t wearing. And yet . . .

  “Yes I do know what. And I’m not going back on it. So please don’t even think of doing the, for my behavior I do apologise bit, because this time I really will laugh my head off.”

  “Then I won’t. I’ll just leave it at that.”

  “Thank you.”

  Unlike him she kept her eyes on her goal, whereas he’d gone for broke again. When he did, when he stood in danger of being exposed, of having anyone get close to him, he backpedalled and obfuscated. Now she saw this, she could deal with it.

  It wouldn’t do to think he was being amenable because he liked her. She had her fame, success and riches to think of after all. He gestured towards her with the glass.

  “Except to say that would be a first, you laughing anything off.”

  “Mitchell, I thought you said you’d leave it that?”

  “I am.” The look he cast her was as hard to fathom as the bottom of the ocean. “I enjoyed the sex, Brittany.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “But I think we should leave it at that, seeing as we’re talking such things.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I respect your thinking and more than appreciate you don’t want to get pregnant. I don’t want that to happen either. I’m not throwing you out. Whatever I said about that, you can stay. I just think we made a mistake.”

  She had obviously. This was taking the obfuscating a little far. Her heroines now might believe that this was purely a play for her to say, ‘Oh please darling, I know you secretly want me and you need me to say I want you, to know you are adored. Please, let’s not let your lack of money stand in our way.’

  Her heroines might ra
ge about the cheek of some man refusing them, swipe his killer cheekbones with the palm of their hand. Think, oh here was another man letting them down. One who’d had his fill and now didn’t want to be seen for dust. Or just maybe they might think they’d stung him and made him feel like nothing, much as Gabriella must have done.

  She wasn’t her heroines. Where men were concerned she’d seen, done, it all. What was more she didn’t need him to get home.

  “Me too, Mitchell, seeing as you’re being so frank. So? From now on, do I have it in one, that you just want me to be your wife in name only?”

  Looking like that? The epitome of sensuous, powerful cool. She’d probably only to go to him, wind her arm around his waist to put an end to that little notion.

  “Careful now, Brittany, you’ll have me believing you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, it’s not a problem.”

  Because it wasn’t, she glided forward and wound her arm around the back of his neck. A mistake when the scent of him was an exotic perfume that enveloped her like lingering, sinuous smoke? No. A goodbye was what this was. His shoulders tightened, his mouth responding. Her heroines might feel the world standing on its orbit, themselves bestriding it like a spinning colossus. She just knew one thing. She had this and it was nice. Her body flooded with silky warmth where it pressed against his. Stay here and she could have a career as a femme fatale.

  “You see?” She drew back. “No problem, whatsoever. Good night, Mitchell.”

  If only the battery still worked on her phone. She’d never seen his eyes so hypnotized, his beautifully sculpted face, so still, the faintest sensuous quiver to his lower lip. The crime was to turn away.

  But she crossed the floor. Where she went now didn’t matter. Only where she went now, even femme fatales might find murder. They must, or her heart wouldn’t give that tiny baby dip—she wouldn’t say it was more. She had kissed random men before. She had kissed Mark when she was with Sebastian.