Chapter Nine

C HAPTER N INE

Now Christina was a lovely girl—pretty and shy. Lady Long-Nose showed Christina how to dance and ride, the proper etiquette for long official dinners, and how to make friends with the other girls in the court.

They became such good friends, in fact, that one day Christina whispered to Lady Long-Nose that she’d fallen in love with a man.…

—From Lady Long-Nose

She’d never spoken so boldly in her life.

Elspeth felt liquid warmth between her thighs as she watched Julian. It made her want to squirm. To press her fingers against herself.

He was like a statue, a grave, beautiful Apollo, a god of music and poetry, who also held his sibyl at Delphi jealously to his heart.

Or so the myths said.

But what if it was the other way around? What if the sybil, a mere mortal, drew the helpless god’s powers to her and made him writhe in ecstasy as she proclaimed the future?

Would that Apollo look like this just before he submitted to his oracle? Poised. Still. But almost quivering with strain?

She let her gaze wander back to his loins. She could see his member there, his penis, his cock, a solid ridge beneath the veiling cloth. Larger than she’d expected, but still frustratingly made indistinct by his clothes.

If she were to ask him, would he open his falls and let her see his naked flesh?

He jerked suddenly, as if awoken from a dream, and drew down the curtains of his face. “I must go. By your leave.”

But he didn’t wait for her permission. He simply left.

That she didn’t like.

Elspeth pushed the book off her lap and growled. He should’ve waited for her word. Her command. He’d been excited by their discussion, she could tell. Why then would he leave before anything more could come of it?

Freya had told her that the rules in the world outside the compound were very strict. That women were either “good” or “bad,” and the difference was based solely on whom she had sex with. For instance, a woman might have three husbands, which was “good,” but if she took an equal amount of lovers when unwed, that was “bad.”

Elspeth’s jaw had dropped when she’d first heard this nonsense. The Romans and Greeks had had similar rules, but to still be practicing them in this enlightened age seemed bizarre.

But if Julian believed in strict adherence to these rules, then perhaps he considered it “bad” to talk about sex with her—she wasn’t married to him, after all.

She scowled at the thought.

Stupid rules.

Stupid, pointless rules that left them both wanting.

Elspeth picked up the next book—a small copy of The Compleat Angler —really, why was this book so popular?—and began paging through it desultorily. Page after page of nearly illegible print. Obviously, this wasn’t one of the better editions.

Then suddenly the pages were filled with scrawls in the margins, top, bottom, left, and right. Sometimes the writing was over the printed words.

She turned the book and squinted.

… my brother-in-law Augustus is poisoning me.

Elspeth’s head jerked back in shock. This must be it, Julian’s mother’s notes. Who else would write about an Augustus? But Julian hadn’t mentioned his mother being poisoned, had he? She’d died of an illness, unless he was hiding the truth from her.

If he wasn’t… then he didn’t know how his mother had really died.

Elspeth bit her lip. What terrible information to give him. He already mourned his mother—how much more awful to realize she’d been deliberately murdered by his uncle.

She sighed and got to her feet, still holding the Angler . Julian would want to see this, even if it was terrible news. With this information, he had evidence against his awful uncle. Elspeth glanced to the door, hesitating. What would he do when he had his mother’s notes? For one thing, he’d stop searching the library.

Perhaps he’d order her to stop searching as well. If she wasn’t helping him to find this book, what reason would he have to help her find Maighread’s diary?

She looked down at the book in her hand. Julian wanted—no, needed this book. She knew that. She was completely aware of how important the information within was to him.

But would it matter if he didn’t see it right away?

After all, they were trapped here at Adders Hall. The roads were impassible.

She couldn’t let him find his mother’s words just yet.

Elspeth quickly stacked The Prince in the original Italian, Gulliver’s Travels , and a copy of Euripides’s plays in Latin on top of the Angler . She took a deep breath, picked up the stack of books, and walked sedately to the library door and opened it.

The hall was empty.

Her walk to the stairs was more hurried, and she kept a fast pace down the dark corridor to her borrowed bedroom. It was only as she approached the door that she let out a sigh of relief.

“What are you doing?”

She nearly yelped. Elspeth spun, the books clutched to her bosom, to face Julian in the hallway.

He was frowning at her. “I thought you wanted to search the library?”

“I do!” she replied far too loudly. She swallowed and continued more sedately, “I do want to search the library, but I found these books and thought they would be nice reading tonight.”

“Indeed?” He arched a skeptical eyebrow. “What about the book of erotic artwork you were looking at?”

“I left it for you,” she replied sweetly. “It is your book, after all, and I was loath to take it when you might need it.”

A ruddy flush spread over his pale, cold cheeks. “Did you indeed?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “But if you find you have no need of it, perhaps I’ll borrow it as well.”

“ Elspeth…” Her name was a low rasp in his throat, and for a moment all she could see was him, standing still for her in the library.

Then she came to her senses. “I’ll return to help you in the library as soon as I can.”

She slipped through the door and shut it behind her, leaning back against the wood.

There was silence from outside.

She turned her head slowly, pressing her ear against the door, feeling her heart beat against her breastbone. If she listened hard enough, could she hear his breathing? She could almost feel him standing on the other side of the doorway, separated from her by only inches of wood.

A scuff from the hallway and then the click of shoes walking away.

Elspeth let out her breath, vaguely disappointed that he hadn’t forced the door and followed her inside. Silly. She had more important matters to attend to.

Pushing herself away from the door, she set the books on the small table beside the bed and then glanced around the room. There was no obvious place to hide the book. She’d heard of people squirreling away secrets in the stones inside the fireplace, but that sounded like a way to make the book go up in smoke.

She could put the book in the soft bag she’d brought with her to Adders, but wouldn’t that be the first place Julian would search? That left the bed. She looked at it. The bed was the only large piece of furniture in the room. If she hid the book there, it would be found within seconds.

If there was nowhere to conceal the book, then she’d leave it in the stack of volumes on the table.

In plain sight.

An hour later, Julian looked down at Plum, panting gently by his side in the library. Elspeth hadn’t returned. Which… was a disappointment.

He scowled.

She could at least take care of her dog.

“Come on, then,” he said to Plum.

The dog stood at once, following Julian as he made his way back to the kitchen. He heard dishes clinking together as he neared, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when he entered and found Elspeth bent over the hearth.

“Oh.” She looked up and then straightened. “I was heating the stew for luncheon.”

He nodded and crossed the flagstone floor to let Plum out. The dog took one look at the downpour and tilted his head up to Julian in a plea.

“You have to go out,” Julian said gruffly. “Go on.”

The dog glumly splashed outside.

“Thank you for tending to him,” Elspeth said from behind him.

He shrugged, watching Plum come racing back inside again.

The dog shook, spattering him with muddy drops.

Elspeth giggled.

He turned and saw her holding both her hands over her mouth, her blue eyes gleaming.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.

“You are?”

For some reason, his words resulted in another round of giggles.

“Here,” she finally gasped. “Sit at the table, and I’ll serve us.”

He complied, watching as she set the bread and cheese on the table and brought bowls of stew.

“I think you must like dogs,” she said as she cut the bread.

He looked down at the stew, poking at a potato. “Perhaps.”

“Only perhaps?” She glanced at him as she took a sip of wine.

He let his spoon drop, no longer hungry. “I had a dog as a boy. A terrier. He hated badgers. Used to chase them down their own burrows. I was always worried that a badger would kill him one day, but that never happened.”

Julian bit into a slice of bread, not tasting anything.

“What happened to him?” Elspeth asked.

“I don’t know. He disappeared after Augustus arrived at Greycourt. Aurelia had died, Mother was dying… I didn’t have time to mourn a silly terrier.” His voice had gone gruff by the end of the sentence. Tom had been a good dog.

A hand suddenly covered his on the table.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry my brother hurt Aurelia, that your father died and then your mother, and your ghastly uncle took charge of your life.”

He glanced up and saw to his surprise that there were tears in her eyes.

She swiped at them with her other hand. “I don’t know why Ranulf did the thing he did. But I’m sorry you lost your sister because of him.”

Except he hadn’t. Julian blinked at the thought. Aurelia had been dead before Ranulf had come to Greycourt.

He opened his mouth.

Ranulf had been tarred black because of Aurelia’s death and the rumors around it. If he told her, she wouldn’t understand. He hardly understood the events of that night and why he’d had to betray both his best friends.

Julian shut his mouth. He could never tell her.

His guilt felt like an anchor sunk into the fleshiest part of his soul—heavy and unbearable and dragging him down.

They ate the rest of the meal in silence before returning to the library.

Plum at least looked relieved to lie on the carpet by the fireplace again. Julian was careful to put several more logs on the fire.

Then they returned to work.

Oddly, they worked together well, he placing the books to be examined on her right, she looking through each volume before placing them to her left, where he in turn picked them up to return them to the shelves.

Careful. Calm. Precise.

The room was infernally quiet, save for the turning of pages and the squeak of the library ladder. Julian should’ve settled into a bored routine. Instead he felt himself tighten. Needs, wants, the woman sitting at his feet, all combined into a terrible, waiting stillness. He could feel it in his chest, a stifled cry that if he let it go would continue on and on and on.

God, he wanted her.

More, he wanted her to tell him what to do. To lift all duty and expectation and fear from him so that he could float, entirely mindless save for her orders and pleasure.

Somewhere inside him, he was aware that he was putting these needs on the wrong woman. A woman both naive and, if he was right, a virgin. Elspeth would have no idea what to do with him.

But he couldn’t help the fact that he was exquisitely aware of every movement she made. Of the curling strands of hair at the back of her neck. Of the scent of wild roses that seemed to linger in the air.

Was he going mad?

Julian closed his eyes. He was in control. He’d made it through more than a month of starvation in London. He was above his rude bodily urges. He didn’t need release or pleasure. He could survive without.

“Are you all right, Mr. Greycourt?” came her throaty voice.

He opened his eyes and could think only how he wanted her to call him intimately by his Christian name. To order him into calm.

That… that wasn’t possible. She was young and sweet. Any coarse thoughts concerning her were damnable.

Only a base villain would think of her in that way.

Helplessly, he looked at her plump, pink lips and her soft, dimpled hands and sensed that she was about to command him. To ask him to…

No. No.

“Mr. Greycourt?” she said quietly. Slowly. As if in anticipation.

He shook his head, attempting to drive the image from his mind. “Call me Julian.”

His voice was curt, but she appeared unsurprised by his unseemly request. “Julian.”

The sound of his name on her tongue was a delicious agony. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.” Her brows were knit.

Jesus. He couldn’t stand this anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, turning away. “I should see to my horses.”

He exited the room before she could respond.

Elspeth watched the library door close behind Julian, feeling restless, almost angry. If only he’d talk with her. Tell her what was bothering him. Let her…

She shook her head. No. She had more important things to think about.

See to his horses. An obvious excuse to get away from her, but it would take at least half an hour, surely?

Elspeth rose, shaking out her skirts.

Plum raised his head where he sprawled on his side near the fire.

“Stay,” she said firmly.

He blinked and laid his head back down, but whether it was because of her order or because he liked the warmth of the fire more than following her, she wasn’t sure.

In any case, this was her chance.

When Julian had found her in the library yesterday, she’d been thinking only of excuses so he wouldn’t make her leave his house. It wasn’t until later that she realized how silly she’d been. In between looking through the books in the library, she’d been stealthily searching the rooms in case the diary wasn’t in the library. But she’d started at the far east wing.

She hadn’t gotten to Julian’s bedroom.

More fool she. Had she known that Julian would make a surprise appearance at Adders, she would’ve started with his bedroom. After all, wasn’t the master bedroom the most likely place to hide something?

Elspeth gathered her skirts in her hands and ran down the hallway, stopping only to look in both directions before pushing open the door to Julian’s bedroom.

The room was gloomy with only the light from the window. The bed was bigger than hers, the hangings probably once a rich wine red, though now they were limp and dusty, and it was obvious the moths had been at them.

There was more furniture than in her room. That made sense since he was the master of the house and presumably was in residence at times. She began with the desk near the window. It was an unfortunate Jacobean piece, heavy and overcarved and, frankly, ugly.

Elspeth pulled out drawers, both big and small, peering into recesses and probing the carvings to see if there were any hidden compartments. All she found was a broken quill, dried ink in a bottle, and a mouse nest at the back of one of the drawers.

She straightened, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. There was a bundle of saddlebags under the window, but Julian had just brought those.

She quickly searched the bedside table and the mantel around the fireplace.

How much time did she have remaining?

Elspeth didn’t know, but she still had the bed to go. It was high enough off the ground that she could slide underneath it if she lay on her back. Julian’s maids were not particularly thorough in cleaning. Elspeth sneezed three times in a row as she used her hands to feel about the boards and frame of the bed. Nothing.

She stood and brushed the dust from her skirts, wrinkling her nose. The headboard was of the same time period as the desk, so she crawled onto the bed and, kneeling on the pillows, began to feel around the carved faces. But again she found nothing.

Frowning, she sat back on her heels before climbing down once more and began looking under the feather mattress. There were two mattresses on the bed, the one below stuffed with horsehair. As she lifted both to look around under the head of the bed, she felt something hard between them.

Excitement shot through her. Sticking her hand under the feather mattress, she pulled out a square red book a little bigger than the width of her hand.

She opened the book.

At once she could see that it wasn’t Maighread’s diary, for the book was printed. She stared at it anyway. It was in a language she didn’t recognize, but below the title was the figure of a blindfolded man kneeling at the foot of an equally nude woman holding a stick above her head.

The man’s penis was erect.

A thrill like the plucking of a string went down the center of her body, landing in her cunny.

She turned the page.

The next held text, but the one after that depicted another nude man, this one bound to a cross laid sideways in the shape of an X. A fully dressed woman stood to his side with a flail. It might’ve been a scene of martyrdom save for the fact that again the man’s cock stood tall.

In the next illustration, a tumescent penis filled the page, a sort of ring at the base, binding the flesh tightly.

Shouldn’t that hurt?

She shook her head and looked further. There were many scenes of kneeling or prostrate men being whipped or flailed or beaten by women and men. Sometimes the naked men were forced to do humiliating things such as lick the shoes of a fully dressed woman. Often the nude men writhed as if they were in agony. Other times they shot their seed into the air.

But it was an illustration nearly halfway into the book that made her pause. It depicted a woman sitting on a chair holding her skirts above her knees. Before her knelt a man, his hands tied behind his back, his head buried between her thighs.

Elspeth couldn’t help but squeeze her own thighs together. Something about the man’s naked buttocks on his heels and the woman smiling down at him as she petted his head made her want to squirm. One couldn’t see the man’s face, only the back of his head between the woman’s spread thighs. But the position made her think of what he might be doing so close to her quim. Was he kissing her there between her folds?

Was he licking her?

The door to the bedroom opened, making Elspeth start.

Julian Greycourt stood there, his black hair sternly bound into a braid, his light-gray eyes staring at her. “What are you doing?”