Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

“An hundred years should go to praise, / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze,” Augustus murmured, brushing his lips across her closed eyes, along her cheekbones, down to her jaw.

Making a low, murmuring noise deep in her throat, she obligingly arched her neck for him, baring the delicate path along the side of her neck, down past her collarbone, all the way to the first swell of her breasts, where her bodice did more to tease than to cover.

Augustus grazed a knuckle along the low neck of her bodice, watching as her breasts rose and fell against the taut fabric, practically bare already. All it took was a twitch of the fabric—all right, perhaps a little more than a twitch, a slight wriggle—and she went from being daringly décolleté to bare. She was small but well formed, perfectly in proportion to herself.

“Two hundred to adore each breast,” Augustus quoted hoarsely. He leaned down and touched a tongue to one nipple, feeling it pebble in response.

His hand began the long, slow slide from ankle to knee, beneath skirts, beneath petticoats, traveling along her silk stocking to the ribbon that held her garter in place. “But thirty thousand to the rest—”

He leaned in to kiss her again, but Emma pulled away, saying, very clearly and distinctly, “Marvel.”

His finger traced the top of her stocking, the band where silk met flesh. “Yes,” he agreed. “Quite marvelous.”

She pulled back against his arm, pushing his hand away. “Andrew Marvel. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’”

Not exactly in keeping with the mood, but, all right, points to her for knowing her seventeenth-century poets.

“Well spotted,” Augustus murmured, and leaned forward to kiss her again, since her lips were so temptingly red and rosy and this had all been going quite well until…

“It’s not your own,” Emma said. The writing desk wobbled as she pushed back. She shoved her hair back behind her ears. “Those aren’t your words.”

“Not my words?” Augustus’s brain was still keeping company with his libido. He couldn’t help but notice that her bosom heaved very nicely and that she hadn’t bothered to pull up her bodice.

Emma yanked up her bodice. Damn.

“You wrote poetry for Jane,” she said, and bit down on her lip as though to keep herself from saying anything else.

Oh? Oh. A glimmer of comprehension broke through the fog of desire.

He took a deep breath. “My own words aren’t good enough for you. My doggerel was good enough for—well, for an adolescent infatuation, but it’s not good enough for you. You deserve better. You deserve the best.”

“Marvel?”

“And Shakespeare and Donne and Scève and Ronsard.”

Emma pressed her lips together in that way she had when she was thinking. At the familiar gesture, Augustus felt a rush of tenderness as disconcerting as it was surprising. Something in his head stirred and whispered, Emma?

“I’ve been wooed with Sceve before,” Emma said thoughtfully. “And Ronsard and du Bellay. I’d rather just have you. In prose, if need be.” She looked up at him with that peculiar sort of frankness that was entirely hers, saying, “We did promise each other honesty.”

I’m a British spy and I’ve been using you to get to your friend’s plans.

There was a mad moment when Augustus was almost tempted to blurt it out, the whole damnable tangle. He wanted to tell her that he had been using her, but not anymore. That whatever that was, it had nothing to do with this. That he hadn’t ever felt like this before and wasn’t quite sure what he was feeling, but whatever it was, it meant that he wanted her with him for a very long time, not out of ploy or policy, but because she was Emma, and he had got rather accustomed to the Emma-ness of her, to the tilt of her head and the cadence of her voice and the sparkle and glitter of her paste jewels as she blazed her way through the room. He wanted to tell her that he thrilled to the crystalline ring of her laughter, that her bluntness intoxicated him, that her lack of self-deception was a revelation and an inspiration.

And then what? his thwarted libido murmured. Would this all happen before or after she told him he was crazy and/or stomped out of the room?

She looked so good, all warm and pink and tousled. All she was waiting for was the word, and all that could be his, the flushed flesh above the low neckline of her dress, the reddened lips that pressed together as she waited for his reply, the blue vein that flickered in the hollow of her throat, just waiting for his lips.

Revelations could wait.

“It’s prose you want, then?” Augustus said huskily. “I can give you prose.”

“That would be…nice,” said Emma. Her eyes were dilated and her chest rose and fell rapidly beneath the barrier of her bodice.

Augustus brushed a finger lightly across one cheekbone, tracing the lines of her face. “You fascinate me,” he said softly. “You confuse me. You intoxicate me.”

Emma made a breathy little noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t seem to have done anything to your vocabulary.”

“Haven’t you?” They were practically nose to nose. “I don’t have the words to describe what you do to me, what you’re doing to me right now. Do you want me to tell you how much I want you?”

Emma made a little noise in the back of her throat, and for an awful moment, Augustus thought she meant to say no.

She leaned forward, setting the desk wobbling. Her voice was husky as she said, “I’d rather you show me.”

Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, even though the sky outside was still blue and the sunlight, unconcerned, dawdled lazily on the corners of the desk. Augustus grabbed her so hard that he heard the breath rush out of her lungs in a whoosh.

“All right,” croaked Emma. “That’s one way.”

She was laughing. Augustus had never seen anything so wonderful as that laughter.

“Hush, you,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her. “Don’t you know mockery isn’t conducive to passion?”

Emma wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her body against his. “Really?” she said, and the bit of Augustus’s brain that could still comprehend language vaguely registered the word.

“Mmm,” said Augustus, into her neck. “I might be wrong.”

She made a little mewing noise. Augustus reclaimed her lips as they staggered unevenly in the direction of the bed. There wasn’t far to stagger.

“Bed?” he murmured.

“Bed,” she agreed, and dropped down onto the coverlet, pulling him with her.

Something crinkled. And crinkled again.

Oh, hell.

Augustus froze as Emma rolled over and said curiously but without any of the alarm that was steadily mounting in his own chest, “Is there something under here?”

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly, and reached for her, but it was too late. Emma drew down the coverlet and pulled out Fulton’s plans.

She looked up at him with confusion. “But aren’t these… ?”

Sussex, England

May 2004

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dempster.

Oh, didn’t he? “My papers,” I said, as much for Colin as Dempster. “Someone’s been going through them. And my e-mail.”

“I don’t know why anyone would want to read your e-mail,” said Joan, joining us on the stairs. I should have known she couldn’t stay away. Her long skirt whispered against the stair treads. She smiled at Colin over my head. “It must be the strain of the academic life. Scholars are such…special people.”

Delusional, that smile seemed to say. Americans. What can one expect of them?

I’d show her special.

“Ask your boyfriend,” I said, my voice cold and hard. “Ask him what he’s looking for. Ask him why he used you to get in here.”

Just as he had used Serena before.

“Colin!” exclaimed Joan. “Tell her—”

“I warned you,” Colin said to Dempster. “Not again.”

“The film—” Dempster began, just as his girlfriend said something that included the phrase “obviously disturbed,” before both were drowned out by a clangorous knell that echoed in my ears and made me catch at Colin’s arm for balance. It was a horrible, metallic sound, and it seemed to go on and on, catching the guests in the hall in shimmering waves of sound.

In the corner of the hall, Cate, sans clipboard, was wielding a mallet against a brass gong with considerable vigor and more than a little relish. The tinkle of a fork against a glass would never have been heard in that din. The gong swept everyone away in its wake. The guests stopped gossiping, the waiters stopped circling. Even Joan shut her mouth, although she shot me a look that promised retribution later—and another one, at Dempster, that made me think that the extra-connubial bed wasn’t going to be all that cozy that night.

An expectant hush settled on the room, broken only by the swish of fabric against the floor as someone shifted weight, the click of a glass against someone’s ring, and then even those sounds ceased.

Dinner?

No. It was Micah Stone.

The film star sauntered into the room. The hiss and whisper of conversation faded to nothing beneath the click of his cowboy boots against the marble of the entryway. I was reminded, for no discernible reason, of Charles II making his way between bowing courtiers at Whitehall. Micah Stone had that same sort of lanky grace, that same indefinable saunter, the saunter of a man confident enough to lope rather than stride.

Stone was taller in real life than he appeared on screen. I’d thought it was usually the other way around. Maybe it was just that they paired him with particularly leggy leading ladies. Either way, he made Jeremy, clinging to his left elbow, seem short, stocky, and overdressed, even though Jeremy was a reasonably tall, reasonably fit man, dressed up by dressing down in dark slacks and sport coat. No sport coats for Stone. He was wearing jeans—acid washed—and a T-shirt. It was, appropriately enough, a DreamStone T-shirt, emblazoned with the company’s logo of a large rock. A dreaming rock, presumably.