“Yeah. I told you that you’d envy Picky before this was over.”
“You were right. From a hotel that feeds their feline guests lobster tidbits and puts them up on satin pillows in a room the size of Rhode Island, to . . .” She looked at the spider busy rolling up a fly for a midnight snack. “This.”
“You’d never guess that there are millions of dollars in rare and old books downstairs, would you?”
“Not from looking at the fairgoers,” she said, glancing toward the lobby bar.
“Most of them are exhibitors, not spectators.”
“They put all their money in their stock rather than in their wardrobe?”
“Somewhat. But mostly it’s the professorial thing. Bad clothes, bad teeth, great mind.”
“Don’t forget the bad hair.”
Grinning, he combed his fingers through his needs-a-haircut mop. “Are you talking about me?”
“Not even on your worst day,” Serena said absently, studying a man—no, it was a woman—whose hair was three inches of henna and one inch of white right next to the pink scalp. “You have gorgeous hair. I’d kill for it.”
“I’d rather have yours falling like fire all over my bare skin.”
The words and the sensual heat in his tawny eyes drew her, made her breath stop. “Don’t talk like that,” she said quickly.
“Why not?”
“It’s distracting.”
His glance traveled over her like hands, remembering. “Yeah, it sure is.” He made himself look away, scanning the lobby for someone who was glancing at them too often or who looked like the file photo of Ed Heller that Factoid had sent as a .jpeg.
A woman with the body of a Playmate and the grace of a ballerina came gliding up to Erik. Serena gave the woman a good look. Though not beautiful in the Hollywood sense of the word, she was somehow compelling. Her hair was a sleek slice of midnight. Her eyes were wide-set and delft blue. Her mouth made you think of burgundy wine and sex. Her voice was humid, steamy, southern.
“If Shane had told me you were going to be here, I wouldn’t have kicked as hard about coming,” she said.
“Risa! Where did you come from? It’s been forever since I’ve seen you.” Erik bent down to give Risa a hug and a kiss.
Serena told herself that she wasn’t jealous. Then she told herself again. She was going for a third time when he released the stunning woman and grinned down at her with obvious pleasure as he made introductions. Serena and Risa shook hands while they gave each other the kind of once-over only another woman could.
Risa wondered where Erik had found the aloof, brooding redhead with the witchy bedroom eyes and the kind of lithe, elegant body that Risa had wanted all of her life. Not to mention a textile jacket that was so extraordinary she had a hard time keeping her hands off it. Odd that such a striking woman would wear such a dull scarf as an accessory, but there was no accounting for individual style.
“Don’t tell me your boss has you combing through the dustbins, too,” Erik said, pulling Risa’s attention away from Serena. “What did you do to piss him off this time?”
“I’m breathing.” Risa turned back to Serena. “Where did you get that fabulous jacket?”
“I made it.”
At first Risa thought it was a joke. Then she realized it wasn’t. “Well, there goes that dream.”
“What dream?” Erik asked.
“The one where I buy a jacket like that and attract the lover of the century.”
“Hey, I offered,” Erik said.
She rolled her eyes. “Only after you were sure I was over my crush on you, and then you only did it to salvage my pride when my boyfriend dumped me for a rich girl who could pay for his Ph.D.”
“He was a loser, a pretty boy with no morals.”
“I’m sure you’re right, darlin’,” Risa said slowly, letting the natural smokiness of her voice increase with the drawl. “It comes with being a big bad older brother.” She winked at Serena. “But I’m friends with Erik’s sisters, which means I can get even. He has no secrets from me.”
“Really?” Serena grinned, liking Risa better with everything she heard. “Can I buy you a glass or three of wine?”
“You can do the girly bonding thing over my secrets later,” Erik cut in. “Have you been down to the floor?” he asked Risa.
The shrug she gave made light move over the tailored coarse silk jacket she wore. Serena had thought the jacket was black, but the glints of light in it were an intense, almost fiery blue, rather like her eyes.
“I’ve been there,” Risa said. She put her slender, manicured hands in the pockets of her tailored black slacks. “The usual stuff.”
“What is Shane after?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Damn,” Erik muttered. “I was afraid of that. He’s heard about that carpet page of gold foil and touches of color, hasn’t he?”
Risa simply raised her sleek eyebrows.
“Well, I’d rather he got it than some other people I could think of,” Erik said, but he wasn’t happy at having more competition. Tannahill was an enigma. Trustworthy up to a point—that point being when Tannahill wanted to acquire something. Then it was a new game, with new rules. As in no rules.
“So you’d rather Shane buy the golden goody than Norman Warrick?” Risa asked.
“So Shane is after that page.”
Risa smiled like a cat. She was every bit as competitive as her boss was. “You know him better than I do.”
“Nobody knows Shane.”
“Odd. He said the same thing about you. I agreed with him, and I know you better than anyone except perhaps Niall.” Risa’s smile became deeper as she turned to Serena and handed her a business card. “Don’t let Erik talk you out of having drinks with me. I think we might find we’ve got a lot in common.”
“Smart women in a world run by men?” Erik said, a pained expression on his face. It was his sisters’ favorite gripe.
Risa blew him a kiss from ripe, sultry lips. “You guessed it.”
Serena watched the other woman stride away. She covered the ground quickly, but somehow it looked easy, luxuriant, as though she had all the time in the world to be lazy.
“I can’t believe you turned her down,” Serena said.
“I don’t rob cradles.”
“She’s not that much younger.”
“Not now. She was then.”
“So what happened to now?”
Erik looked at Serena. “What do you mean?”
“Why aren’t you two lovers?” she asked bluntly.
“We like each other too well to ruin a good friendship with what we both knew would be short-term sex.”
“How do you know it would be short-term?”
“Ever look at a pair of shoes and know without trying them on that no matter how great they look, they’re going to pinch?”
“Sure. It’s called experience.”
“That’s how we knew.”
Serena’s dark-red lashes lowered over her eyes for a moment. “Okay.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that. Okay. It makes sense. Only teenagers have to go over a cliff to find out it hurts when you land.”
Erik opened his mouth, closed it, and gave her a slow smile. He would never understand a woman’s mind, but that didn’t prevent him from enjoying the quick ones. “I like you, Serena Charters.”
“I’m learning to like you, Erik North.”
“An acquired taste, is that it?”
She licked her lips, remembering just how he tasted.
“You’re killing me,” he said. He bent and kissed her quick and hard and deep. Then he said in a low voice, “I like Risa, but I don’t trust her in this. She’s an ambitious, intelligent woman with a lot to prove. She has made some acquisitions for Shane that were frankly borderline as to methods and/or provenance. She wants those pages because her boss doesn’t promote losers.”
“Are you sure you like her?”
“Yes, a whole lot. That doesn’t make me blind.” He kissed Serena hard again and buried his face against the fey scarf in the curve of her neck. He was baffled by the need he felt to reassure himself that she was here with him, within reach, as though if he turned away for an instant she would be gone for a thousand years. “Now let’s go see if we can find another leaf or two of the Book of the Learned.”
Serena wanted to tell Erik to wait, her head was spinning and she really wanted to keep on kissing him. Then she heard her own thoughts, shook her head briskly, and strode after him to the escalator. As she followed him down, she smiled and said silently, G’mom, some of them just might be worth the trouble. He doesn’t crowd me even when he’s so close the only thing I can breathe is him.
That was a first.
In fact, she had thought it was impossible. But the proof was right in front of her, riding down the escalator, looking around the lower mezzanine with the eyes of a hungry bird of prey. The supple leather suit coat he wore with casual slacks and scuffed-enough-to-be-comfortable loafers fitted him like a dark-chocolate shadow. She decided that he had a perfect build, strong without being muscle-bound, and big enough to make her feel as deliciously feminine as Risa’s mouth.
Then Serena remembered what he had said about Risa: Don’t trust her in this. Erik lived in a world where trust was a commodity that could be rationed. She lived in a world where she had learned to trust no one. Not really. Not all the way.
Yet she wanted to trust him all the way, even though she knew that was foolish. She couldn’t help it. She trusted him not to kill her. She trusted him as a lover. Now she was sliding toward trusting him not to hurt her in ways that weren’t physical but were very real nonetheless.
She didn’t need her grandmother’s advice to know that trusting Erik like that was stupid. He had come to her because of the mystery surrounding the Book of the Learned. He would leave when the mystery was solved. End of story. End of affair.
At best, she would be hurt. At worst, she would end up like her grandmother. Murdered.
But unlike her grandmother, Serena wouldn’t know why she had died.
Chapter 49
Erik stepped off the escalator, waited for Serena, and led her to the registration table that waited near the hallway just beyond the rest rooms. He could have dropped a Rarities business card on the rumpled woman behind the table and been given two VIP passes. But he would rather pay ten bucks apiece for visitor passes and site maps and not have some PR person hovering over him, telling him how important this or that exhibit was, and how this book exposition was the ultimate destination for discriminating collectors from all over the world.
If he didn’t know that already, he wouldn’t have come in the first place. Or, to be precise, Dana wouldn’t have sent him.
Because no matter how much professionals bitched about all the junk that could be found at affairs like this, there was always something spectacular, too. Something that a museum couldn’t or wouldn’t afford. Something that was labeled one thing and was actually another. Something that just filled a gap in a private collection or sent a collector off on a whole new tangent. That was why everyone came: the hunt. They never knew what they might find.
And the exhibitors came because they never knew what they might sell.
“The manuscripts are down this way,” Erik said, looking at the site map.
Reginald Smythe’s booth was down the center aisle, just where a novice would be expected to start looking. The good news was that Erik had never dealt professionally with Smythe, so he wouldn’t be recognized as a knowledgeable buyer. The bad news was that the indirect approach took longer.
But it left him with a fallback position.
“Play along with me,” Erik said quietly. “You wanted to come here and you’re my fiancée. Don’t mention anything about anything unless I do it first. Okay?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t want to be guessing.”
“Okay. I’m arm candy and you’re the big man.”
Erik was still laughing when she followed him into a long hall with doors opening off it on one side. As she stepped through after him, she discovered that all the doors led to the same place—a huge ballroom. The room had been partitioned into subrooms that held booths of various sizes and differing contents for sale.
Staring around, trying not to trip because she was looking everywhere but where she was headed, she walked beside him down a narrow corridor between booths. Though the exhibit floor was far from crowded with customers, a hum of conversation hovered just below the threshold of hearing, punctuated by sudden words and phrases.
“. . . biggest choir book I ever saw. Size of a card table and illuminated with . . .”
“. . . not since the Lindisfarne Gospels has there been a . . .”
“. . . sure it was commissioned by Charlemagne, but I can’t prove it. That’s why the price is so . . .”
“You sell anything yet?”
“. . . illustrated page from La Divina Commedia. Look at the fine . . .”
“. . . believe this leaf came from a Carolingian Bible. All the internal evidence points to a ninth-century . . .”
Serena wondered if her eyes were spinning like pinwheels. She wanted to look at everything, but Erik had his hand wrapped around her upper arm and was all but frog-marching her down the rows of fascinating manuscripts. Every so often she dug in her heels for a better look, but he didn’t let her linger nearly long enough.
“. . . see, signed right there, Bartolomeo Sanvito. I assure you, this is as fine a fifteenth-century book as you will . . .”
“Hey, you sell anything yet?”
Serena turned, but couldn’t see the questioner who was going down a parallel aisle saluting various exhibitors with the same question.
“. . . the quality of this historiated initial. Sumptuous! The epitome of sixteenth-century . . .”
“. . . exquisite lapis blue in the Madonna’s robe, but it’s the gold foil that gives this . . .”
“No, it’s late East Anglian style. Look at those faces. They could have been copied from the Luttrell Psalter.”
“You sell anything yet?”
Erik felt Serena’s unwillingness to be dragged any farther and almost smiled. He managed to bully her as far as Reggie Smythe’s booth before her patience ran out. Not that he blamed her. Anyone who made textiles as medieval-feeling as she did would be fascinated by the designs and illuminations of medieval books, particularly in the British style, which owed a lot to the designs and symbols of Celtic ancestors.
Pretending reluctance, muttering, he stopped trying to pull her farther down the aisle. She planted her feet and looked past the shoulder of a worn tweed jacket to the page under discussion. He glanced at the page the gently crazed exhibitor was trying to sell to a customer who also wore an exhibitor’s badge. More exhibitors swapped goods at these events than sold them outright to walk-ins.
“I’d be willing to talk about a trade for your fourteenth-century leaf from a French Epistle Lectionary,” said the exhibitor. A smudged badge with the words REGGIE SMYTHE on it had been fastened crookedly to the man’s suit coat.
“I’ll bet you would be,” said the customer, unimpressed. “But if you throw in that damaged leaf from Chartier’s ‘Le livre des quatre dames’ we might have something to talk about.”
“Damaged!” Smythe stepped back as though he had been struck. His shaggy salt-and-pepper hair fairly bristled with disdain. “Only a cretin would consider the normal, beautiful marks made by the passage of time and use on vellum as damage.”
The other man shrugged. “If you haven’t moved either of these by closing time on Sunday, look me up. I’m over by the exit sign on aisle G.”
Smythe smiled grimly and turned to Erik and Serena, ignoring the other man who, despite his words, was still hanging around and looking at the leaf. “Lovely, isn’t it? Would you like to examine it more closely?”
“You sell anything
yet?” came faintly from another aisle.
“No, thanks,” Erik said before Serena could speak. Then he thought, what the hell, nothing ventured nothing gained. Niall would faint at the almost direct approach, but Niall wasn’t here. “My aunt is an antiques nut. You have any early twelfth-century pages written in the Insular Celtic style? Secular, not ecclesiastical.” He spoke slowly, with the air of a man who has carefully memorized what he is supposed to look for.
“Secular? No.”
“How about any, uh, palimps—palimpsests?” Artfully he stumbled over the unusual word.
“Partial or entire?” Smythe asked, smiling genially.
“Either one is fine, I guess. She didn’t say.”
“Secular?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Age?”
“Hell, I don’t care,” Erik said easily, “but she’s excited about fifteenth-century illumination.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s nice enough, if you go for that sort of thing.”
Fifteenth-century illumination was the style he had found on all but one of the overwritten pages he had tracked down from the Book of the Learned.
“Nice.” Smythe winced. “Um, yes. Fifteenth-century illumination is considered by many to be the peak of the illuminator’s art.” He cleared his throat and ducked beneath the counter. He emerged with a cardboard carton. Inside, like pictures in colorful cardboard frames, there was a batch of vellum leaves of various ages, quality, and condition. “These,” he said, selecting quickly, “are what you’re looking for.”
Erik took the box, hefted it, and decided that it was time for his fallback position: screw subtlety. He ignored Smythe’s recommendations and began flipping through the framed leaves with a speed that said either he knew exactly what he was looking for or he didn’t care about what he was seeing. He left it to Smythe to decide which.
Moving Target Page 27