***
The night was still and hot; music played inside and out. The food delicious, the company entertaining; Callie actually lazed, her belly full and satisfied for once—she had a dreadful habit of not eating her fill, frequently losing her appetite if she thought too hard about how fresh a meal was—with crisp salad and perfectly grilled steak. No thought of work or money or fear was in her head, and she contented herself on the fringes watching Lucius host his party with easy aplomb.
“What’s that stunned look for?” Rachel asked, plopping down on the neighbouring lounger.
“I’m trying to figure out what I’m seeing.”
Rachel followed her line of sight. “The guys being Neanderthals? Men, meat, fire. It’s basic. Y’know, later on . . . if you make sure to annoy him just a little—something involving the remote, or his beer, or something simple—you’ll get some rough caveman loving when you go to bed. If you like that sort of thing!”
The personal experience that advice suggested had Callie’s insides quaking sickly, and she cast a horrified look in Rachel’s direction. There had been some dating within the group, she had learned, but it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone—even Rachel—might have been with Lucius.
Rachel stared back for a blank second, and then laughed helplessly. “Don’t be ridiculous! Just friends! The best of friends, but no benefits. That’s all, I swear. I just know the type. And neither of us have, er, dabbled within the circle, you know? Too many problems in the fallout.”
The relief was palpable. “Okay. Good.”
But beneath that was the dreadful knowledge that her friendship with Rachel would not survive any breakup with Lucius. Didn’t friends choose sides when couples separated? And Rachel would choose Lucius over her in a heartbeat.
He glanced in their direction just then, raking a smiling look over her before turning back to his conversation long enough to extract himself from it, and moved towards them.
“Squish up,” he ordered her, and she slid forward on the lounger so he could take the place behind her, stretching his bare legs on either side of hers and cradling her in his arms, her back against his chest. “Much better. What were you two gossiping about?”
“ROI,” Rachel said dryly and winked at Callie, who decided to ignore her and bask in the warmth of Lucius’ attention.
His heart pounded with soothing strength against her back; his firm mouth lost no opportunity to nuzzle her cheek or murmur little asides in her ear. And since he was getting her all tangled up, she saw no harm in stroking palms over his muscular thighs and deliberately dripping cold beer on his skin to trace the rivulets, and to shift against him as if restless, and feeling her success hardening.
“You are so going to pay for this,” he growled, and laughed when she looked at him with the most bewildered look she could produce. “I’m not falling for that innocent thing.”
As the party wound down, everyone pitched in to clean up, though, as typical of the male of the species, sports highlights on the widescreen TV in the living room called an early end to their participation in the kitchen.
The stereo was shut off; the pluck of acoustic guitars sounded, along with some very spectacular masculine harmonies.
“Lucius, Sam, and Matt,” Sandi grinned. “I miss the band.”
“This from Yoko herself,” Rachel snorted.
“Did you hear Sam’s filed for divorce?” Annie whispered, sneaking a look over her shoulder in the direction of the living room.
“No!” was the shocked consensus, with Sandi adding, “I was just glad that ice bitch wasn’t here today.”
Callie listened to the gossip as she continued cleaning, revelling in the time with her new-if-temporary friends. Making new friends was done without expectation, and one thing she didn’t fear. There was comfort and confidence in her adeptness at letting them go.
Or had been. She wasn’t so sure this time.
By ones and twos, guests called cabs and made their exits. Alone, Callie’s fastidiousness whooshed to the fore, and the kitchen received a second round of completely unnecessary cleaning even while she scolded herself for it; consciously knowing she was being foolish, but subconsciously unable to stop herself. At last, all was gleaming to her satisfaction and she wandered down the hall to the living room, pausing in the archway.
Sports were done, apparently, and Lucius, his back to her, lounged on the sofa, feet up on the coffee table as he watched a weekly business report recap on Asian markets while casually plucking an amazingly complicated instrumental on the guitar. Feeling lightheaded in her eagerness for his attention, she moved into action, stepping around to block his view of the TV.
“Hey,” he complained as she shifted away his red cup and the remote to the other side of the coffee table, out of easy reach. Setting the guitar on the neighbouring armchair and stretching an arm along the back of the sofa, he beckoned sternly to her. “Come here.”
She met his glare coolly. “I’m going to bed,” she said, moving around to the archway again. “What are you doing?”
“No, seriously! Come here, Cal. You’ve got a smudge or—I can’t see from here.”
Disappointed that the ploy had failed, she rubbed at her nose and cheek. “Did I get it?”
“Mm, I don’t think so. Let me see.” His position was essentially unchanged, just his head turned towards her. The hand resting on the back of the sofa gestured. “Com’ere. Let me see.”
Feeling decidedly sulky, she approached him. “Where is it?”
He reached up. “Right . . . here!” And in a slick move, he tumbled her over and onto the sofa, straddling her and catching her wrists in one hand as she squealed with startled laughter. “Now, there’s quite a list of payback for you, young lady.”
Still laughing, she struggled ineffectively against his grip. “You brute,” she giggled.
His free hand slid under the skirt she had thrown on over the bikini bottoms. “You’re wearing too many clothes. Maybe if I kept you naked, you’d be more inclined to behave.”
“That actually sounds like an invitation to misbehave. Ah!” Her body arched up to meet his exploring fingers.
Intent on getting her clothes off, he released her to facilitate quick action; with a quick flick, her bandeau disappeared, and he shifted his weight off her long enough to rid her of the skirt and bikini bottoms. Straddling her again, he studied her naked body.
“Cold?” he asked politely, dragging a fingertip over an erect nipple.
“No,” she laughingly whispered, and turned her face away from the intense scrutiny of his.
“Such a smart girl shouldn’t be so sexy,” he complained softly, running a hand over her belly. “There’s only so much a man can take.”
“Oh, please,” she scorned lightly, though she liked the compliments. Glancing shyly up at him again, her breath caught at the vision of the man—the tousled hair and the fresh touch of sun the day had added to his cheekbones, the flicker of star-sapphire luminescent in the surrounding darkness of skin and hair. The unbuttoned camp shirt revealed bronzed flesh and taut muscles; his erection pushed hard against the khaki shorts.
That this man should be so taken with her, so aroused by her, was somehow wrong; it unbalanced her worldview too far.
Digging into a pocket, he pulled out a condom pack and set it over her navel, the foil cool on her burning skin. He slipped the button on his shorts and unzipped.
He flashed a grin and pulled her hand away from her mouth. “Stop that.”
Tugging out of his grasp, she reached out, thumbing the pearl of moisture from the tip of him and, holding his gaze, brought her thumb to her mouth, sucking the musky salt of his essence.
Everything about him seemed to throb as he watched her action.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Mm,” she approved of the flavour.
The condom pack fell as she sat up.
“We’re going to need that,” he muttered with a distracted air that was really complimentar
y.
“Not yet,” she assured. Palms on his ribs, she pushed him back as she dipped her head, mouth opening to take the hard, hot length of him in, suckling and tasting, tugging his shorts further down to get all the access she could.
He swore softly, tangling a hand in her hair. “I’m having the best day,” he chuckled, relaxing against the arm of the sofa.
The strained, deep thrill underscoring that casualness emboldened her—he was not nearly as blasé as he suggested. And soon, he went from gently hissing breaths to deep groans of approval.
Being the boss of him was very empowering.
His hips jerked; he was struggling not to thrust into her. Taking him in as far as she could, she hummed around him.
“Oh, god!” Pushed to the brink, about to lose control, he pulled her off him and flipped her back, scrabbling for the wayward condom. “You’re a very bad girl.”
She would have laughed triumphantly, but then he was inside her, feral and fervent in his claiming of her, and she couldn’t do anything but hang on.
Rachel gave the best advice.
Chapter Twelve
Stubborn, blank refusal was the tact she took Sunday night when Lucius wanted to swing by her place only long enough to gather work clothes for the morrow. She needed to go home and stay there. They did not argue, exactly, but her resistance made for a slightly chilly and rather depressing drive home, where his coaxing goodnight kisses on her doorstep almost had her changing her mind.
It was only the beginning of a bleak night alone in the suffocating heat of her attic dungeon—all the worse for having been spoiled in Lucius’ air-conditioned manse, luxurious bed, and powerful, safe arms. In the steamy gloom, she contemplated the business card he had given her for his real estate agent. Old and new fears crept up almost unnoticed in the periphery until they swamped her, depriving her of any sleep at all.
Plunging into what shaped up to be a busy work week killed any lingering sense of summer fun and, after thirty-six hours that dragged like eternity without even seeing a glimpse of him, she finally accepted that the fling was going to be weekends only—if it continued at all.
The less she saw of him, the easier things would be in the end. And just as she decided that it was all for the best, she was summoned to his office for a review of her reports.
Sitting distant and cool and very business-like behind his desk, while she shrank under his gaze and that of the ravens, he virtually shredded her work and then said, after his scathing assessment, “Good work, Cal.”
“How can you say that?” she whispered, humiliated that he had trusted her to this job and she had failed. She was not used to professional failure, and it was a bit shocking to the system.
A gentle laugh sounded. “You were thrown into this position with little experience and zero guidelines. Just because there’s a little room for improvement—”
“A little?”
“A little,” he concurred and continued, “doesn’t mean that you didn’t do a fantastic job. What was my main point in this assessment?”
She thought. “That the reports were too broad.”
“One of your best skills is seeing problems in minutiae, predicting how they impact the big picture. You anticipate trouble in areas most people would dismiss as unimportant.” He waved a hand at the once-neat reports that were now annotated with his bold, black pen. “These are big picture reviews parroting the proposals, with allusions to minutiae glossed over. You need to reverse the view—up from the bottom, not down from the top.” He stacked the reports. “After you fix that, we’ll discuss the difference between finding weak links and micromanaging, so that you never fall into that trap.”
“So . . . you’re not firing me from my new job?”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth and jaw, eying the ceiling for a moment.
“Not today,” he finally managed. “Callie, don’t be ridiculous. Generally, this was excellent work, and from anyone else, I’d likely laud the effort with little reservation. But you second guessed yourself in your focus. Didn’t you?”
She shrugged. “I read some similar reports as a guide and ended up taking a more . . . typical approach than what I initially intended.”
“I promoted you, not someone typical. You second guessed me, too, didn’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Stop supposing and answer directly.”
“Yes,” she said rather curtly. “I second guessed myself.”
“And?”
“And I second guessed you. What you wanted.”
“And I’ll never do it again, Lucius,” he prompted gravely.
She smiled slightly, and sliced a quelling look at him, which—as usual—served only to amuse him. “I’ll try not to do it again,” was all she would promise, and she rose to retrieve the reports.
“Don’t go,” he said quickly, indicating that they move to the sofas. “Do you have anything new on the HRF?”
There wasn’t much new, exactly, but—with Lucius interjecting occasional questions—she revealed her plans to search for Carlyle’s christening in London parish records, many of which were scanned and online at Ancestry. And she spoke of the advice from her online genealogical friends who had advised watching for marginalia that would not have been transcribed, and the warning that Carlyle’s birth may well end up being what genealogists called a brick wall, never to be resolved; and little things she had discovered about parish records generally, and the parishes in Chelsea and West Sussex specifically.
And then there were details garnered about Neville’s travels to France and the Netherlands for business; the formation of Falcontor; Carlyle and Lily’s division of property, the comparative value of same and that it seemed quite equitable—barring the art, for Carlyle got the Birds and Lily whatever was at Linchgate, which was reputed to be quite a collection . . .;
. . . World War I and the Battle of the Somme where Carlyle allegedly received his head wound, and though she didn’t doubt Gordon, she was certain that gas hadn’t been used at the Somme, so perhaps Carlyle had fought elsewhere, and ordering his war records might be of use to clear up that bit of history, for nothing could be left to doubt; how Carlyle had had the end of the Chelsea possessions—including the Birds—shipped to Canada after he was demobbed, and was it possible he had thought to return to England permanently but Lily’s reaction to him changed his mind . . .
A long breath, then:
There was a daguerreotype—no, no, a tintype, because daguerreotypes were superseded by that time with the newer technology, if she recalled—of Neville and Elizabeth early in their marriage that Lucius’ parents had found for her, and a photograph of Elizabeth alone from several years later, and how the shape of the rather hard eyes was nothing like Lucius and Gordon’s, so it must have been just that softly luminescent blue, reminiscent of the Star of India star sapphire, rather than the bright, hard blue of typical corundum, that was passed on, though the image was in black and white, of course, so who could say . . .;
And the hope she could find in the mass of family historic papers Maddie was couriering to her this week that she could find some hint that the Birds had been commissioned, for none of those artists had done anything similar though none had had huge careers, and it was possible that the ravens were of some value for all their grimness, as it was far outside Pike’s rather poorly done still-lifes, demonstrating at least a glimmer of talent, and William Warner, who had done the nightingales, had had a brief career painting some once-important family in the Midlands in an overwrought Neoclassical style, and had tended in those family works—though predating Jung’s published list—to Jungian archetypes of Anima and Animus, but had deviated with those poor nightingales, devising the Scarecrow archetype in the most Dafoe sense, and were she a Jungian—and she wasn’t sure she was not—she would describe the Birds collectively, hah, hah, pun intended, as a subset of the collective unconscious, a descriptor unto themselves, as if trying to tell a story if only someone would lis
ten, but of course that was sheer imagining and she did not generally deal in such impracticalities, but still . . .;
And wasn’t it too bad that the cost of synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy was so prohibitive, because she’d love to hit the family with that instead of a claim of thin paint to prove clean canvasses; and that, accounting for inflation, the family had spent upwards of four hundred thousand on the HRF and hadn’t even gone through those papers, which, honestly, was as inadvisable as rearranging PEMDAS and cart and horse.
And so on.
It was dizzying and soothing all at once, that cool voice drifting across the low table to him, hypnotic and bewitching. It was stream of consciousness almost, but even when she seemingly drifted off topic, she pulled the threads together to make her point, providing clarity to a massively complex problem with many pieces. Seeing the minutiae without losing perspective.
He could listen to her all day; several times over the last couple of weeks, he had found himself pretending not to know what the devil she was talking about, just so he could hear the drone of her voice when she recited facts, the lilt of elated interest as she warmed to her subject, and the seductive cadence as she drew conclusions.
The meeting was over far too soon for him, but, all business, she escaped his office with her usual, “I have work to do,” and—tossing the reports on top of her notebook—vanished.
Nothing sexier than brains. He was still enjoying the almost post-coital bliss of her monologue when the rattling vibration of her phone on the table roused his attention. Shifting aside papers to locate it, he picked it up.
The display: Leon
Don’t do it.
Flipping open the phone: “Callie’s phone.”
“Er, hi. Is Callie there?”
He crossed to the door, turning the lock. “No, sorry. Is this Leon? She’s spoken of you often.”
A Bird Without Wings Page 20