A Novel Seduction

by Gwyn Cready

  “Absolutely. My sister Jill really liked the pink Power Ranger when she was little. She’s as tall as I am now.”

  “What are you reading?” He inclined his head toward her book.

  “Um… grown-up stuff.”

  He turned so that he could see the cover. “What’s it about? That girl looks like you.”

  Ellery turned the book over. The heroine had red hair, a body that was rocking a size zero dress and legs as long as the Ohio River. “Really? Which part?”

  He pointed to her face. “You have pretty eyes. My mom has pretty eyes too.”

  “Is your mom around?”

  “She’s sleepin’.”

  “Ah.” Ellery took a quick look down the aisle and spotted a woman curled over the armrest, mouth agape. “Does she know you’re unbuckled?”

  “I had to pee. What’s your book about?”

  “Well… it’s about a man who falls in love with a woman.”

  The boy chewed his lip, took a long look at Axel’s sleeping form then returned his gaze to the book. “Does she love him back?”

  “I think.”

  “Is it like Beauty and the Beast?”

  “Hmm. Probably.” What man didn’t have a few Beast-like tendencies, after all?

  “Will you read it to me?”

  The boy’s face was painted with eager, innocent desire, and Ellery melted. “Sure.”

  He leaned in and the finger went back in his mouth. She could smell the sweet, soapy scent of his skin and feel the heat of his body. She remembered how hot Jill had always seemed when she crawled into Ellery’s bed. It had been a long time since she’d had the pleasure of a child’s attention.

  She found the start of a random chapter and began.

  “The Beast,” she said, conjuring from her imagination, “was very alone and longed for someone to love him. He had been cursed by a wicked sorceress, whom he had offended. His punishment was to spend his life as a beast until he could convince a woman to love him.”

  Ellery paused. The boy gazed at the page, considering. Then he pointed to the paragraph from which she had been reading.

  “That word is ‘Peter,’ ” he said matter-of-factly, “and that one is ‘breast,’ not ‘beast.’ ”

  She clapped the book closed. “You read?”

  He shrugged. “Some stuff. I like Curious George best.”

  All righty. “Say, ah, it would probably be best if you didn’t mention this to your mom. Maybe you could tell me a story—about the Power Rangers, maybe.”

  “Henry?”

  The bleary-eyed woman hurried up to them.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, taking her son’s arm. “Was he bothering you?”

  “Not at all. We were trading Power Rangers stories.” Ellery tucked the book under her arm.

  “C’mon, Henry,” his mom said. “We’ve got to get back to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  “Nice to meet you, Henry,” Ellery said, holding out her hand.

  The boy shook it solemnly.

  As he walked away, Ellery felt an odd pang of longing, as if a better world had come her way but slipped through her fingers. She wondered what it would have been like to hold Henry on her lap. She wondered what it would have been like to hold any sort of baby on her lap.

  With a sigh, she returned to the book’s back cover.

  A few hours posing on Sir Peter Lely’s modeling chaise leads to a night of seductive passion, then Cam returns home and discovers his betrayal.

  Ellery put the book down and looked at Axel. Betrayal came in so many flavors. There was the soul-throttling betrayal of adultery, the quick lightning strike of a lie and the dull but aching grind of being taken for granted. But Axel’s betrayal had been different. Sure, there had been the daily exasperation of living with a man who didn’t take care of himself and whose need to party at all hours and go wherever his camera led had left her feeling inconsequential and vaguely prim.

  But the constant drinking and shooting and spending time with his friends had meant she couldn’t count on him.

  If she had told him that, he would have said, “Well, just tell me when it matters.” But life doesn’t work like that. You have to have a track record. And when she’d found out she was pregnant, she was paralyzed with fear. Fear that she wasn’t ready, fear that Axel wouldn’t want a child, fear that the career she’d been building would be compromised, fear that she was barely raising Jill properly. The one thing she hadn’t been afraid of was that Axel wasn’t ready. That had been a given.

  She wondered what would have happened if she had told him. She had been planning to, though it had taken her weeks to decide what she wanted. Then almost as soon as she decided she did want the baby, she lost it. That was the night she couldn’t raise Axel on his cell when the pain started. Her anxiety had grown as the cramping worsened, and by the time she was doubled up in pain, she was petrified and had no one to turn to.

  She’d driven herself to the hospital—foolish, she thought now, but in her terror-soaked brain, it had made sense—and walked, bleeding, into the emergency room, carrying her laptop so that she could work while she waited to be seen. That, too, had been foolish, for she was rushed into an ultrasound and then into a room to be prepared for surgery. She’d been quaking with fear, remembering too much of her mother’s frequent hospital stays before her death, and wishing Axel had been there to hold her hand.

  Everything about a surgery, especially an unexpected one, seems calculated to disempower. She was stripped of her clothes, her dignity and, with the insertion of the IV, her ability to move around. She’d curled up like a child, in pain and alone. When they’d asked if there was anyone she wanted them to call, she said no, and was wheeled, crying, into the operating room.

  She’d been furious she’d had to face that alone, furious that she’d had to endure that feeling of powerlessness without an advocate at her side. She’d expected Axel to find her missing at home and try to call. But he hadn’t, because he hadn’t arrived home. He didn’t stroll in until the middle of the next afternoon, long after she’d been released from the hospital.

  He said his phone had been stolen, that he’d found the perfect shot of the Sixteenth Street Bridge but had needed to wait for the moon to be right, and then he’d fallen asleep.

  Well, she’d had enough of the Sixteenth Street Bridge, and the faces of the commuters at the bus stop at Liberty and Wood, and the way the light hit the leaves at Point State Park—as well as the beer and the drugs—and she’d had it out with him: not about what she was really mad about, but about everything else.

  He’d been surprised at first. Their fights had been brief and sporadic—her complaints about his late nights and partying, while frequent, had been mild—and his surprise had turned to shock when she demanded he move out. But he had, especially after she’d made it clear she would not be changing her mind. Within a week he was out of her life forever—or so she had thought.

  Turning in his sleep, Axel barked his long legs against the seat in front of him, made a wuffle of complaint and settled his head in her direction.

  Ellery’s memory of their time together was complicated. They’d been in love, or an adolescent version of it, and she’d been working hard, often in conjunction with Axel, to build her career. In her head, the memory was a heady hodgepodge of late-night typing, take-out Thai, IKEA furniture and really great sex. The fiery breakup seemed such an incongruous end to it all that it sort of played in her head like slow-motion Super 8 footage of a butterfly flapping from flower to flower until it landed on her palm and dropped a poisoned stinger in it.

  Automatically she curled her fingers, feeling the imagined sharpness.

  It would have been stupid to have the child. What a mess she would have brought a baby into. It was just as well she’d miscarried, but when she let her imagination wander, she could still sometimes re-create that thick, slightly nauseated sense inside her and the feeling that she and Axel had been meant for
some higher purpose.

  He scratched his belly.

  Some higher purpose.

  She cleared her head and returned to Peter Lely and his star-crossed heroine. She hoped the sex made up for the unhappiness. She’d had enough betrayal to last a lifetime.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Wow, did sex make up for the unhappiness!

  Right now, Peter, who had turned out to be considerably more entrancing than Ellery’s art survey class in college had bothered to mention, had his lovely heroine pinned up against the wall of his studio’s balcony and was doing something Ellery was fairly certain wasn’t a common painter technique during the Restoration and frankly wasn’t sure could even be done. The heroine faced a choice of suggesting removal to the couch for a more thorough bit of underpainting or risking brick burn and quite possibly hip dislocation. Ellery couldn’t remember the last time she’d faced such an interesting choice. Her options lately ran more along the lines of news or bed, quit or be fired—

  “Chicken or pasta?”

  “What? No. Oh. Pasta, I guess.” Lots of room to grow in Axel’s pants, she thought, and then giggled, thinking how very different a meaning that phrase could have, especially in light of what she was reading.

  Axel, who had awakened at the first scent of dinner, looked up from his book, pointed at the chicken and gave Ellery a look.

  “Something funny there, Pittsburgh?”

  She wiped the smile from her face and shook her head firmly. The last thing she needed was Axel knowing she was thinking about his pants.

  The meals were served, and Ellery picked up her fork and returned to the book.

  It seemed the heroine didn’t have to make the choice, for when Peter finished tending to her outdoor needs—he was an early forerunner of the plein air tradition, apparently—he did exactly as Ellery had been hoping and carried the lucky girl inside for the final touches.

  Suddenly warm, Ellery fluttered the top of Axel’s borrowed shirt up and down before reaching above her to adjust the air.

  Axel eyed her with curiosity.

  The trouble with the characters having sex was that Peter believed his heroine was in love with him… well, at least in lust. And she was, but she had also come with the intention of prying some information out of him, and when Peter eventually realized that, he was going to be devastated, especially since the heroine was the first woman Peter had had any interest in since the death of his wife several years earlier.

  Ellery flipped the page, hoping that Peter wouldn’t figure it out or that the heroine would change her mind.

  “Are you going to eat that?”

  “Eat what?” she said, jarred by the interruption.

  “Em, that.” Axel pointed to a hunk of lasagna sitting on her fork. “It’s been hanging there for five minutes.”

  She gave him an irritated hm and popped it into her mouth.

  “Sorry. I was afraid it might attract flies, eh?” He smiled.

  “What are you up to?”

  Axel, who had picked up Kiltlander again, paused. “Just getting ideas for locations.”

  “Locations?”

  “Yes.”

  “You spent half an hour looking for locations? It must have been a page-by-page search.”

  “Just doing my job. Speaking of which”—he leaned in closer, and for an instant Ellery, who was more romance-addled than she’d realized, thought he might kiss her—“mind if I take a look at yours?”

  He meant the book. She exhaled. However, she was particularly reluctant to let go of Peter before she knew if his heart was going to be broken. “I… I…”

  “C’mon, Pittsburgh, how long does an examination need to be?”

  She sniffed and handed it to him.

  “Do you like it?”

  She looked around. “What? The book?”

  “Yes,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “The book.”

  “You know I don’t read stuff like that.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “‘Like’ doesn’t enter into it. I was reviewing the text, trying to identify the devices specific to the genre.” She thought of the wall of the balcony and wondered exactly how uncomfortable bricks would be on one’s back. “There are certain conventions authors follow that may help explain the overwhelmingly positive reaction romance novels seem to engender.” The image of Peter dropping the spent heroine on the wide, low couch and stripping off his shirt, those whiskey-colored eyes signaling his intent, swum in her head.

  “Do you have anything you want to add to the locations?” Axel asked.

  “Locations?” She wondered what the servants would have made of the distinctive sounds.

  “Ellery?”

  “Oh, God, sorry. Yes. Peter Lely’s studio, if it exists. I think it was in Covent Garden somewhere. Actually, I think the inside of any Restoration-era town house near Covent Garden would do, assuming it has a balcony. And bricks.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty specific.”

  “I thought you liked specific. Do you still need it?”

  “What? The book?”

  “Yes,” she said, imitating his sarcasm. “The book.”

  “I, ah, guess not.” He handed it back uncertainly.

  “Then I guess we’re set.” She settled back into her seat and found her page.

  They were kissing—those hard, hunger kisses that taste like mistakes. Ellery’s mind wandered, feeling those determined lips on hers, their pungent mixture of sadness and lust. She tempted them, teased them, bit them—

  She jerked so hard, the tray shook.

  She’d bitten Axel. On the lip. Last night. She was sure of it.

  With a sidelong glance, she scanned the battlefield. There it was. That curved red contusion on the stubbled skin above his mouth. Those were definitely tooth marks.

  Oh, God, what else had she done? And why hadn’t Axel said something? And what about Joe/John/Jake?

  She scoured her memory for details, but it was all too fuzzy.

  She couldn’t take it. “Axel.”

  “Mm.”

  “Did we kiss last night?”

  He turned the page he’d been reading without looking up. “That would be a yes.”

  “Before or after the other guy?” She prayed before. After seemed to leave room for too many other possibilities on the malt sacks in the brewery.

  “After.”

  “Did we…?”

  “No.”

  No? Her ego bridled. Why not? But while the soft grassy green in his eyes radiated sympathetic warmth, it revealed nothing.

  “Was it me kissing you,” she asked, “or you kissing me?”

  “I’d say it was pretty equal.”

  All right, then. So Harold and Ynez had had the power to get her to strip half naked, come on to a stranger and lock lips with her ex-boyfriend. You wouldn’t hear anyone making that claim for John Updike or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  She didn’t care for the unsettling footing this put her on with Axel, but there didn’t appear to be a remedy for it. Already the air between them was crackling with some sort of odd potential energy, though Axel, reading his book, was oblivious to it all. She wished she could recall more about the kissing. The only thing she could remember clearly, apart from the nip, was a disconcertingly clear sense that even if they hadn’t done it, she would have if he’d given her half the chance.

  “Well,” she said primly before settling back into her seat, “all I can say is that pill must have been pretty magical.”

  He grunted and returned to his reading.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  London Hilton, Park Lane

  Axel stared at the rain beyond the window, turning over her words. Magical pill, eh? That’s what she thought had inspired that kiss? He was half tempted to tell her the pill had been ibuprofen, but the point was if she thought that was the origin of the kiss, nothing he could say would make a difference.

  Despite the fact he suspected he might learn something on the
topic of dealing with uninspired kissing partners from Jemmie, the words on the page could not hold his attention.

  And in any case, what he had already learned from the man could, well, fill a book.

  Jemmie was quite the hero. In the few chapters of Kiltlander that Axel had been able to read, Jemmie had, in no particular order, dislocated a shoulder, killed a marauding English soldier, fought off six more with nothing but a barrel stave and a targe, rescued a child about to be hanged, captained a vessel at sea, held his breath underwater for almost two minutes, taught a priest how to use a dagger, beat a dirty card player at his own game, winning a brothel in the process, authored a pamphlet on liberty, escaped from the king’s secret prison, sworn a vow to honor his dead brother and lost his virginity to his new wife.

  Sadly, Axel lacked the skill to do any of those things except dislocate his shoulder, which he’d done once with a Homeric amount of crying, and lose his virginity, though that had happened so many years ago, it didn’t seem to be of much practical consequence.

  It was enough to make a man feel quite humble. Which was a shame, given the fact that he was stretched out on the couch in Ellery’s room.

  He had managed this enviable feat by entering a different check-in line in the lobby, waiting until she disappeared into the elevator, stepping out of line, counting to two hundred, appearing at her door and telling her there was a problem with his room. She’d agreed to let him stay until the front desk called to say his room was ready, and since he wasn’t registered nor had any plans to be, that was likely to be a long time—long enough, at least, for him to capture a nice long nap.

  He would pocket the per diem and now had the chance to watch Ellery walk around, fresh from the shower, in the hotel’s fluffy towel, waves of damp black hair streaming down her back.

  “So the appointment at London College is confirmed,” Ellery said, looking at her phone.

  “Great.”

  “And I’ve put together a list of questions. I figure we just need a few head shots of the professor. Maybe one of the college.”