She stopped. “Are you serious? There are people around.”
“No questioning,” he said. His voice was still deep in his throat, but now it was more husky, rougher.
Fine. She could play his game.
Gen balled up the underwear and reached under the tablecloth, finding his fingers. She opened her hand above his. “Got them?”
“Oops. Dropped them,” he said.
“What!” she whispered, imagining her black lace underwear lying on the floor, where she had the option of either letting someone find them later or crawling around under the tablecloth to retrieve them.
Arthur smiled. “I’m kidding.”
He leaned back and stuffed something in the interior breast pocket of his suit jacket. Gen caught a peek of something black and frothy.
Okay, he had probably been kidding about dropping them.
The waiter appeared at the table, pushing a cart holding two bowls of soup and a champagne bottle in an ice bucket, just as the lace disappeared into Arthur’s pocket.
Gen ate the supper acutely aware that, under the floaty skirt, she was naked from the waist down except for her high-heeled shoes. Every time she thought about it, the skin between her legs grew more sensitive.
She crossed her legs, squeezing herself.
Arthur watched her shift, and he stopped talking in the middle of his sentence, cleared his throat, and then continued.
They made small talk about people, Ruckus’s improving behavior, and some books they had read, and they joked around.
It felt just like always between them.
Except that she wasn’t wearing panties.
And he might tell her to do something else.
And she just might do it.
And occasionally, she caught Arthur with a small, secret smile.
They shared a creme brûlée with crackling sugar over the top. Gen let Arthur eat most of it because she wasn’t sure how much more strain that zipper on her side could take. Plus, the steak with peppercorn sauce had filled her up. And the champagne. Bottles of it. But she took a few good bites.
In the car, before they left the parking lot, Arthur leaned over the center console of the Aston Martin—which again looked like something out of a rocketship—and ran one fingertip down the side of her neck and around to her collarbone.
“You were a good girl in there,” he said, his voice low and sexy.
“Yeah?” she asked. His finger on the side of her neck and shoulder made her skin tingle.
“Oh, yes.” He leaned over, nearly close enough to kiss her, and his warm breath smelled like sugar.
Gen didn’t shift, didn’t move, but she wanted to.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, his breath feathering over her jaw.
“Kiss me,” she whispered, scared again, but she had said it.
His lips brushed her jaw, and he backed off. “You’ll have to be a better girl for that.”
“I—what?”
“Do what I say, when I say it. No arguing. No excuses.”
She sat straight up in her seat. “Are you serious?”
His voice dropped lower. “I’m always serious about this.”
He leaned back and buckled his seat belt.
A very small part of Gen’s mind warned her, He’s playing you, but she told that part of her brain to shut up.
Okay, if he wanted to play games, lawyers could play games.
THE HISTORY OF SPENCER HOUSE
Gen tried to make sense of that while Arthur drove them through the dark countryside back to Spencer House. He gave the car to a guy in the garage to put up for the night.
When Arthur held the car door for Gen, a breeze whipped at her skirt and she grabbed it, holding the material to her legs before the guy got a peek at her bare bottom. She almost dropped her clutch purse, trying to grab the material whirling around her legs.
Her head spun just a little from the succession of champagne bottles they had put away. Gen was a big girl and worked in a profession where many meetings were held over a liquid lunch, not to mention months of charity soirees with open bars, so she could hold her liquor pretty well.
Yet, champagne. What was it about champagne?
Under her foot, one sky-high heel of her fuck-me pumps skittered on gravel. She stumbled, reaching for the side of the car.
Arthur was already there beside her and grabbed her elbow, steadying her. Between his firm grip and the cool metal of the car, she was fine, and she laughed. Arthur was already smiling at her.
She could hold her liquor, though. She wasn’t wasted.
Really.
They walked in a side door. Arthur said to Gen. “Come with me.”
Gen followed him through the hallways of Spencer House to a library.
Oh, and what a library it was.
Gen sighed when she looked at it.
Books-books-books-books-books.
White bookcases stretched to the ceiling that seemed to be at least twenty feet above her head. A lot of the books seemed to be sets, leather-bound editions that were covered in the same color with gilded stripes running down the spines of the whole set. Other shelves held dozens of hardbacks and paperbacks.
She trailed her fingers over the books. “You like to read?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Summer holidays with my grandfather were often uneventful, especially in the evenings. During the day, I ran about with George, but I came in for dinner. The earl insisted that I dine with him and spend the evenings in the library. I learned to like reading.”
“I thought you didn’t come back to England much, that you spent your school vacations with those other guys, your friends.”
“Caz and Max. After my grandfather died, I spent the Christmas holidays with their families to be around friends, but I spent many of my summers here. Sometimes I visited Caz and Max for a few weeks, but Spencer House is my home.”
Gen practically dropped her tiny purse. “We need to document that. Part of Christopher’s case is that you didn’t return to Britain for years at a time.”
“Utter rubbish. Copies of my passport from that time are in the files. I set foot on British soil at least twice a year, often for months. I just made little effort to see him or my uncle. They didn’t particularly welcome me, the boy who would inherit what they thought Christopher should be entitled to. Most of the time, I came home.”
Gen gazed at the high ceilings, several stories above her, and the bookcases and delicately carved furniture pieces that must have been antiques and worth a fortune. “It’s hard to believe that this enormous mansion is a home.”
“Would you like a tour?”
A tour of a manor house that had been on a BBC show and that her mother would have fought tooth and nail to get into? “Yes, please.”
Even though she still wasn’t wearing panties.
But dang it. Spencer House.
Arthur’s smile was a little shy, and he looked out of the corners of his eyes at her. “Maybe we can do part of it tonight. We could start here.”
“That sounds good,” she said quickly and dropped her clutch purse on a small couch.
He gestured to the tall bookcases around them. “This is the single surviving library in the house. There used to be eight or nine libraries, but many of the volumes were donated to make way for other art or sold when the estate was in dire straits.”
“Oh,” Gen said, a sad, descending sound.
“I think it’s a shame, too. The art is wonderful, but at one time, we had three First Folios of Shakespeare, forty-three thousand first editions of other works, and fifty-seven Gutenberg Bibles. Most are gone.”
“Wow. Really?” Gen tried to stop her mind from chanting Books-books-books-books-books, but dang, how amazing was all that?
“Yes, indeed. We still have some rare volumes collected here, but the majority of the Finch-Hatten collection is now art and furniture. And jewelry. Plus some sculpture. And a few tapestries. Some of the remaining books here go
back centuries.”
“That’s amazing,” Gen said, slowly spinning around to look.
He motioned to the ceiling. “This house was built in 1505 by Lord Charles Spencer, so it has stood since the Tudor dynasty.”
“The Tudors. Queen Elizabeth the First and Henry the Eighth.”
“Those were the Tudors. My family held dukedoms and other noble titles before they built the house, of course. Nineteen generations of Spencers and Finch-Hattens have lived here.”
Gen was staring at the books, aware that some of these volumes were older than the United States of America. Far older. “How come you’re only an earl then, if your ancestors were dukes?”
Arthur grabbed his chest. “Oh, you wound me.”
“Oops. Sorry. Guess that’s not a polite thing to mention.”
He dropped his hand, grinning. “As a family goes in and out of favor with the monarch, one goes up and down the ladder of noble titles. For the last two centuries, we’ve held the Earldom of Severn. My many-greats grandmother, Margaret Spencer, the Duchess of Somerset, is the source of much of the family’s fortune, though that has varied with time and the monarchs’ favor, too. She took our family from minor nobility and some lands and raised them to be the most wealthy family in England for a time. Her portrait is in the next room.”
“I’d love to see it.”
He waved one hand. “You don’t have to. Seeing musty old portraits and antique chairs can be taxing.”
Gen turned to him. “I want to see it.”
He bit one side of his lip, sexy again, and smiled at her. “If you’d like.”
Arthur led Gen through tall, double doors to the next room over. Dark wood wainscoting and crown molding trimmed the red-upholstered walls and the wide fireplace. Silver platters adorned the walls, leaning on the top of the dark wood rail above her head’s height. The enormous soot-stained fireplace looked large enough to roast a haunch of one of the deer they’d seen in the deer park, or maybe even a roast elk.
Gen said, “Wow,” yet again.
“This room has been preserved almost entirely as it was in Tudor times, except for modern wiring and such. Pitch torches are quite the fire hazard. Duchess Margaret was a special friend of Queen Elizabeth the first. She was Mistress of the Robes, the Groom of the Stole, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and Ranger of the Great Park.”
“When you say they were special friends—” Gen began.
“I mean they were political allies, which was exceedingly important during Tudor times, far more so than anything else. You’re interested in these trivia?” Arthur asked.
“Oh, yes,” Gen assured him. She had always liked English history. Her mother had gone on and on about it, and it felt like Gen was seeing what she had only been told about. “Go on.”
“All right, if you’re interested. You can stop me whenever you want. I can ramble on about the house and the history of England for hours if you don’t stop me. We can save some for future trips.”
Would there be future trips to Spencer House?
Well, maybe. Depended on how coffee went in a few months or so.
And other things in the meantime. They might find out that they were totally incompatible in other ways.
She said to Arthur, “So tell me about Great-Grandmomma Margaret the Duchess.”
“Here she is.” Arthur gestured to a large painting, probably ten feet high and six feet across in a carved, dark frame. A woman stared haughtily out of the canvas, holding a staff, robes over her other arm, and golden keys attached to a chain at her waist. Her dark red gown matched the wallpaper. She looked down her nose at the viewer with deep brown eyes.
“She looks,” Gen searched for a polite word, “imposing.”
“Oh, she was,” he said. “She ran Queen Elizabeth’s government in many ways and was a fantastically wealthy woman. When Elizabeth’s government nearly fell, several times, often when she refused to name an heir, Margaret called in personal favors to make sure that the right people supported the Queen.”
“So she was a kingmaker,” Gen mused. “Or a queenmaker, actually.”
Arthur stared at the portrait as if he were reliving the past. “If Elizabeth’s government had fallen, the War of the Roses would have reignited, and England would have been mired in another bloody civil war, perhaps for another century. It’s not too much to say that she saved thousands of British lives with a few words in the right ears, essentially fighting bloodless wars. Bloodless wars are the best kind of wars. If you do them correctly, no one even knows they happened.”
“She sounds like quite a woman,” Gen said, watching him. His intent stare seemed like he was trying to speak to his ancestor across the centuries.
The smile had dropped away from Arthur’s mouth, and his eyes glittered with a metallic sheen as he stared at the portrait. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were reading something that was written deep within him, something imperative that Gen should hear and understand.
He said, “Margaret lent money to the government, at interest, to pay for the war to defeat the Spanish Armada. She saved England with a few strokes of her pen or a little bribe or a bit of blackmail so many times. She could have been called a spymaster with all her manipulations and machinations that no one discovered until I read her letters, which are in the archives here at Spencer House, but she was far more important than that. Queen Elizabeth knew it, though. By the time Elizabeth died, Margaret owned twenty-seven landed estates, more than the Queen, and she left it all to one grandson, Arthur Finch-Hatten.”
“You’re remarkably well-preserved,” Gen said, doing her best arch British accent. She still sounded dang Texan.
He laughed and shook his head, glancing at her with those silvery eyes so full of mischief. “Family names are reused as often as the family silver. My grandfather and my father were both named Charles.”
“And you’ve all lived here.”
“Since 1505, in this house. It has ninety-three rooms, thirty-one bedrooms, eighty-six fireplaces, and over seven hundred paintings.” He winked. “I used to give summer tours when I was a teenager under an assumed name. A few people figured me out.”
Interesting that he remembered the numbers. “It’s a wonder you have enough walls for all those paintings.”
Arthur laughed again, his somber mood thoroughly gone. He seemed so much like his jovial, devil-may-care self that it seemed incongruous that he had been so intense while looking at that portrait of his great-whatever grandmother.
He said, “Come on. Let’s look at the gallery, where we have many more walls for paintings.”
Arthur led her out of the Tudor Room and into a hallway, which converged to the main hallway in the middle of the house. The ceiling was at least four stories high there, maybe five, and paintings tiled the huge room. A wide staircase led up from where they were to the second floor, and a walkway ran around the edges of the gallery. Hallways led from it to the other wings of the house.
“That’s Charles the First, over there. We put him on the throne.”
“King Charles the First,” she said, just to clarify that point. Because, you know, he was the king.
“That’s the one. He sat for that portrait in one of the music rooms while he was at Spencer House to hunt deer. The art collection is one of the finest privately held collections in the world. Luckily, my ancestors had decent enough taste in art, and they managed to hold onto the collections through rough economic times.”
A small herd of housekeepers, all in matching black dresses, trotted past Gen and Arthur, hurrying off to clean something else in the enormous building. They all turned toward Arthur and nodded to him like a flock of curtseying geese.
Gen watched the servants scurry off. “Doesn’t look like times were ever that rough around here.”
Arthur shrugged. “In the 1930’s and 1940’s, times were rough all over England and the world. Owning art doesn’t pay the bills. The art might have been worth a great deal, but the farmers weren’t able
to pay their rents. A house that is five centuries old requires maintenance, a lot of it. During those years, my great-grandfather, Earl John Finch-Hatten, let go all but the most essential staff. Five people, I’ve heard, for the entire estate, including the gamekeeper. They used to find Lord John sitting in the dining room in the evenings, polishing the silver. We tried to give the house to the National Trust at that point, but when the committee members visited, it was raining. Water was pouring into the Great Hall, right here,” Arthur motioned at the carved wooden ceiling, now painted white, “right through the roof. It was pouring like a waterfall, buckets and buckets of water. They took one look and walked out. We nearly had to abandon it.”
Spencer House might have been torn down or just fallen into a destitute husk, a horrifying thought. “Oh, no.”
“Thus we were stuck with it, all through the War.”
“You mean World War Two,” she clarified.
Arthur scoffed, “Of course I mean World War Two. I’m British. Before the War, we had a house in London, too, but it was destroyed in the Blitz. We had evacuated everyone, all the family and the staff, to Spencer House because bombs fell only rarely this far from London. We stripped Finch-Hatten House in London down to the plaster, all the books, the art, the furniture, even the linens in the closets. It was empty when the German bomb destroyed it. We saved everything we could from Finch-Hatten House, everything except the architecture.”
She turned to him. “That’s so sad.”
“I’ve seen pictures. It was beautiful, though not as beautiful as Spencer House. This is the gem.”
“It really is gorgeous,” Gen said, still turning and looking at all the portraits of long-dead people, staring down at her across the centuries.
Arthur said, “This house was built to display art. It’s a trophy house, so to speak. It’s meant to show off our connections to royalty and our power in the kingdom. It was meant to awe and intimidate.”
Gen looked around at the cavernous hall that held hundreds of priceless paintings and stood taller than the highest ladder she had ever been on. “It’s working.”
“Oh, come now,” he said. “It’s just a house.”
Stiff Drink: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #1 Page 31