A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man

by Celeste Bradley

  There, she felt like saying. Now we’re caught up, you douche.

  Piper clutched the briefcase to her chest with her free arm, determined to prevent another brush with catastrophe.

  “It really is wonderful to see you,” Mick said, smiling like he meant it.

  He’d arranged himself at a casual angle in the chair across the café table from her, the museum coffee shop humming with morning activity all around them. His long, denim-clad legs were nonchalantly crossed at the knee and an elbow was hooked over the back of his chair. His face was relaxed and handsome, but Piper would have to say he was more striking-looking now than when he was an assistant lecturer at Wellesley. He’d had a kind of baby-faced charm back then. Now, his face was thinner and more rugged, and his charm had an edge to it—not arrogance exactly. Maybe just an abundance of confidence.

  He had the same black eyebrows that contrasted so dramatically with his pure blue eyes. He had the same hair, dark and thick with curls, still a little longer at the collar than the norm. Black Irish, with the sexy accent to match.

  But one glance was all it took for Piper to tell that his body had changed dramatically. He was harder and bigger than he’d been at Wellesley, probably because he’d been doing fieldwork for the last decade instead of teaching others how to do it. She could detect the cut of his biceps and the swell of his chest beneath his collared T-shirt, which clung to a superbly flat stomach and tapered down into his belt. Too bad Mick was sitting down, she thought to herself. His best asset was hidden from view.

  Piper surprised herself. She rarely allowed herself such base thoughts about a colleague. Reading the diaries must have rewired her neurons.

  Oh, but who was she kidding? Mick had never been just a colleague. He’d been her first and only object of lava-hot lust. He’d been the only man she’d ever fantasized about, the only man who’d ever inspired her to touch herself.

  She’d been so young and stupid back in grad school. And she’d placed ridiculously naïve hopes and expectations on him, a man far beyond her grasp.

  Piper winced at the memory of how she and Brenna had drooled over Mick all those years ago. They set up camp in the front row of Mick’s ethnoarchaeology graduate seminar, transfixed by his baritone brogue and stupefied by his looks. And whenever he’d turn and raise his arm to write on the board, they’d clutch at each other and cease to breathe, waiting for the exact moment his herringbone jacket would rise over the belt of his faded Levi’s, exposing the curve of what was then and remained to this day—at least the last time she and Brenna discussed the matter—the single finest male butt either of them had ever encountered.

  It was understandable how Piper might still make that claim, since she hadn’t exactly gone on to a life of inspecting male posteriors. But for Brenna Nielsen to still rank Mick Malloy at the head of the rear-end list? Now that was saying something, since Piper’s best friend not only was a sexologist by profession but dedicated most of her free time to the study of the male form, the male psyche, and the male gender in all its glory. Piper couldn’t wait to tell Brenna that Mick was visiting Boston.

  She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The way Malloy was staring at her, it was obvious he expected her to engage in conversation. “It’s nice to see you, too,” she said, avoiding eye contact, afraid the shame she felt would be broadcast in her expression.

  Why did she have to meet up with Mick Malloy on the most angst-filled day of the last decade of her life? What had she ever done to deserve this kind of punishment? It wasn’t fair! Of course she was no fashionista, but at least she made an effort to look presentable on most workdays. But not today.

  Today, she hadn’t washed her hair or applied tinted moisturizer. Her lips were blue. She wore Birkenstock sandals and a rather shapeless linen dress in a dusky pink that brought out the bloodshot quality of eyes framed in duct tape. And beneath that disheveled exterior, Piper’s mind was in similar turmoil, short-circuiting with flashes of naked flesh sliding on satin sheets, silken ropes tied to bedposts, a perfumed bath drawn for two before the fireplace, and the vexing row of buttons on the front of an English gentleman’s breeches …

  I wanted this. I wanted to experience everything, to feel everything, to live, fully and unrepentantly, to suck the marrow out of every moment of freedom. I wanted to touch and be touched, to love and be loved, to fuck and be fucked.

  Across from Piper, Mick raised an eyebrow. “Hello?”

  She forced herself to breathe. Holy shit, she was having flashbacks! “Right. Yes. It’s been a long time.” She added, “Sorry, but I need to be going.” Piper stood, still clutching her briefcase. “The staff meeting is about start.”

  “I am aware of that,” Mick said, rising with her, his smile now decidedly devilish. “You know, you haven’t even asked me what I’m doing at the BMCS.”

  Mick was correct. She hadn’t asked. For the last fifteen minutes, she’d half listened to him describe his life of adventure while she’d been wrapped up in her own embarrassment—and embarrassingly sex-saturated thoughts—all while watching the clock and knowing she wouldn’t have time to get the diaries locked away. What if the stress caused her to develop a tic? That would be perfect. Blue lips. Duct-taped glasses. A facial tic. She’d have to beat the men off with a club.

  They began to walk together from the café.

  “You’re not the least bit curious?” he asked, looking down at her.

  Piper rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’m curious. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on loan to the museum,” he said in the deep, melodious brogue that had haunted her for a decade. “For the next six months, I’ll be on sabbatical working as a consultant to the board of trustees.”

  Piper stopped walking. “What did you say?”

  “It’s part of the faculty exchange agreement with the university.”

  Piper felt her blue lips go slack.

  “You don’t look thrilled,” Mick said.

  She shook her head, attempting to process the information. “Wow. That’s so great. Really.” The tears were seconds from spilling down her cheeks. “I have to go.”

  * * *

  Mick studied her from across the conference table, perplexed by what he saw.

  The last time he’d seen Piper she was the girl with the brown French braid, the huge green eyes, and the heart-shaped chin. In his mind he saw her clomping through campus on her scuffed clogs, usually reading, sometimes bumping into people, sporting a wardrobe of baggy Levi’s, turtleneck, and a moth-eaten Fair Isle sweater. She always wore preppy glasses. No earrings. No bracelets. No lipstick. No nothing.

  Twenty-year-old Piper Chase-Pierpont was known back then as the best friend of Brenna Nielsen, a Nordic beauty of good Minnesota stock, long-legged, blond, and sporting an attitude. He’d always found it funny that the two of them had glommed onto each other the way they had, giggling from the front row as they stared at his ass.

  But from the start he knew that Piper was more than the beauty queen’s sidekick. She was brilliant, cute, and shy, but her reticence was punctuated with moments of dry humor and dead-on insight that intrigued Mick.

  And through the years, if his mind happened to wander to Piper Chase-Pierpont, he’d imagined she’d grown into her looks, that she’d ditched the drab preppy look and admitted to herself that she was fine.

  He told himself that if he met up with Piper again, he’d find her sleek and sexy and in full control of her bad-ass female self.

  He’d been wrong, apparently.

  She sat directly across the conference table as the museum staff meeting dragged on into perpetuity, reminding him why he’d steered clear of desks and offices for so long. Piper had been doing an excellent job of avoiding eye contact, or even acknowledging his presence. According to one of the other curators—a little neddy-boy arse-kisser named Linc Northcutt—an ink pen had exploded in Piper’s mouth sometime over the weekend. That explained the blue lips. It didn’t explain everything else he was se
eing.

  She looked hollow-eyed and fatigued, yet her cheeks were in a constant state of blush. She clutched that briefcase so tightly to her belly that you’d think she was carrying around the original Dead Sea Scrolls. She wore beat-up Birkenstocks and some housecoatlike thing she’d probably found at a fancy organic free-trade boutique that managed to convince otherwise intelligent women to spend a fortune on a burlap sack.

  She deserved better.

  Piper glanced up at him. Mick jolted to attention. But she looked away immediately. He could see the red stain of embarrassment spread down her throat to her chest.

  Mick heard his name mentioned, and turned his attention from Piper to the museum’s executive director, Louis LaPaglia, who was obviously in the middle of introducing Mick to the staff.

  “And no,” LaPaglia added, a wry smile on his chubby face. “His salary is not coming out of our operating budget—it’s part of the university’s faculty exchange and sabbatical program, which is covering his entire six-month assignment.”

  Mick watched as the suspicion faded from several faces at the table. He couldn’t blame them for feeling threatened—the museum had lost close to six million of their endowment value in the last three years, and their exhibit receipts had plummeted forty-two percent in the same time period. Seven positions had been cut, more were likely, and it was a pattern being repeated all over the country throughout the nonprofit universe—museums, symphonies, zoos, libraries, theater companies—and everyone at that conference table knew they’d be substitute teaching or waiting tables if they were let go.

  He was here to help turn that trend around at the BMCS. He’d agreed to help launch a new fund-raising campaign if a portion of the proceeds went toward future archaeological exploration of Boston’s earliest urban settlements, one of his pet projects.

  He had other reasons for a visit to Boston. He needed to help his brother, Cullen, resuscitate the family pub business. And he needed to negotiate the terms of the Compass Cable Network reality TV project.

  Mick let his gaze wander back toward Piper. Suddenly, her bloodshot eyes locked with his. The connection lasted just an instant, but it was an instant longer than she’d managed all day and enough to send out a flash of sharp need. And sharper anger.

  But that couldn’t be. She was angry at him? She was the one who blew him off all those years ago. She wouldn’t return his calls. She refused to speak to him except to talk about her feckin’ thesis, like the disaster in her apartment had never even happened! She turned away every time he asked for a few moments of her time.

  Dear God, the girl had been stubborn. And he’d left Boston after that semester, headed to the Isle of Wight, and shoved the memory of that night to the back of his mind.

  But looking at her now, he couldn’t help but remember. The sweet, innocent Piper had gone and gotten herself absolutely langered at a department wine-and-cheese, then asked him to walk her back to her place, where she pulled him in the door by his lapel and became hell-bent on getting him in bed. Sweet Janey Mack! Like he didn’t want what she offered. But he’d never taken advantage of a woman in such a weakened state, and he wouldn’t be starting with a brilliant student he suspected was a virgin, especially weeks before he would be leaving Wellesley to start fieldwork. That wasn’t his style.

  Mick shut his eyes for an instant, trying to block out the details that were coming back to him. It didn’t work. He remembered how she’d stumbled toward the CD player and slipped in some Marvin Gaye, then begun a torturously clumsy striptease that, within seconds, revealed that Piper Chase-Pierpont had the mind of a future Ph.D. candidate and the body of pole dancer.

  Right before Mick’s eyes, his shy, cute prepster had morphed into an extremely fuckable drunk chick within arm’s reach, practically begging for it. Mick froze. His eyes got huge. His fingers trembled. The zipper on his jeans nearly busted.

  He couldn’t do it.

  So he’d scooped her turtleneck from the floor, covered her perfect bare breasts, and kissed her forehead. He told her he’d call her the next day. And he headed for the door.

  Mick had kept an eye on her career through mutual acquaintances over the years. He heard she’d had a rough go with her last exhibit, something about the contribution of New England’s women telephone operators during the first half of the twentieth century. Apparently, it had cost a bundle to stage and was heavily promoted, yet didn’t bring in the visitors. Mick even heard rumors that her job was likely the next to go. So when he accepted the temporary BMCS gig as a way to get home to Boston, he thought maybe she’d appreciate a friendly face—the face of a man who only wished the best for her.

  “Dr. Malloy?”

  LaPaglia was asking Mick to say something. He stood, told everyone a little about what he had in mind, and made a point of pausing to meet the eye of each staff member at the conference table.

  Except for Piper, of course, whose eyes were cast down onto her notepad, her left hand orchestrating white-knuckled flourishes of pen against paper. Her collection of doodles featured arrows shooting off in all directions and rockets blasting into space. Mick was no fan of Freud, but he couldn’t help but note that all Piper’s sketches were …

  Basically, they were phallic as fuck.

  Three

  Piper ignored the pounding on her door and pressed the couch pillow to the side of her head, hoping whoever it was would go away. She was finally enjoying a moment of peace, the diaries safely and intentionally miscatalogued into obscurity in the museum. Then she heard Brenna’s unhappy voice.

  “I saw your car parked on the street. I know you’re home, Piper. Open up or I’m calling your mother.”

  Ugh. Piper shuffled to the door and opened it a crack.

  Brenna’s eyes went wide. She quickly scanned Piper from head to toe, then glanced beyond to the large Konica digital copier that occupied half her living room.

  She narrowed one eye at Piper. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you better let me in.”

  She sighed, gesturing for her friend to cross the threshold into the apartment’s small foyer. Miss Meade toddled over to greet Brenna, and Piper’s friend picked up the cat and gave her an affectionate scratch behind the ears, even as she frowned at Piper.

  “It’s Monday. We were going to celebrate your birthday tonight. You haven’t returned my calls or texts. You look like Lindsay Lohan after a bender. And your lips—did you finally bite a pen in half? After all these years?”

  Piper rubbed her face to try to wake up. She must’ve fallen asleep on the couch. Clearly, she’d forgotten all about their weekly girls’ night out, and her big birthday blowout.

  When Brenna’s hand landed softly on her shoulder, Piper looked up. The sympathy she saw in her friend’s expression caused tears to well in her eyes. She didn’t want to cry any-more. All she’d been doing from the second she got home from work to the moment she fell asleep was cry, read, and then cry some more.

  “Oh God, what’s happened? What’s wrong?” Brenna dumped Miss Meade to the floor, a rude dismissal the cat didn’t appreciate, and led Piper to the couch. She cleared a spot for both of them to sit by gathering up all the copied diary pages and dumping the stack on the coffee table. In the process she noticed the duct-taped glasses, picked them up, gave them a quick inspection, then tossed them back to the table.

  “Were you in a car accident? When did this happen? Did you get medical attention?” Brenna’s pretty face began to twist in concern. “Piper, why didn’t you tell me? I swear to God I just don’t get you sometimes! You go around thinking you can handle everything by yourself! Why didn’t you let me help you? I’ve been worried sick!”

  Piper shook her head. “There was no car accident. I’m fine. A couple things happened that left me a little shaken up, that’s all.”

  Brenna slowly exhaled, and began rubbing Piper’s back. “Don’t bullshit me. You’re about as fine as your glasses are. What’s going on?”

  “It’s kind of a long sto
ry—”

  “And what are you doing with the ginormous copier?”

  Before Piper could answer, Brenna’s gaze wandered to the papers she’d just cleared aside. She grabbed the top pile, held together with a large paper clip and riddled with penciled-in notes. Piper leaned over enough to see a date and deduced that Brenna was examining a diary entry midway through Volume II, just before the crap hit the fan for Ophelia. It had been a time in her life when she was between “protectors” and playing the field, living large as the ultimate catch among London’s gentlemen. That time was spent gallivanting to the opera, the theater, and the finest dinners and parties. It was also a time when she regularly held private “salons” with gentlemen in her own home, a perfectly outrageous activity for a proper lady in that day and age, but not for the courtesan known as the Blackbird.

  Piper smiled as her friend’s eyes scanned frantically from line to line. She’d already decided to share her discovery with Brenna, which was good, since there’d be no chance of hiding anything now. Besides, she’d always told Brenna everything. Brenna knew she was back on dairy. She knew she’d struggled to find a theme for the Ophelia Harrington exhibit, and would surely appreciate the value of the journals.

  And her friend knew all about Mick Malloy.

  Just then, Brenna’s eyeballs popped. She began flipping from page to page, gasping and clicking her tongue in disbelief. Piper watched her desperately search for the cover page, written in an elegant, flowing hand.

  Volume II

  The Life of Ophelia Harrington, Courtesan

  Brenna looked sideways at Piper, not moving except to blink. “What in the name of God is this?” she whispered.

  Piper shrugged. “It’s pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think? The one you’re holding is the middle of her three journals. In my mind, I’ve been calling it her ‘Britney Spears Years.’”