by Merry Farmer
Lenore hadn’t felt the same sort of excitement of possibility as she mounted the stairs to Phineas’s decidedly modest townhouse since she’d stepped off the ship at Portsmouth and set foot on British soil for the first time. It didn’t matter that Phineas clearly didn’t have the funds that the rest of the crowd Freddy and Reese ran with had, or that he answered his front door himself. The second Lenore saw him dressed for dinner and groomed to perfection in the context of his own home, her heart ran riot and her unmentionable parts thrummed in anticipation.
“Miss Garret, how lovely to see you,” Phineas greeted her, taking a step back and gesturing for her to enter. “Lord Herrington isn’t with you?”
“Good evening, Mr. Mercer,” she said, stepping into Phineas’s front hall. She unbuttoned her coat and turned her back to Phineas so that he could take it from her shoulders. “I’m afraid Freddy has come down with a bit of a cold,” she said, glancing coquettishly over her shoulder at Phineas, one eyebrow arched.
“Oh, dear,” Phineas said, his tone hinting he wasn’t fooled for a minute and that they’d both known that was the plan all along. “I will be sure to have my cook send him some of her fortifying bone broth to speed in his recovery.”
“You have a cook?” Lenore asked, teasing him as he hung her coat on a peg on one wall beside his own. If the peg wasn’t a sign of Phineas’s modest finances, then nothing was. Reese had an entirely separate room just for the coats, hats, and gloves of his guests, and a butler to carry them away.
Phineas sent her a look that said he knew he was being teased. “I have a cook and a maid both, I’ll have you know. Though neither of them live in. They’re day help only.”
Lenore’s brow shot up. On the one hand, that was decidedly middle-class for a man who was set to inherit a baronetcy someday. On the other, it was a blatant admission that they were alone in the house for the duration of the evening.
“How very interesting,” she said, lowering her voice to the appropriate level of purr that a gentleman who had invited a lady over to seduce her would expect.
“I would be happy to show you their handiwork, if you’re ready,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him down the hall.
It was not lost on Lenore that the sweep of his gesture took in both what appeared to be an entrance to a well-lit dining room from which delicious scents of supper were emanating and a staircase leading to private rooms upstairs, as though it were up to her to choose which way to go. She grinned to herself and continued on to the dining room, glancing deliberately up the stairs as she went. However the night ended, she hadn’t had supper yet. Some things always took priority over others.
Besides, the true purpose of her evening was to discover proof that Phineas Mercer was the author of Nocturne. Whatever else came after she’d teased an admission out of him or found her proof in other ways was best saved for dessert.
“What a lovely home you have,” Lenore said as Phineas held out a chair at the small dining room table for her. The table was very noticeably only set for two, in spite of the invitation ostensibly being for Freddy as well, confirming every suspicion Lenore had about the purpose of the evening.
“I know it’s not half as grand as anything you’re used to,” he said, pushing her chair in, then seating himself diagonally across the table from her. “Either here in London or in your Wild West.”
Lenore laughed. “You’d be surprised at how humbly we lived at home,” she said, genuinely impressed when he uncovered a few of the dishes waiting on the table and served her a generous helping of each of their contents. “Papa and Mama were never much for ostentation, no matter how well Papa’s businesses did.”
“Businesses?” Phineas asked. “Plural?”
“Papa started out life as a card sharp,” Lenore explained with a proud grin. “He was unbeatable, if the tales he spins are accurate. He actually won my mother in a bet as they were both traveling west on the Oregon Trail.”
Phin’s cool look of seduction broke into a smile of undisguised delight. “That could be the most American thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true,” Lenore said, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table and pouring for both herself and Phin as if she were the hostess and not a guest. If he intended to make the evening a cozy one, then she would participate to the fullest. “Once they reached Haskell, Papa tried his hand at a couple of different businesses. Unlike other men who tried multiple things because they failed, Papa succeeded at everything he put his hands on. He tended to get bored easily, though, and he still does, so he would start one business, sell it to someone just moving west, then start another. That all resulted in him owning one of the more successful ranches in Wyoming.”
Which, of course, made him a target for some of the more cut-throat ranchers who were causing so much trouble in the state at the moment, but the range wars were the last thing Lenore wanted to think about on what was shaping up to be a lovely evening.
“And what about you, Mr. Mercer?” she asked as they both started in on their supper. “What made you decide to publish erotic stories as a means of making a living?”
Phineas laughed. “I assure you, I don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking right at her. He was a brilliant liar, she had to give him that. The fact should have made her uneasy, but strangely, it only made her heart beat faster and made it harder for her to sit still. “I am but a humble member of the gentry,” he went on. “My father is a baronet, Sir Anthony Mercer. Our family has an ancient and dilapidated estate in Yorkshire that provides almost no income. Which has meant that my brother and myself have been forced to seek our fortunes elsewhere so that we might support our ailing father and three younger sisters, Hazel, Gladys, and Amaryllis.”
Lenore’s brow rose and her heart fluttered. She hadn’t expected Phineas to be so open or so domestic in his conversation. She’d expected the two of them to trade barbs and to tease each other mercilessly throughout supper in a way that would make Bonnie’s girls back home blush, until the moment their passions were so worked up that they couldn’t resist spilling into each other’s arms. Somewhere along the line, she’d planned to withhold affection from him until he confessed to authoring Nocturne just so that she would put him out of his misery. Now she found herself leaning closer to him, warmed by sentimentality.
“It must be difficult to be so far away from your family,” she said, fully aware that her tone had changed to something just as nostalgic as his talk of his family.
“It is,” Phineas said, shaking himself slightly, as though he, too, realized how far off course from his intentions he’d veered. “But Yorkshire is just a train ride away, whereas Wyoming….” He sent her a pointed look.
Lenore swallowed the bit she’d just taken, her throat squeezing as she did. She missed her parents and siblings terribly, and her chances of ever seeing them again were slim at best. “They write to me as often as they can,” she said, reaching for her wine.
She drank more of it than she should have in one gulp. How had the evening gotten so far off track already? She had to pull herself together and focus on her intentions if she was going to prove that Phineas was the man he refused to admit he was.
“So, has Lady Hamilton come knocking on your door, demanding blood yet?” she asked, batting her eyelashes teasingly at him and spearing a parsnip on her plate with particular ferocity.
Phineas’s expression melted back into the calm seduction it had been when she’d first arrived, something she had a feeling both of them were more comfortable with for the moment. “I don’t know what you can be referring to,” he said with an arch of one brow. “I barely know Lady Hamilton. The encounter in the Pickwick family’s hallway the other day was the most we’ve ever spoken to each other.”
“I see,” Lenore said, taking another sip of wine. He wasn’t going to crack with words alone. She would have to find a far cleverer way to get the truth out of him. “Then you wouldn’t be at all worried about her determination to bring th
e author of Nocturne out into the open?”
“Only in as much as an action like that might be seen as suppression,” he said with a casual shrug. “I believe that people should be free to speak their minds and to share ideas that society in general might not approve of.”
“But you approve of these ideas?” She sent him a pointed look. “Even though they are salacious to the point of being wicked?”
“If one chooses to be wicked, then it is a personal choice and should not be stifled by snobbery or false moralizing,” he said, giving Lenore the feeling that she’d hit on an issue he felt passionately about. “It is common knowledge that a good half of the people who rail against any given activity as being evil or sinful are guilty of practicing it themselves behind closed doors. Why not simply be open about one’s proclivities? If, indeed, those things are a sin, whose business is it other than the sinner’s?”
“What a fascinating opinion, Mr. Mercer.” Lenore grinned from ear to ear, wondering if she were getting somewhere. “I think you should write about that someday.”
“Someday, I might,” he replied with a wink that lit his gorgeous face with allure that had Lenore’s heart pounding.
There wasn’t a shred of doubt in Lenore’s head that Phineas was the very best kind of sinner as well as being the author of Nocturne. But before she explored the former, her pride demanded that she prove the latter. And since Phineas wasn’t going to confess….
“I’m terribly sorry about this,” she said, standing abruptly, “but would you give me directions to your water closet?”
“I’ll show you where it is,” he said, eyes practically sparkling, rising with her.
“Oh, no, that won’t be necessary,” she insisted, stepping away from her chair and toward the hall. “Just tell me which door it is and I’ll find my way there.”
His mouth pulled into a lopsided grin that made Lenore want to kiss it. “Second door on the right,” he said.
“I won’t be but a moment,” she said, gesturing to the table. “Please continue eating without me.”
She waited until he sat down—which he seemed reluctant to do—before skipping out to the hallway and disappearing around the corner. She could tell he wasn’t really fooled, which meant she had practically no time at all to snoop through his things in search of proof he was who she thought he was. Lucky for her, she’d discovered far more in far less time and under far more pressing circumstances.
Her first order of business was to find the water closet, exactly where he said it would be, then to open and shut the door so that he might think she truly was interested in using it. Once that was done, she tip-toed the rest of the way down the hall, searching for an office or library, or some sort of room where a man might write. Phineas’s house was tiny, all things considered, and she found exactly what she was looking for directly across the hall from the water closet.
As so many of the men who had gone before her family out to the West in the early days, she hit pay dirt almost immediately. She found herself in a small office crowded with books and, as one brief glance showed her, a copious amount of deliciously wicked drawings and paintings of women, men, and couples in various states of undress and sexual congress.
“Oh, my.” The temptation to abandon her search in favor of perusing Phineas’s art collection was almost too great to bear. A few of the drawings in particular made her tilt her head to the side and squint, then raise her eyebrows. “How is that even possible?” she asked, picking up the illicit drawing in question.
“One has to be exceptionally limber,” Phineas answered from the doorway.
Lenore shouldn’t have been half as surprised as she was to be caught in the act so quickly. She gasped all the same and dropped the drawing she’d been so fascinated with. Dropped it right onto a pile of past issues of Nocturne and writing paper scribbled with notes.
None of that was half as intriguing as the way Phineas leaned one shoulder wolfishly against the doorframe of his office, studying her with undisguised desire. “I should have known you’d be trouble from the moment we first met,” he said, casually undoing the buttons of his jacket.
Chapter 5
“I wasn’t—” Lenore stammered, darting a glance past Phineas’s shoulder to the hall, then looking behind her at the desk full of papers, drawings, and photographs, then back to Phineas himself. “I don’t—you have the wrong idea.” Her heart raced in her chest, and she didn’t seem to be able to draw a breath. And not simply because she’d been caught. The way Phineas finished with his jacket’s buttons had her insides shivering in expectation.
“I don’t think I have the wrong idea at all,” Phineas said, stalking deeper into the room and discarding his jacket as he did. He tossed it over a leather-upholstered chair sitting in front of the smoldering fireplace without so much as a side glance to see if it landed correctly over the arm of the chair—which it did, by no surprise at all—then proceeded to work open the buttons of his waistcoat.
Lenore’s eyes shot straight to his hands. They were beautiful, with long fingers and perfectly trimmed nails. They were the sort of hands that could do things, though they didn’t appear to be particularly calloused, like a working man. No, the things Lenore was certain those hands could do had nothing to do with hard labor and everything to do with the way he finished undoing the buttons of his waistcoat, letting it fall open to reveal a soft, white shirt.
“I understand entirely,” he said, lowering his voice to a timbre that was as intoxicating as the wine he’d served at their interrupted supper. “You’re a curious minx and you simply could not resist discovering all of my secrets.”
Lenore’s mouth dropped open, but no sound came out at first. He was dead right about that. She backed against the desk, thanking the heavens that bustles had gotten much smaller in recent years so that sitting against the edge of the desk was merely awkward instead of impossible. It was immediately necessary for her to grip the edges of the desk as Phineas stepped so close to her that their bodies were flush against each other, and she had to lean back slightly to stare up into his wicked, blue eyes.
“Did you have enough time to solve all of the mysteries of the universe?” he asked, brushing a hand up her side so that it came to rest just under her corseted breast. He leaned in so that his mouth was only inches from hers.
Good sense would dictate that Lenore should be terrified out of her mind to have a man make such a blatant advance on her. He’d already begun undressing, for heaven’s sake. The way he subtly nudged at her inner thigh with his knee, prompting her to widen her stance so that he could stand between her legs, was as bold an indication of impending seduction as possible. Any woman with half her wits intact would have run screaming from the room.
Lenore wasn’t a sensible woman. She wanted to throw herself on him, tear the rest of his clothes off, knock him to the ground and ride him like a prize stallion until they were both limp and satisfied.
“You cannot possibly think to deny that you are the author of Nocturne now,” she managed to say, though her words were decidedly breathless and infused with desire. “Not after I’ve seen all this.”
She turned her head slightly to gesture to the papers and photographs on the table. The moment she did, Phineas moved in, brushing his lips against the top of her neck where her jaw met her ear. He kissed and nibbled his way down to her pounding pulse-point as his hands journeyed farther up her sides to cradle her breasts in earnest. “Do you like what you see?” he asked in a wolfish whisper.
The question came just as her gaze settled on an etching of a couple engaged in a decidedly gymnastic tangle. “Oh, yes,” she sighed, snaking her arms around him and dropping one hand to his firm backside.
Phineas jerked straight at her possessive touch, staring into her eyes with a combination of surprise, fire, and amusement. “Good God, Miss Garrett. Is this the sort of behavior a darling of high society should engage in?”
“Who said I was anyone’s darling?” Lenore ask
ed in return, lowering her head just enough so that she could stare up at him through coquettishly lowered lashes.
“I knew you were the minx for me right from the moment I met you,” he replied with surprising passion.
He leaned in to kiss her, but Lenore was fast enough to raise a hand to his mouth, blocking him. “Ah-ah,” she scolded, grinning. “You’ll get nothing from me unless you admit to the truth of your literary activities.”
He leaned back, a positively devilish grin on his face. His eyes looked more impish than Lenore would have thought possible behind his spectacles. “You plan to resist me until I confess to authoring Nocturne?” His sensual mouth quirked into an amused grin. “It might be fun to work against that resistance and to see how quickly I can break it down.”
“I’m afraid you would be sadly disappointed at how firm I can be when I set my mind to something,” Lenore said, far calmer than she felt. In fact, her insides were burning and her sex was throbbing and wet for him already, to the point where if he changed his mind about the seduction, she would have to turn the tables and move heaven and earth to break down his resistance.
But Phineas replied, “I like the sound of that,” in a voice so rough with desire that Lenore was tempted to sweep everything off of his desk so that he could take her right then and there.
“You tell me your secret and I’ll tell you mine,” she purred, circling her hand around the tempting muscle of his backside before squeezing, and flashing a seductive smile up at him.
She knew she’d won when he sucked in a breath and involuntarily jerked into her, pressing the sinfully hard bulge in his trousers against her. He wanted her to the point where he would do or say anything to have her. Knowing that made her positively giddy with power.
“All right,” he said, bringing his mouth to within inches of hers again. “I’ll admit to it. I am, indeed, the author of Nocturne. I have been all along. Are you satisfied?”