Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

“Would you?” he said. “I’ve got a few tales that would curl a listener’s hair.”

She pul ed a ringlet from her tousled mass, lifted a brow, and they laughed.

Stephen, who had been sitting at his desk attempting to repair a particularly il -prepared printing plate, cast an automatic glance down the hal and shifted. He had been made privy to a range of sounds this evening, including some that could only be described, if indeed words could ever be put to them, as indelicate, and he would have just as soon been standing at the riverside next to his fel ow revelers with a bottle of ale in his hand, but nothing would have induced him to leave the watching of the stairs to anyone else. Nonetheless, the silence above him seemed ominous, especial y given the most particular set of noises that had preceded it.

His experience, while not broad, was consistent, and silence, such utterly perfect silence, did not fit his notion of proper postcoital relations. Which is why when the sudden sound of laughter rattled through the floorboards above, he released a breath he hadn’t even been aware he was holding.

Saints be praised. Peter has found his savior.

22

Mertons paced his smal room, furious. He’d been banging and shouting for half an hour, but the room was in the lowest floor of the house, and if anyone heard they remained unmoved.

The cunning fox was probably plying Peter with her wares now. If Peter were not smart enough to see a trap when it was laid for him, surely he would not divulge an iota of information on Van Dyck, not when the sole purpose of their trip here had been to save that idiot’s reputation.

The locked turned and Mertons started. It was an apprentice from Stephen’s troop of apes, though this time, one smal er than a barn, which gave him hope.

“Master wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.”

“I should think so.”

Mertons took the stairs two at a time and pelted down the hal . He listened for the signs that the woman had been subdued but heard nothing. The thought of a gag brought a smal smile to his face.

The office was empty, and Mertons was just about to bolt again when the side door banged open and Peter, wearing a rumpled shirt and a stormy, unrested face, flung a canvas so hard into a box for unwanted jetsam that he knocked the box several feet across the room.

“What on earth … ?”

Peter silenced him with a molten glare, col apsed into his seat and dropped his head in his hands.

“The deed is done. Take me back.”

23

Cam typed quickly, despite occasional breaks to wait out a spel of Jeanne resettling herself with a sleepy sigh on the long office couch or to wipe the lens of wetness from her eyes. She’d been working hard since arriving back in the twenty-first century a few hours earlier, but she wasn’t going to stop until she was done—especial y because stopping meant she’d have more time to think, and thinking was the last thing she wanted to do after leaving Peter’s bed with her tail between her legs.

At least she had gotten a story angle—a great story angle, she might add. Peter had told her about the affair Van Dyck, the old lech, had had with a young girl named Agnes. Gisel e, it turned, had been a nonstarter. Nothing but a seventeenth-century stalker. Apparently even painters had those.

Agnes, on the other hand, was a girl who had been identified by Van Dyck early in her young life as a potential wife. Van Dyck had supplied the abbess of the orphanage where Agnes lived with enough money to sponsor the girl’s education and to ensure she would never be exposed to anything that might awaken her sexual curiosity. Van Dyck, it seemed, had an unearthly fear of being cuckolded—the hobgoblin of men with smal minds and even smal er penises—and wanted his future wife to be entirely devoted to him.

Natural y when she emerged from the orphanage as a young woman Agnes promptly fel in love with a man her own age—Cam had a sneaking suspicion this was Peter, though he referred to the young man as Horace—and Van Dyck