A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man (3 page)

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Two

Thus emboldened, I returned to the witness stand, determined to skewer the hypocrites, all of them.

“I stand accused of a murder I did not commit. And who are my accusers?” I scanned the packed courtroom and pointed to the offenders.

“The prosecutor is a man who has unsuccessfully courted me for more than a decade, a man known to grovel at my doorstep, only to burst into sobs when I sent him away. And the man bringing these charges?”

I took great relish in facing the sullen, vindictive wastrel, wondering how I could have ever found him dashing. “This is the blackguard who tried to sell me into sexual slavery years ago, only to beat me severely when I escaped his control.”

The courtroom erupted into gasps and murmurs. Yet I was not done. I stood in the witness box and raised my voice high and clear.

“This trial is naught but a temper tantrum thrown by enraged and undisciplined little boys, all of whom are in dire need of a good spanking!”

The alarm had gone off long ago, but Piper remained propped up on her pillows, in the same daze she’d been in all weekend. There was no other way to look at it—Ophelia Harrington had balls. The lady didn’t take crap off anyone—not her guardians, not the arbiters of decorum, not the men who sought out her company and then sought to rule her.

That chick had the courage to live life to its fullest—in and out of the boudoir.

It was all very inspiring. And exhausting.

After spending forty-eight hours in Ophelia’s exotic world of lust, excess, seduction, intrigue, and betrayal, Piper felt overwhelmed. The journals had aroused her and piqued her curiosity in equal measure, but she was far more accustomed to being piqued than being aroused, so, by this time, she was wiped out. Wasted. Hung over on a Monday morning and running late for work.

The sun sliced through the miniblinds. The window air conditioner hummed and rattled. Miss Meade was curled up at the foot of her double bed. This was where Piper was supposed to rise and dress and pack her brown-bag lunch and get herself to the museum. She had a 9
A.M.
staff meeting. She had an afternoon monthly budget session. But how was she supposed to do all that? How was she supposed to drag her sex-dazed self in there and pretend she was the same girl who’d come to work on Friday?

She wasn’t. And she’d probably never be that girl again, would she? Piper wiped at the tears suddenly running down her cheeks, laughing at her own ridiculousness. She’d made quite the wet mess of herself, hadn’t she?

Last night, for the first time in years, Piper had touched herself.

Last night, for the first time in her life, she’d managed to bring herself to orgasm. And not just the standard kind of orgasm. Inspired by the diaries, somehow Piper had charged headlong into a searing, core-rattling, devastating place she’d never visited before. She didn’t go there once. She went
four times
. And the most shocking part of all of it was that somehow, Mick Malloy had risen from her past and inserted his man-candy self into her orgasmic fantasies, weaving in and out of the jumbled historical sex-stew that had temporarily taken over her brain.

So now, as Piper sat there propped up against her pillows, it felt as if a dam had burst in her soul, as if the heat of Ophelia and Sir’s two-hundred-year-old sexual liaison had somehow burned down the walls she’d built inside herself.

And all Piper could think was,
Shit
. Because the truth was she needed more. And she needed the real thing. Like Ophelia. She wanted all of it—the intense passion, the devotion, the entire arc of a love story for the ages! Unfortunately, these things required an actual man.

I will not go there
.

She laughed again, so loud she disturbed Miss M. The cat raised her head and opened one eye long enough to pass judgment, then went back to sleep.

Piper needed to get a grip. She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and concentrated on removing herself from Ophelia’s sensual world. She forced herself to reenter her own mind, her own time and place, her own body.

She took a moment to notice that the sheets tossed over her legs were practical cotton, not the finest satin. She wore a holey Red Sox T-shirt, not some of Lementeur’s hand-stitched lingerie. Her muddy brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, not loose and glossy and jet black as it fell over her shoulders and onto her bare back.

Eventually, Piper became aware that her limbs trembled, either from exhaustion or exhilaration, she couldn’t be sure. But it was no mystery why her chest felt tight and heavy—it was the burden she now carried. Piper had become the sole executor of Ophelia Harrington’s secret legacy—every shocking and succulent morsel of it. In less than three months, Piper would have to unveil the Ophelia Harrington exhibit at the annual BMCS Fall Gala. She’d have to stand before the board of trustees, the cranky Claudia Harrington-Howell, and a lobby full of big-money museum donors and Boston muckety-mucks and show them what she’d come up with.

And here was Piper’s dilemma: would she proceed with her plan and give everyone a technically accurate and thoroughly inoffensive look at Ophelia’s home life and abolitionist work, or would she dare tell the whole story, as she now understood it?

Would Piper have the guts to commit professional suicide with an exhibit exposing the
truth
about Ophelia Harrington—that the righteous Yankee matron who demanded the end of American slavery was once a London call girl who gleefully rented herself out for debauchery?

Piper tossed the copied pages of Volume III to the bedspread and groaned with frustration. Who was she kidding? Even if she possessed balls the size of grapefruits, there was no way she could do justice to Ophelia’s decadent London world on a nonexistent budget. How could she re-create the courtesan’s boudoir, salon, and wardrobe—not to mention the Regency London social scene—without spending a fortune?

She wasn’t like her best friend. Piper couldn’t go around batting her eyelashes and showing a little cleavage the way Brenna did, getting people to upgrade her to first class or give her the window table.

Piper swung her legs over the side of the bed and staggered toward the bathroom, her mind reeling with every newly discovered fact about Ophelia Harrington and every corresponding missing piece with which she was now obsessed. For herself. Exhibit aside, she felt compelled to understand Ophelia and her choices. Just for herself.

How had that woman ever summoned the courage to live life on her own terms? What had that girl had that Piper didn’t?

She stretched, ripped off the T-shirt, and jumped under the spray. She had time for a lightning-quick shower but wouldn’t even bother with her hair. Who cared what she looked like, anyway? Piper was a scholar, an academic with her master’s in anthropology from Wellesley and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. She hadn’t been asked out on a date in six months. She operated in a world where her mind was all that mattered, all she needed. The fact that she was a woman in possession of hair and a face and a body was immaterial.

Piper toweled herself off roughly and grabbed her toothbrush. She caught sight of her reflection and gasped. Her lips were still a ghostly blue from the ink pen disaster. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was terribly pale. Her wavy hair had frizzed in the heat and humidity, defying the rubber band that imprisoned it. Piper reached for her broken glasses and burst out laughing.

God.
No wonder no one had asked her out lately. Her femininity was more than immaterial—it was downright undetectable!

No wonder Mick Malloy had walked out on her.

She dug around in her closet for something cool and roomy to wear and some comfy sandals to slip into. She returned the original diaries to her briefcase and shoved her working copy alongside. Piper set out on her Monday-morning commute into downtown Boston—there was no way she’d take the T with the original journals on her person—and arrived at the museum with a half hour to spare before her meeting. She would have just enough time to safely store the diaries, and once that was done, she would be able to breathe.

Piper swung into the first parking spot she found. She jogged to the rear museum entrance, already sweating, and used her employee card key to gain entrance. She scurried down the back hall toward the employee elevator, her glasses askew, rounded the corner …

And was knocked on her rump, the victim of a full-frontal collision with a person she never saw coming.

She watched, horrified, as the diaries ejected from her briefcase and went sliding across the linoleum floor, clearly visible through their Mylar storage sleeves. Without wasting a second, Piper scrambled on her hands and knees to collect them, shoving them one by one into the briefcase, hoping beyond hope that no one had seen anything.

She bolted to a stand, her chest heaving, and glared up into the face of the asshole who’d knocked her over.

She froze.

“Piper? Is that you?” The man’s blue eyes widened along with his dazzling white smile. “Hey! I was hoping I’d run into you on my first day here, but not like this!” He laughed. “Are you okay?”

Oh no. Please. Oh God. Oh holy shit. Any day but today.

Magnus “Mick” Malloy wrapped his fingers around Piper’s upper arm and leaned in close. He studied her broken glasses and blue lips.

“Rough weekend?” he asked.

*   *   *

Moments later Piper sat across from Mick in the museum café daintily sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup and trying to appear cheerful while anxiety ripped through her body. Mick had just told her he looked forward to catching up.

Catching up on
what
?

She hadn’t seen him in a decade. The last time she’d spoken to him about anything other than her master’s thesis, her underwear had been down around her ankles,
Let’s Get It On
was playing on her off-campus apartment CD player, and he was striding out her door, taking with him every morsel of bravado she’d scraped together for just that occasion. Mick Malloy had broken her heart. He’d crushed her self-confidence. Much later, he’d invaded her orgasms. But the point was, Mick was just a stranger.

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.