A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man (4 page)

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 seeing.

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 story—”

“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.