How To Host a Seduction (12 page)

So why was she sitting here avoiding his gaze and full of angst about what he thought?

The man was bloody great sex, damn it. That was all.

She'd recognized those sparks between Harley and Mac because she experienced them with Christopher. Her body still tingled with the effects of that sort of debilitating passion.

All he had to do was
look
at her and she went to pieces. He touched her and she forgot time, obligation,
everything
but the passion she experienced in his arms. That was the only reason she cared what he thought. And she had four
days—or maybe only three, if her mother won the award—to get over
him.
She refused to spend her life suffering the kind of out-of-control longing she'd just witnessed between two mismatched private investigators.

Pining for a man who wasn't
the one.

Powerless to resist him whenever he glanced her way. Worried what he thought about her choices.

No, thank you.

The Library

E
LLEN ESCORTED
C
HRISTOPHER
into the library, where he spread out their mystery gear on a marble-topped table. They'd discovered their special clue to be a society column from a New Orleans newspaper that reported on guests at a Mardi Gras ball. Since the article didn't mention the captain or his sister, neither she nor Christopher could guess what it might mean to their investigation. They'd decided to search for Harley and Mac's diary, instead.

Ellen couldn't imagine what the replica of a nearly two-hundred-year-old diary might look like, but one glance at the walls of overstuffed shelves convinced her that one could be easily hidden in this room, refuting Mac's concerns about the transparency of hiding a diary in the library.

“I'm glad no one's here,” Christopher said.

“Just what do you think we'll be doing that precludes an audience?”

Dimples flashed. “I'd like to do any number of things in here with you, love.
All
of them preclude an audience.”

Ellen wouldn't dignify that with a response. Tugging up her ruffled collar in what had become a constant effort to hide her hickey, Ellen peered around for a place to begin her search.

Situated on the west side of the plantation, the library
boasted an entire wall of stained glass. Two walls of bookshelves overflowed with clever reproductions of first editions and literary fare from a vast variety of genres. Scanning the shelves at eye level, browsing the spines for curious titles, she decided against attempting the ladder while wearing enough ruffles to make climbing a feat worthy of a stunt double.

Not too much time had passed before he said, “Look at this, love. What do you make of the inscription?”

Ellen crossed the room to find him inspecting a Bible that had belonged to the captain's father. Inside was an inscription written to his son in boldly scrawled words that read,

The inscription itself wasn't noteworthy until Christopher flipped the book shut to show her the engraving on the front cover. Ellen understood the significance immediately.

“
Comte
d'Archand? The captain's father was a nobleman? I don't recall any mention of the captain being nobility in his biography, do you?”

“Not a word, but I'll check again.” Handing her the Bible, he strode back to the table. “I assumed he became a privateer to make his fortune.”

“Which makes you wonder why a nobleman would need to make his fortune running goods out of the Caribbean.”

“Exactly.”

Ellen followed, depositing the Bible in front of Christopher. He didn't glance up and she continued past, heading back toward a set of shelves by the door. Surveying the titles at eye level, she searched for one she'd noted earlier.

“I was right,” Christopher said. “The biography doesn't mention a thing about the captain's title.”

She was only half listening. Ah, there it was. Plucking the book from the shelf, she peered down at the cover.

Lafever Holdings

She flipped through the leatherbound reproduction of a book with handwritten entries, stopped at the last entry. “Listen to this, Christopher. ‘The Comte d'Archand, Charles Lafever, held his land from the Duc, as did his fathers for twelve generations. He answered his annual obligations, including military service, until his arrest in 1794.' Bless the feudal system and its detailed record keeping.”

“You're the history authority. I'll take your word for it.”

Whether she edited stories like those Susanna wrote, which were a rich blend of historical fact and fiction, or Tracy's costume pieces that only skimmed social customs for color, Ellen had learned enough about various historical traditions to justify Christopher's opinion. Which got her to thinking…

“You know, if the captain's noble birth is a clue, we really need to know more about him before we can even guess at his motive for murdering the governor's daughter.”

“Come sit,” Christopher said. “Tell me what you're talking about.”

Ellen tucked the book beneath her arm, lifted her skirts and joined him. “Everything you said before about estab
lishing means, opportunity and motive makes sense to solve the mystery, but this is more than a mystery, it's an unfolding story.”

The tiny furrow between Christopher's brows deepened but Ellen didn't give him a chance to ask questions.

“Felicity Clayton was a guest at Félicie Allée along with her parents and the mayor's family, so we already have means and opportunity for the captain to murder her. You said we need to focus on determining motive, which makes perfect sense. But if we don't know anything about his goals, how can we understand why he did the things he did—”

“Or guess what he might do?”

“Exactly, which means we have to find out everything we can about the captain. Conduct an in-depth character study of the man. We need to know his likes, dislikes and his desires. We need to know how far he's willing to go to get what he wants. Once we know these things, we'll be able to guess at what our society column might have meant to him.”

It wasn't until she paused that Ellen realized while they'd been speaking in hushed whispers they'd gravitated toward each other over the table. She was suddenly staring him full in the face. And he looked pleased,
very
pleased.

“You're brilliant, love,” he said.

And then he kissed her. One solid buss on the lips before he shot her a dimpled grin that was more than enthusiasm for the game. That grin told her he admired her cleverness and was glad she was his partner. That grin made her stomach flip-flop so hard her breath hitched. That grin made Ellen acknowledge just how much she liked to make him grin. And kiss her.

That craving again.

Leaning across the table, she kissed him back.

Christopher's reaction time was much more impressive than hers had been, because she never got a chance to back away before he'd driven his fingers into her hair, locking her against him so he could kiss her back. A real kiss.

His tongue plunged into her mouth, stealing her breath. Her insides swooped again and her thighs tingled—whether from the memory of last night's lovemaking or a brand-new response to this heated moment, Ellen couldn't say. The only thing she could say was that kissing him back sparked her craving as if she'd tossed a lighted match into a puddle of gas.

Their tongues tangled with an urgency that might have been justified had they not just spent a whole night indulging their needs. She grew dizzier and giddier as the tabletop cut into her rib cage. Or perhaps it was only his kiss that crushed the breath from her lungs. Either way, Ellen had to force herself to pull away, before she reached up, threaded her fingers into his hair and gave into this growing ache that should have been at least a little satisfied after last night.

“So,” she said, not a little shakily. “I suppose we need to know why the captain's father was arrested. It may explain why he left France for the Caribbean.”

“It may.” His grin never wavered.

But the damage was already done. Chemistry had become a part of their search. She wondered if they shouldn't just go back to the suite to indulge themselves, so they could get on with their work. Tension mounted to the point where she searched right alongside him just to bask in that crazy glow she got whenever he glanced up from a book to gaze warmly at her.

Until her brain finally took a giant leap out of the gutter. “Christopher! 1794.”

He glanced her way yet again, his gaze caressing her
face from her chin to her lips to her nose, until finally meeting hers. “What about it?”

“The French Revolution.”

“What about it?” he repeated.

“Honestly,” she said, with an exasperation that had more to do with her own breathlessness than his obtuseness. “What did you do when you toured France? Obviously you weren't paying attention to the history.”

“Uh, not usually.”

“I'm shocked,” she said wryly. “What was it that time—bungee-jumping from the Eiffel Tower or swimming the Channel to visit the Queen of England?”

He shot her an equally wry look. “A hot-air balloon.”

“While you were on that balloon, did you hear anything about trouble between the nobles and the peasants? Does the word
guillotine
ring any bells?”

“I studied the French Revolution. So shall we get busy looking for something to tie it to the Lafever family?”

With a “Humph!” Ellen hiked up her skirts and retreated to a bookcase on the opposite side of the room. Insufferable man.

But it wasn't long before Christopher dragged her right back to his side again.

“Pay dirt.” He held up a fabric-covered notebook. “The captain's mother's journal. And it's loaded with information about their estate and the family.” He bent over the shelf again. “There must be a dozen here. Help me look through them.”

Ellen hurried over, and didn't have a chance to comment before he motioned her to the floor.

“Sit. I'll hand them to you.”

She'd barely spread her skirts when he started handing her books. Organizing them according to date, she started reading the earliest entry.

The journals proved to be a gold mine of information, as the captain's mother, Allienor, had begun writing as soon as she became a bride. Ellen tallied the dated entries against her memory. “Allienor Lafever came to her husband's barony right before the start of the Revolution.”

When Christopher didn't reply, Ellen turned her attention to piecing together a picture of the captain's early years.

Working side-by-side in the companionable silence that came so easy to them, she acquainted herself with a young noblewoman who was madly in love with her husband and joyous at the long-awaited birth of a healthy son, after several miscarriages.

Christopher added other pieces to the puzzle—the building strife in France, the start of the Revolution and how the captain's father smuggled his young wife and son out of the country shortly before his arrest.

“I wonder what happened to him,” Ellen said. “I hope he wasn't beheaded.”

Christopher didn't look hopeful, and she supposed the fact that the captain became a privateer spoke for itself. “We need to find out, though, because Julian had a sister. If the captain's father didn't emigrate with his family, Brigitte may have been a half or even a stepsister.”

“Maybe his mother was pregnant when she left.” Ellen could hope, anyway, because the thought of the head-over-heels in love Allienor becoming a widow didn't appeal in the least.

Though some impugned the romance genre for its requisite happy endings, Ellen believed that love-conquers-all was the only ending worth reading. She could pick up any newspaper to read far too many stories that ended in tragedy.

“What about those journals?” She pointed to a few at
the bottom of the pile. “They're dated much later than the others. Let's look at them.”

They settled in to unearth the resolution of the tale, and Ellen supposed later that it had all begun innocently enough—her skimming through one journal, Christopher through another. Her back started to ache from prolonged sitting on the floor, where even a thick carpet couldn't protect her from the hardwood below. When Christopher pulled her against him, she didn't resist. His firmly muscled chest was preferable to the sofa back, which was stiff and prickly with antique upholstery.

Sandwiched as they were on the floor between the sofa and a freestanding bookshelf, they were hidden in a private little niche in an otherwise roomy library.

Which is why, she supposed, Christopher considered it perfectly acceptable to start idly thumbing her nipple.

She only let him because it felt so good.

The steady
flick, flick, flick
of his thumb brushing across the tip created just the right amount of friction between the fabric and sensitive skin below, skin that had been pleasured so thoroughly last night that her senses leapt at his attention.

A heated languor began to flow through her, running downward from his casual touch, through limbs tight from her awkward seat on the floor, through muscles achy from a night indulging in serious sex. It was such an oozy, pleasant sensation that emphasized the power of his body curled around her, the weight of his arm draped over her shoulders. A sensation that reminded her of those drowsy spells between closing her eyes and falling asleep. A warm, weightless place where her thoughts slowed with her breathing and her mind gave way to her body's command.

Ellen couldn't resist, though being felt up in a library where anyone could have walked in wasn't exactly proper.
In fact, if she thought about her behavior at all, she would have agreed it wasn't even remotely acceptable.

But she was having a hard time concentrating on the journal's passages much less devoting energy to do anything else. Though the plantation had been upgraded with the modern conveniences of central air, a shoofly still hung from the ceiling, and the gentle waving motion and soft whooshing sound only added to the pleasure drifting over her in their idyll.

And when she really got down to it, her gown's flounces covered most of Christopher's hand.

She was content to sit in his arms like this.

Unfortunately, Christopher wasn't.

Soon his thumb became a hand. His fingers molded the curve of her breast, exploring her in a way that made the blood slug through her veins, a lazy heat reminiscent of the Louisiana sun burning the morning mist off the bayou.

And those fingers soon began fondling, kneading her in a way that engaged so much more of her body than just breasts, which suddenly felt too full and heavy. The muscles in her most intimate places awakened, building in tempo to wanting squeezes that radiated through her belly and halfway down her thighs.