Chapter Eleven #2
“Shouldn’t you get dressed too?” Amelia suggested.
“After all, you’re only wearing a shirt and—and nethergarments.
” She mumbled the last word, for whereas she was imperturbable about such things as deadly teapots, explosive jewelry boxes, and packed lecture schedules, Caleb’s trouserless legs evidently embodied her one frailty.
Perhaps if they themselves were more frail, less shapely, she would not feel herself now in peril of gawking at them again.
And Amelia never gawked. Never mind being a Tarrant—she was an intelligent woman.
Yet here she was, blinking hard to keep herself from doing so.
Snatching up her lantern, she hastened for the door.
But as she passed Caleb, he caught her by the arm, stopping her. Reluctantly, for she knew what was coming, Amelia turned to face him.
“Yes?” she asked with exquisite nonchalance.
“About the…” he began, but trailed off in the obvious hope she’d finish the sentence for him.
“We are friends,” she said.
“You keep saying that.”
“And we’re adults,” she added.
“Allegedly,” he remarked sardonically.
“It can’t be unusual for adult friends to…”
“Snog?”
“Experiment with the intricacies of their…” Now she trailed off, but Caleb remained stubbornly silent. “Friendship,” she concluded rather weakly.
Caleb went on considering her for a moment that felt longer than the Plantagenets’ entire rule, even while one of its scions raged in the background. Amelia barely heard the ghost’s shit-talking. Her hearing was devoted wholly to the anticipation of what Caleb might say next. At last, he shrugged.
“In that case,” he said in his gorgeous smooth-and-rough, polished-and-dirty voice.
And he bent his head toward her, causing Amelia to promptly abandon all pretensions of breathing.
But the confounded man merely whispered near her ear, as if he didn’t want King John’s phantom to hear, “I look forward to undertaking several analytical trials.”
Amelia’s nervous system dissolved into hysterics.
She’d never heard the word analytical spoken in such an erotic manner before, and all she could think of was how she might inspire a further conversation about sampling, and examining, and coming to a definitive conclusion.
Caleb moved back just enough that he was able to look at her through a golden lock of hair, and Amelia realized there existed no hope of conversation.
For it was impossible to utter any word when her entire body was aflame.
“Merde!” King John yelled.
“No one asked you,” they snapped at him in unison. Then Amelia took a step back from Caleb in one final effort to be sensible. “Ottersock—”
“Is in Oxford,” Caleb interrupted. “And we are in Cumbria. What happens in Cumbria—”
“Stays in Cumbria.”
He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, and the slow, wicked curve of his lips practically deflowered Amelia on the spot.
She could only thank blame herself; after all, she’d been the one to request a kiss.
And she might just have requested another right then, but King John threw a chamber pot across the room, and in the horrifying second before it was proven to be empty, Amelia concluded that she definitely needed to concentrate on work.
With a quick frown at Caleb, she left for her own room and the calm dark it temporarily offered before the ghost and the professor wrought their fascinating chaos upon her again.
—
For the remainder of the night, Amelia and Caleb searched both bedrooms, evaluating several framed coins of medieval provenance, a badger-haired toothbrush that certainly looked as if it had been used in the thirteenth century, and a tin of cocaine cough lozenges that Caleb sampled before Amelia could decipher its faded label.
None of these evidenced any thaumaturgic power, although Caleb himself was certainly energized for an hour after eating one (three) of the lozenges: reciting speeches from Shakespeare’s Henry V just to aggravate King John’s ghost, and swatting at hallucinations of flying badgers.
No further kissing occurred, out of fear that someone might suddenly appear at the door.
Indeed, they were wholly professional, badgers notwithstanding, and felt rather disappointed that Throckmorton did not turn up.
If nothing else, he could have helped with moving the furniture to look for hidden artifacts.
Finally, the first faint stirring of daylight eroded the ghost into silence, and Amelia allowed exhaustion to claim her.
Caleb was already asleep on her bed, so she went to his instead.
An hour later, upon being awoken by a chambermaid drawing the curtains, she blearily and quite shockingly discovered herself hugging a pillow that smelled of Caleb’s aftershave, and turned so red the chambermaid asked if she was unwell.
If having a mad crush on my lifelong best friend might be considered unwell, then indeed, I ought to be in hospital, Amelia thought, giving herself a severe Tarrant-style frown even as outwardly she smiled at the chambermaid.
Returning to her own room, she passed Caleb in the corridor doing the same, and they nodded wordlessly to each other—for no degree of amor justifies a conversation at seven thirty a.m., especially after a mostly sleepless night.
But as Amelia washed and changed into fresh clothes, her memory of that night awakened; specifically, and in some detail, the kisses she had shared with Caleb.
Goosebumps stirred along her bare arms, not just from the morning’s chill.
The sensation of pulling on her drawers and securing her corset, when layered over with the kisses’ soft brushstrokes, made her imagine Caleb taking them back off again.
“Stop,” she whispered to herself, scandalized.
But then again, why should she? They’d agreed to experiment with their friendship, at least while in Cumbria. In fact, considering they were healthy, intelligent adults with a professionally trained sense of curiosity, it would surely be strange if they didn’t do so.
Amelia was happy to decide that this made perfect sense, and any rebuttal from a more sensible branch of her intellect need not be entertained. Besides, no one would ever know what went on in the privacy of her own mind.
Now that she finally gave herself permission to imagine, quite a lot went on, and quite inventively.
After all, one didn’t spend years studying history without developing a robust ability to envision things.
Furthermore, she would have been a poor scholar indeed had she not attempted to replicate these visions via physical trials.
Soon she became so giddy that, had anyone approached her right then to ask the likely provenance of a terra-cotta Zeus figurine, she’d have said “Neolithic England.” But work called, so eventually she pulled herself together and finished dressing.
With her shoes buttoned and a small book in her skirt pocket as an essential part of the outfit, she felt restored to, if not her usual degree of levelheadedness, then at least an eighty-five-degree angle of sanity.
It was only when she reached for the doorknob upon leaving the room that she discovered she’d put her cardigan on inside out.
But when Caleb entered the corridor just as she did, Amelia was confronted with two rather substantial flaws in her argument.
First, every nerve within her began fluttering the moment she set eyes on the man, and her brain shouted kiss!
kiss! with such enthusiasm that she had to press her lips together in case she spoke it aloud—or, worse, obeyed the command.
Second, she apprehended that her relationship with Caleb really was deep; so deep, in fact, that there existed a good chance he’d take one look at her and know exactly what had been going on in the privacy of her mind, let alone her bedchamber.
This thought accelerated the flutters to such a degree that she could barely walk straight.
Caleb placed a steadying hand on her lower back, and Amelia felt suddenly glad she was dressed in black, considering she was likely to die soon from nervous overexertion.
“Tired?” Caleb asked her, thankfully oblivious to the true cause of her instability.
“Hm,” she replied.
“Same,” he said with a piteous sigh, rubbing his free hand against his brow. “It was all I could do to get dressed.”
“Poor thing,” Amelia offered sympathetically, never mind that his black turtleneck jumper and impeccably ironed gray wool trousers suggested that he was planning to abandon their assignment and attend a fashion parade instead.
Kohl-rimmed eyes showed no trace of bleariness, and he appeared to have visited a manicurist somewhere between Amelia’s bedroom and his own.
He was so pretty, she could not resist touching him, even though she knew it was a bad, bad, terrible idea.
“Such fine wool,” she murmured, running her fingers down his sleeve and thrilling at the tingles caused in them by the merino’s texture. But unexpectedly, Caleb caught her hand.
“You’re hurt,” he said, and held the hand so that he could inspect it—a necessity, it must be said, for the scratch thereon was so minor he actually would have benefited from a magnifying glass to better view it. A frown creased his brow. “Who did this to you?”
Amelia tried to tug her hand free to no avail. “You, most likely,” she said. “Last night you briefly thought I was a badger, and tried to ward me off with a toothbrush.”
“Ugh,” he said, which she assumed was an apology. And then, far more lyrically, he kissed the tiny scratch.
Amelia’s stomach flipped, setting her so off-balance she nearly fell down the stairs. “Caleb,” she chided him in a whisper. “Anyone might see you.”
“There’s no one around to do so,” he said, and kissed her hand again. (Two footmen installed at the bottom of the stairs exchanged an amused glance.)
“Really, you mustn’t,” Amelia told him, and pulled her hand so determinedly, it escaped his grasp. She might want him to kiss her, but only in safer circumstances. “Professor Throckmorton is no doubt still here. If he catches you behaving like that, our jobs are forfeit.”
“Well, he’s leaving this morning. And then we can have all the fun with ‘friendship intricacies’ that we want.”
“Fun,” Amelia repeated, her dubiousness born from Tarrant instinct.
“Oh, yes,” he promised, grinning so rakishly that Amelia noticed one of the footmen blush.
Thankfully, before something caught fire, Caleb jogged down the last three steps into the entrance hall, then turned to watch her follow more sedately.
A footman led them toward a half-open door, through which drifted the mingled aromas of bacon and pipe tobacco.
“As soon as Throckmorton is gone,” Caleb continued, “I’m going to bandage that wound—”
“Tiny scratch,” she corrected him.
“Terrible injury. And I’m going to smile at you all I want. And then I’m going to—” He finished the sentence by means of bouncing his eyebrows, and Amelia swatted his arm lightly.
“Stop it, you incorrigible rotter.”
“Come on, Meely.” He swayed so that their shoulders bumped. “You must agree, last night’s kiss was the best in the entire history of—”
“Balderdash!” Throckmorton’s bullish voice rocketed out from the parlor, destroying Caleb’s playful mood and slamming calm dignity like a barricade across Amelia’s face.
Pausing in front of the door, they both took a deep breath.
I can do this, Amelia told herself. I’ve sat in faculty meetings full of men like Booming Basil.
Just one, just over breakfast, will be tolerable.
“Nietzsche!” the medieval studies professor shouted. “ ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ ”
“Ah, but if I stab you with this fork, it will cause you pain, and that’s a fact,” came a second voice. “Empiricism is the sole acceptable method of studying history.”
Amelia and Caleb exchanged an appalled look, and not just because of the simplistic argument.
As one, they looked behind them to consider possible escape routes.
But at that moment the footman grew tired of waiting for them and reached out to push the door fully ajar.
Trapped, they turned their heads with grim inevitability, staring into the room.
Professor Throckmorton sat at the end of the white-clothed table, pipe in one hand, heaped spoonful of baked beans in the other, and a squashed bean adrift in his beard.
Catty-corner to him, Vanity had her head lowered, focusing intently on a cup of tea.
Sir Nigel, in a shabby dressing gown and decidedly unnerved expression, was gazing at the extensive collection of antique plates displayed on the wall as if counting them.
Beside him, with an upraised fork that looked altogether reminiscent of King John’s sword (albeit with a piece of bacon affixed), sat a gentleman bedecked in tweed the same brown hue as the large, curved pipe emerging from beneath his bushy mustache.
Amelia’s heart dropped. Caleb took a cautious step away from her. Together, they stared in dismay at Mr. Dummersby of the British Museum.