Chapter 16 #3
“Why are we talking so much about me?” Beau released my hand but took his time doing it. “Why can’t we talk about you? Because I’m not the most interesting thing in this room—you are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; you know my life. It’s a patchwork of disasters. I was a patchwork of disasters before all this”—gesturing at the book world around us, the Astral Library beyond that—“happened.”
“Oh, honey, no.” Beau smiled a sweeter, sadder smile than the dimpled stunner he’d just flashed me. It kept the dimples hidden but creased his eyes and his cheeks in mesmerizing parallel lines. “Under the surface we’re all a patchwork of disasters.”
“Some of us more than others.” I shrugged, trying to sound flippant. “I don’t know who my father is, and my mother didn’t want me. Get kicked out into the world with a start like that, you’re guaranteed to be a fuckup.”
“Your mom’s the fuckup for missing out on your life. Not you.”
“You know I keep seeing her? In a book world, then in a painting world . . . I feel like any time I slow down enough to take a look around me, she could pop up. Only so far, it’s never her.”
“It could be.” Beau tilted his head. “What if she disappeared into a book, and that’s why she left you?”
“I thought that too. I asked the Librarian but she said she couldn’t tell.” I tried to smile. “Apparently even the Astral Library has HIPAA violations.”
Beau pointed at my tablet. “Could that tell you?”
I looked down at it. “I’m afraid to ask.”
He hooked one finger through the long strand of pearls around my neck. “I’m here for you, Alix.”
“It’ll just tell me no,” I said.
He waited.
I took a deep breath and typed my mother’s name into the search bar. Hit Enter.
Access denied.
I wasn’t really surprised to see it. Not surprised, but disappointed despite myself—disappointed enough that tears pricked the corners of my eyes.
“Dammit, I’m going to ruin this lovely court makeup job that came with the dress.
” I tried to smile, tried to blink the tears away before they could fall. “See? Told you I was a fuckup.”
“That’s the last thing you are.” Beau twirled his fingers through another loop of my pearls, shortening the distance between us. “You should see yourself, dancing between book worlds like a magician, spinning doors out of pages. You are seriously impressive, Alix Watson.”
Because the Astral Library had chosen me, sprinkled some of its stardust on me. “It’s this place, that’s all.”
“I don’t think so.” Tilting his head, gaze on me unblinking. “I think it’s you.”
Maybe he was only trying to cheer me up, distract me from my disappointment over not seeing my mother’s name in the tablet . . . But I still felt the wild urge to take a risk. “Are you flirting with me, monsieur?” I asked, the sound of the music from below still swooping and swirling in the air.
“You tell me, czarina.”
“I thought you only flirted with aspiring models who can’t spell their names. Should I start signing myself A-L-Y-X?”
“Don’t you dare. And if you can’t tell I’m flirting with you right now, I need to up my game.”
“Oh, I think your game is fine.”
“Seduction: the only sport I’ve ever been good at.”
“Since when is seduction a sport?”
He wound another loop in my pearls, drawing me closer. “It is if you do it right.”
“You’re good at other sports,” I said, feeling my mouth go dry. “Where’d you pick up all those sword moves?”
“Tae kwon do, when I was fourteen. Get stuffed into enough lockers by enough football players, the idea of learning to flip people over your shoulder starts looking pretty good. I had a lot of staff training with a bo.” A lazy smile. “It translates pretty well to a sword.”
“What else translates from tae kwon do to The Three Musketeers?” I managed to ask, heart pounding away behind my carved busk.
“Dexterity. Endurance. Patience.” Three more loops of my necklace were sliding down his wrist now. He began walking his fingertips up the strand pearl by pearl, climbing toward my neck. “Learning to take . . . your . . . time . . .”
Things like this don’t happen to me, I couldn’t help but think.
Things like this only happen in books. But I was in a book, quite literally.
I was in a book, and a beautiful man was flirting with me, climbing his touch slowly, so very slowly, up toward my throat like a prince climbing Rapunzel’s hair hand over hand up toward the tower window.
Until Beau’s fingertips reached the top and curved around the back of my neck, and then he leaned down and unhurriedly kissed the space just below my ear, first on one side, then on the other.
Then he looked at me through those long lashes, and grinned like a devil. “Where next, milady?”
I hadn’t ever taken tae kwon do and I hadn’t ever learned patience either. I grabbed the broad Regency lapels on that wine-colored frock coat and pulled his mouth down to mine.
He was like falling into a world of velvet, being swathed in satin, spun into gold thread. All that diamond glitter on the surface of him, and I’d never imagined such a soft blaze of warmth beneath it.
“Hello there!” a cheerful young man’s voice exclaimed. “Locked in, are you?”
Bad timing, d’Artagnan! I wanted to shriek, because that’s clearly who this was: the young hero in dusty riding leathers, sparking and fizzing because he’d just completed his chapter 20 quest for queen and country.
Adorable, if I didn’t currently want to throttle him.
Beau unhooked his fingertips from the neckline of my velvet bodice and I untangled my hands from his linen stock, both of us breathing a trifle unsteadily as we looked toward our rescuer.
“Sir.” Beau must have realized who we were addressing, because he swept a bow that dripped chivalry and gravitas. “If we might beg your assistance? We labor in service of a very great lady, and are pursued by those who would threaten her. Your assistance in this matter—”
“Say no more,” cried d’Artagnan, and he bowed over my hand with a flourish of his plumed hat and a flash of the eyes that somewhat dispelled my urge to choke him. “I am to the streets of Paris myself, and I will light your way, my own service to a very great lady just dispatched.”
He was practically leaping off the tapestried walls as he led us out of the anteroom and down a series of corridors, like a big bouncy puppy with a sword and bucket boots.
At first the floors beneath were marble, then plainer stone as we found the servants’ passages, and all the while d’Artagnan yattered deliriously about his ladylove— “Beautiful as a summer moon, her eyes like diamonds and her skin like pearls! I pledge my love to her until my dying breath!”
“He’s gonna be banging Lady de Winter in another hundred pages,” I muttered, throwing a load of satin skirts over one arm as I trotted to keep up. “Some fidelity!”
Beau elbowed me, grinning as he fingered his neckcloth. “You destroyed my cravat, you jezebel. You know how long it takes to tie a cravat en cascade?”
“I’ll destroy your whole ensemble if you give me fifteen minutes and a little privacy,” I purred back with a swoop of my eyelashes.
I’d never been much for flirting, but with that kiss fizzing in me like Dom Pérignon and this extravagant gown billowing around me, I was swooping my lashes like Scarlett O’Hara.
I even gave a little flutter of my feather fan, starting to see the point of all these historical clothes as an aid to passion.
A man tugging one finger through the complicated lacing of a bodice raises the pulse a lot more than feeling one wrench at the laundry-mangled hooks of an old Walmart bra, and the frustrating sensation of Beau’s lean form up against mine with all those layers of broadcloth, damask, satin, and linen between us just made me yearn to peel him out of them . . .
I couldn’t help but start meditating what book we might margin-travel to—what book had a convenient fainting couch to hand where we could do a little more exploration under all these layers after we dispatched Chad and Chester—but a bell tolled somewhere outside the palace in the dark Paris night, and I thought of the broken clock in the Astral Library with the Librarian lying unconscious beneath it.
Could she be waking yet? How much time had we bought her, jumping between books?
Was the door holding against the Library Board?
I spoke up, pitching my voice under d’Artagnan’s excited chatter. “Beau, I think we should go back and—”
“Alix Watson,” a familiar, monotonous, dual-voiced drone sounded up ahead. “Please come with—”
“Monsieur d’Artagnan,” Beau called out at once. “Our enemy approaches. If you and I might fend them off while my good lady here”—indicating me with a sweeping gesture—“makes arrangements for our escape—”
But as soon as the striding duo of Chad and Chester (version six by now? Seven?) came around the corner, d’Artagnan let out a delighted howl of “Leave them to me!” and flew to the attack.
“Damned if I will, sir, a Sato-Jones leaves no fray without a blow struck!” Beau howled right back, flourishing his walking stick, and soon there was a brisk fight ranging up and down the stone corridor of the H?tel de Ville.
Chad and Chester definitely knew to dodge the swords by now, and they were doing so with surprising speed, but Beau was using his walking stick as a quarterstaff to great effect.
All that tae kwon do had clearly paid off—he moved through a series of geometrically precise passes, thwack thwack thwack, putting Chester on the ground and then whirling to the rescue of d’Artagnan, who Chad had pinned to the ground after sliding past a disemboweling lunge.
“Not today, you acetate horror show,” Beau yelled, neckcloth flying, stick whirling over his head in a complex figure-eight before coming down with a smash across Chad’s neck. “All for one and one for all—”
And I realized maybe I had something more than a crush on Beau, something more than the desire to peel him out of his frock coat, because my heart squeezed in my chest—literally squeezed to see him grinning and shouting and knight-erranting all over instead of flashing that sequined shield of a smile that hid all the pain and complexities underneath.
That unruly muscle in my chest, squeezing and trembling under my tawny velvet bodice and boned stays and ivory busk with the threesome etched on it.
“My hero,” I sang out to him like any damsel worth her stuff, and as d’Artagnan bounded to his feet with a whoop and he and Beau engaged Chester between them, I swiped the green tablet open and thumbed us back to the Astral Library.