Chapter 2 #3
And it will be much more enjoyable if it is your delicate hands upon my naked skin, rather than my nephew’s.
She was very still for a moment. Then her gaze went, he presumed involuntarily, to his thigh. Then back up.
He waited. He hoped that any evidence of his arousal had subsided, considering where her eyes had settled.
“I would be willing,” she said, with a wary firmness that cost her, he could see it, “to carry out your treatments. If that is what is required.”
“It is what is required.”
She took a breath. “Then I see no obstacle. Are you ready to—”
“I will have to think about it,” Nicholas said.
The lady blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“I will have to think about it,” he repeated. “You are proposing I abandon my current post, travel to Oxford, act as a proxy scholar for an unknown length of time … three months, you said … and administer my own medical care into the bargain. I will require a day to consider the terms.”
Or, rather, he needed to speak with Lorenzo and his hosts about this very odd offer.
She stared at him, clearly unprepared for this outcome. “A day.”
“I am a methodical man, Miss—”
“Metcalfe,” she said. “Miss Metcalfe.”
The name resonated with the quiet click of a key in a lock.
Oxford, he thought. Gabriel’s tutor was visited by a Miss Metcalfe.
Gabriel had mentioned that the woman who had come to Horace Pelham’s rooms before his death had been searching for the Caxton first edition and had been redirected by Horace toward the Malory manuscript. She had been described as scholarly. Educated.
“From Oxford,” he said. Not quite a question.
She seemed mildly surprised. “My father’s house is near the Bodleian precinct, yes. We have lived there since—” She paused. “Since his fellowship. Why?”
“General inquiry,” said Nicholas.
She studied him for a moment with those pale, watchful eyes. He had the distinct impression she was filing him away. Examining him, as she had examined his correspondence.
“Very well,” she said at last. “Think about it. I will be waiting at the end of the drive at sunrise tomorrow. I have a private carriage.” She moved toward the door, restoring her hood to her head to indicate she had concluded her business.
Then she paused.
She turned back.
And her expression had changed. A calculation completed, a decision made.
“If you bring the manuscript with you,” she said, “the Malory, the one the viscount purchased from Danbury, I will pay you an additional one thousand pounds. On top of the first thousand. Two thousand pounds in total.”
Nicholas regarded her in astonishment for a long moment.
“You are proposing,” he said slowly, “that I steal a manuscript from my … the viscount.”
“I am proposing that you reunite it with the scholar best equipped to interpret it.” She held his gaze without flinching.
“It is a matter of some urgency. Of … life and death is not an exaggeration. I would not exaggerate about this.” A pause.
“In the event that any legal difficulty were to arise from the transfer, I would provide you with the best legal counsel available. My family’s solicitors are very competent. ”
“Miss Metcalfe?”
“Yes?”
“I will not steal the manuscript.”
“I understand,” she said. “I will find another way to obtain it.” Her manner suggested she had already begun identifying alternative approaches. “But I will still be waiting in the carriage. Sunrise. The end of the drive.”
She looked him over one final time. That same frank, assessing look, his shoulders to his bare calves and back up to his face. There was a glimmer in her expression, beneath the assessment, that was warmer than it had been at the beginning of this conversation.
A shrewd expression crossed her face. “You’ll be there. You need the coin.”
She left before he could answer. The candlelight retreated with her through the door, leaving the room in the darkness it had been before she arrived.
Nicholas stood in the dark for a long moment.
Then he found his way back to the bed. He lowered himself onto it with care because he had used up his dignity for the evening. And he stared at the canopy above him.
He thought about two thousand pounds. He thought about Matteo di Bianchi’s name in her mouth, perfectly pronounced.
He thought about a scholar’s daughter running her father’s quest in his absence because someone had to, and the hardheaded stubbornness that produced.
The kind that did not look like stubbornness from the inside because it had never occurred to the person that stopping was among the available options.
He thought about her hands. Whether they would be competent. Whether they would be gentle. Whether—
Stop!
Nicholas decided she might be right, but not for the reason she thought. Mostly because a beautiful woman was asking for his help and had promised to lay her hands on his thigh on a daily basis. What sort of addlepated idiot would he be to turn down such an offer?
He pulled the covers up.
Sunrise, he thought. End of the drive.
He closed his eyes and discovered, to his considerable surprise, that he was smiling with genuine joy.