A Midsummer Night's Romp (19 page)

“I was thinking something along the lines of a dashing knight scooping up a fair maiden in distress and setting her atop his mighty stallion, actually. It was a very romantic picture in my head, although I admit I failed to factor in the shovels. Would you mind not flailing them about? That was my shin you just slammed one against.”

“Sorry. Stop the scooter, Gunner. Two people can't ride on it.”

“On the contrary, I believe we are proving that they can.”

“Do you hear that noise?”

“Yes.”

“That is the noise of a pissed-off scooter. One that is about to burst its gussets, or whatever scooters have. Let me off.”

“No.” His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her back against his chest. He breathed in the smell of her hair. It was floral-scented, just like the rest of her. “Or rather, yes, I will, but on one condition.”

“I am not having sex with you!” she squawked loudly, then shuffled the dig bag so that she could slap a hand over her mouth for a few seconds. When she removed it, she glared over her shoulder at him as best she could. “Goddamn it, Gunner! You're making my mouth do this!”

He did a little more eyebrow waggling at her, and waited.

“I really object to you encouraging me to make a fool of myself.” She took a deep breath, which he felt down to this toenails, and then asked, “What condition?”

His arm tightened again as the scooter lurched over a bump and they hit the gravel path that led toward the front of the house. “That you tell me what this secret plan is that you are harboring. It has something to do with Thompson—that much I know—but just why you are pretending that he fascinates you is beyond my understanding. Care to enlighten me?”

“No,” she said, and tried to climb off his lap, even though they were still moving.

He held her firmly against him.

“Dammit, Gunner!” She pinched his wrist. “Stop flexing your biceps at me, and don't tell me you aren't, because I can feel it against my waist.”

“Why are you pretending to be a photographer?”

She stopped squirming. It took a minute before she asked, “What makes you think I'm not one?”

“Grant me the basic intelligence to recognize a fellow professional from an amateur.”

“Perhaps I don't have the level of professionalism that you have, but that doesn't mean I'm not a legitimate photographer.” She stopped, swore softly under her breath, but not softly enough.

“My sweet, you may be many things—fascinating, enticing, deliciously made, and intriguing in ways I've never before encountered—but a photographer you are not.”

She stayed stiff for the count of twenty, then slumped back against him. “I knew it. I just knew my mouth would give me away. What did I say? I was careful not to mention anything about those f-stop things you grilled me about the first day.”

“Actually, it wasn't what you said—although the combination of f-stop and lenses that you mentioned would have been all but useless—but it's your actions that gave you away. No photographer worth her salt would let the camera stray from her side. When I'm on a job, I live and breathe through my camera.”

He stopped when she turned on his lap, swinging her legs over his, careful to shift the shovels to the other side so they wouldn't hit him on the face again. “Now what? Are you going to tell Roger and Paul?”

He tempted to force her to tell him the truth about what she was up to by using the threat of disclosing her ignorance about photography to Roger, but that thought just irritated him. “I've never had to force a woman to do anything, and I'm not about to start now,” he told her.

She looked a bit confused.

“Sorry. I was having an argument with myself.”

“Oh. I have those all the time. It's the ones I lose that really piss me off, like this morning in the kitchen.” She blushed again, but this time, it made her eyes sparkle. “You should have heard me yell at myself for giving in
to the lure of your chest. And butt. And legs and back and, really, all of you. Can I say right now that I dislike intensely the fact that you're so sexy you make me forget my common sense?”

“I'd apologize, but there's not a lot I can do about my appearance.”

“Oh, like hell there isn't.” She now faced him squarely with a jaded expression. “I bet you love how you look, don't you? You like having women go gaga over you when you parade about in nothing but a pair of damned near indecent shorts. And really, Gunner, what sort of man stands around in nothing but a scrap of silk while a seventeen-year-old girl is in the same room?”

“A man who is the girl's father, and who made sure the sight of appropriate body parts was blocked by a chair when a certain someone aroused him to the point where it would have been noticeable to said daughter.”

“Hmph. I notice you don't deny liking being so gorgeous that women like Sue follow you around just about drooling.”

He gave a one-shoulder shrug. “That's like my saying that I object to you being charming. It's not something you can change any more than I can.”

“Hey!” She elbowed him. “A polite man would have made sure he complimented my appearance. He wouldn't have gone straight for the personality thing, which every woman knows means he finds her physically repugnant.”

He released her long enough to take her free hand and place it on his groin. “Do I feel to you like I find you repugnant?”

“Oh. Oh my. You're very . . . mercy.”

He gritted his teeth against the sensation of her hand stroking his erection through the tight confines of his jeans, and got the scooter moving again. “Yes, I am very.”

“Wow. I mean, not wow as in holy hell, but you're
hung like a horse. You don't feel porn-star huge or anything. You're just very . . . there.”

He tried to rustle up a glare, but the feeling of her fingers on his fly drove all other thoughts from his head. “Are you impugning my manhood, madam?”

She giggled. “Not in the least. After all, my first word was ‘wow.' You can take that as a badge of honor.”

“I accept your apology.” He had to take her hand off him before he got pushed beyond bearing. “And I will reciprocate at a later date. You will see that as we
are
at the library door, the scooter did indeed handle two people just fine.”

“Uh-huh. Is that why there's smoke coming out of the battery?” She got herself and her assortment of items off his legs, and nodded toward the back of the scooter.

A little puff of pale smoke emerged, accompanied by the smell of burning electrics.

“Balls,” he swore.

“Yes, those are very nice, too, but despite what my no-doubt-dilated pupils and tingly girl parts say—despite that, I do not have any interest in them.”

He blinked a couple of times just as if that would help him think. “Interest in what?”

“Your balls.”

“Why not? They would like to get to know you better. And your tingly woman bits.”

“The term is ‘girl parts,' or, at worst, ‘lady garden.' ‘Woman bits' sounds like female-shaped pieces of bacon that you'd shake onto a salad.”

“Strangely specific, and yet, your whimsy in no way makes you less endearing,” he told her, getting off the scooter. “Shall we plan to introduce my highly attractive balls to your tingly girl parts later?”

“No. And I never said your balls were attractive. On
the contrary, it's been my experience that testicles are seldom attractive. Functional, I assume, but attractive? Not so much.”

“There you are!” Sue hurried up to them, her eyes locked on Gunner. “I heard we were doing some exciting things in the castle. Well!” She stopped next to him, and looked at Lorina, then back to Gunner. “Am I interrupting an important discussion?”

“Not really,” Lorina answered before Gunner could. She hefted her shovels and the dig bag. “I was telling Gunner that I think his balls aren't pretty. Feel free to feed his ego by telling him they are the best balls in the world.” With that, she turned and stalked through the library French doors.

Sue's mouth formed an O as she looked at Gunner.

“She'll be back,” Gunner told her, nodding toward the French doors.

“She will? But—”

Lorina reappeared in the door at that moment, her nostrils flaring in annoyance. “I don't know how to get to the cellar.”

He smiled and, with a cane in one hand, grabbed the pickax that Lorina had left for him, swinging it over his shoulder and shooing her back into the castle. “Forward, my little pack mule. Take a left at the hall, go past the sign that says ‘Private,' and through the second door on the right.”

“Do I want to know why you two were discussing your testicles?” Sue asked, trotting after them. “Not that I'm opposed to making a judgment on them . . .”

Gunner tuned out Sue's prattle and instead gathered together the waiting diggers to follow him down into the oldest part of the castle.

He didn't stop smiling, though. Oh, it was going to be
a very long day working alongside Lorina when she simultaneously aroused him and drove him batty with her refusal to explain herself, but there was nowhere else on the planet he'd rather be.

She might claim it was by mistake, but Lorina had started to open up to him, and that was a very good sign indeed.

“I
can't believe you gave away our premium dig spot!” I kicked at a broken wooden crate, and stood up from where I'd been leaning against a door along with a shovel and my dig bag. “You know that if Paul finds anything, he'll grab all the glory.”

Gunner stumped into one of the side passageways with a couple of oil lamps. He held them up triumphantly. “I told you that I thought there were a few of these down here. As for giving away prime cellar real estate, we wouldn't have been able to dig much before Thompson and Roger had to be told.”

“Yeah, but Paul will find the treasure after
we
figured out where it was!”

“Possibly.” He smiled the same self-satisfied smile he'd been giving me ever since I'd blurted out a confession that I wasn't really a photojournalist. Damn his
nonthreatening, sexy self. “But it so happens that I kept a little something up my sleeve just for you.”

“Really?” Unbidden, my gaze dropped to the front of his jeans.

“Well, that, too, but not here where there are so many people about. Later, perhaps, in a more convenient location, like my bedroom.”

I snorted in what I hoped sounded like disinterest, but sadly, it came out more like a horse champing at the bit. “So what is it you're keeping back from the others?”

He looked like he was going to offer to swap secrets again, but, thankfully, thought better of it. Which I couldn't help but admire. It would be far too easy for a man who looked like him to use his attractiveness to force me to admit all, and the fact that he didn't simultaneously warmed my heart and made me want to admit the truth about my failed plan.

“It was a little bit of an untruth, actually. Go left up here.”

I glanced in surprise at him, taking the turn he indicated. In front of me was an extremely old-looking black wooden door. Across the middle of it was a thick piece of wood held into place by a couple of brackets that were twisted with age.

Gunner reached alongside me and tried to shift the wooden bar, but it wouldn't budge.

“I was afraid of that. It's stuck.” He set down the lamps, and applied his shoulder to it, jiggling it at the same time. “The wood gets warped and won't shift.”

“Maybe it's locked,” I suggested.

“There is no lock on this door, just the bar. Ah, there it goes.” With a rough noise, he got the wooden bar to swing upward. He then spent another four minutes pulling, swearing, and prying open the wooden door, which eventually creaked open.

“It hasn't been opened in quite a while,” Gunner explained, wiping his hands on his legs and bending down to light one of the lamps.

“Are you sure it's safe?” I eyed the door. It looked like a strong wind would blow it over, but evidently it was tougher than it looked.

“The door? It's just swollen over the years, but should be fine now.” He held up a lamp and nodded toward the doorway. There was a whole lot of black within it. “No electricity from here on out, I'm afraid. Let me go first, just in case the stairs are bad.”

“So you can break your other leg?” I blocked the narrow doorway. “You don't have to be gallant, Gunner. I'll go first and make sure there's nothing to trip you up.”

He stopped me before I could go through. “I'm not being gallant, at least not for the reason you think. If something were to happen to you, legally it would be better if it happened to me.”

I glared at him. “Are you implying that if I fell down your stupid stairs, I'd sue you? Or rather, your brother?”

Gunner gave a wry little smile. “Elliott
is
due back tomorrow, and he'd be hellaciously angry if I let you hurt yourself. But no, I was actually referring to insurance reasons. You're not covered by the liability insurance the film company has taken out for the crew. So if you would kindly allow me to pass, I will go down the stairs first.”

“But—,” I started to protest.

“Sweetness,” Gunner said, pulling me forward and giving me a swift kiss, so swift that I barely had time to enjoy the taste and scent of him before he was pushing past me. “I appreciate your concern, but I've been down these stairs before, and you haven't. I would advise you to stick close, though. This light isn't going to illuminate much but a few feet around me.”

My lips tingled, and I desperately wanted to kiss him
again, but as he entered the black maw of the doorway, I moved the shovel to the same hand as the dig bag and grabbed the back of his shirt, shuffling after him.

The stairs weren't wood, as I'd assumed. They were stone, very narrow, and quite uneven. “Steady,” Gunner warned, pausing to lift the lamp. About six feet of stairs were illuminated; the rest of the space was swallowed up by blackness. “Speak up if I'm going too fast for you.”

“You're not going too fast, but I'd like to know where we're going. I thought the dirt part of the cellar was the bottom level of the castle.”

“It is. Except for the bolt-hole, which is what this is. Or part of it—the outer part was covered over during a renovation a few hundred years ago. But this was originally a tunnel that my father said emerged out by the folly.”

“Folly?” I tried to remember the layout of the castle grounds. “I don't remember seeing a folly.”

“That's because it's not there anymore. It was located in the south pasture.”

The significance of that hit me immediately. “So there used to be a secret passageway connecting the pasture where the first villa is and the castle?”

“I find that fact significant, don't you?” he asked, his voice oddly softened in the confined space. I shivered a little despite the comfort of both Gunner and his lamp. I wasn't particularly claustrophobic, but I couldn't help but feel the weight of the castle above us.

“Why didn't you tell Roger this?”

“Because I'm not sure if there's anything down here worth his while. For one thing, there isn't room to dig, and for another, I haven't been down here since I was five or six. My father was a fairly tolerant man, but he forbade us to go into the bolt-hole, saying it was dangerous, and that it would be easy to be trapped by a cave-in
or other calamity. Evidently Elliott was down here about ten years ago, but all he said was that the passage still existed to the outer wall of the castle.”

“Cave-in,” I murmured, clutching his shirt all that much tighter. “I can think of other ways I'd rather perish.”

We continued down another dozen steps until Gunner stopped, saying, “All right, we're at the bottom.”

“Sorry,” I said, releasing his shirt, and giving his back a quick brush to try to relax the wrinkles I'd put into it. “You may want to iron your shirt later.”

“Actually, I was going to tell you to hold on to me, since the floor isn't level, and I have no idea if there has been any destruction since Elliott last visited.”

“So long as you don't mind a wrinkly shirt.” I clutched the material again, trying to peer around him as we slowly walked forward. “There aren't any rats down here, are there?”

“Why, are you afraid of rodents?”

“Not unduly so, although I could do without the mental image of being trapped by a cave-in and consumed by a horde of hungry rats.”

He laughed, but it sounded muffled and unnatural, making me all that much more aware that we were deep under the castle and far away from all signs of life. “Don't worry, I won't let that happen. I have my mobile phone. Ah, here we go.”

He stopped suddenly and set the lamp on the ground. “I'll be blowed. I thought Dad was making this up, but now I see that he wasn't.”

“What are you blowed about?” I tried to see around him, but it was too dark.

“One second—let me light the second lamp, and then I'll show you what I hope will make up for losing the premium dig site to Thompson.”

The passage was too narrow for me to see anything
around him but the brownish gray stone walls, stained black over the centuries, with various bits of roots and long-dead plant life sprouting through seams. I rubbed my nose, which was itching with the smell of earth and decay.

Gunner got the second lamp lit. He flashed a grin over his shoulder at me. “Ready to be astounded?”

I eyed him. “You're not going to drop your trousers and demand I admire your gorgeous testicles, are you?”

“Not after you disparaged their beauty.” His teeth flashed again, and then he lifted both arms to raise the two lamps, and turned to the side so I could see past him. Beyond him was a whole lot of blackness . . . and dull gray shapes dotting the ground.

I gawked for a second, then dropped the shovel and bag and squeezed past him, taking one of the lamps in the process. “What is this, a wall? Or the road?”

“That, my sweet Lorina, is the corner wall of a structure. See the right angles? It's definitely a building of some form, and could possibly even be part of the second villa. When I was little, my dad used to tell Elliott and me that there was an old foundation down here. We assumed it was just a now-demolished section of the castle, but this is definitely not sixteenth century.” Gunner carefully thumped past me to stand looking down at the exposed stone structure that lay crumbled and half-buried in the dirt of the bolt-hole, disappearing under one of the brick walls of the castle. “And we don't even have to dig down for it. It's just a matter of uncovering it.”

“OK, that is worth giving up the prime spot for,” I said complacently, mentally rubbing my hands at the thought of stealing some of Paul's thunder. Then I realized that I shouldn't be relishing that since—the temptation of Gunner aside—I couldn't forgo my attempt to bring Paul to account. Not when there were other women like Sandy out there. “We should get Daria in here,
though. She's a bit hurt because Paul swanned in and took away the cellar dig from her.”

He made a face, then gave a rueful grin. “I was going to protest that I'd prefer to remain with you alone, but this isn't the ideal location for seduction, so we might as well have the help she'd be able to give us.”

“Look,” I said when he pulled the walkie-talkie off his belt. “I realize that I fully participated in the kissing and butt-groping, and licking of nipples, and stroking of chest and arms and back, but that doesn't mean I'm remotely susceptible to seduction.”

Gunner cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Dammit, how do you know I'm lying?” I demanded to know.

“I'm not sure. I just know.” He turned a couple of knobs on the walkie-talkie, frowned at it, and pulled out his cell phone instead.

“No reception?” I asked a couple of minutes later.

“No. The phone says I have a connection, but it doesn't seem to want to actually connect.” He sighed. “One of us will have to go fetch Daria. Would you prefer to stay here with the rats, or should I fend them off while you find her?”

I shuddered. “How about we both go?”

He shook his head and eased himself down onto the ground. “It's hard enough walking on this ground with the cast that I don't want to make extra trips. I'll wait here while you bring her.”

“All right, but I'll leave you a shovel so you can whack at any rats that charge you.” I shifted both the bag and the shovel so that it sat next to him. He immediately took a trowel from the former and started scraping at the exposed stone.

“Tell Daria to bring any portable lights that she can find. And possibly a camp chair if she knows of one.”

“I'll go for the full ‘digging in a bolt-hole' kit,” I promised, and, picking up one of the lamps, carefully made my way back to the stairs.

“You might also ask the catering people if they could send us some coffee or tea in a bit. I suspect we're going to be down here for a while,” Gunner called after me, his voice muffled.

“Roger will find out about this if I do,” I pointed out, waving toward the archaeology.

“I'll have to tell him anyway. I just wanted to get a little digging in by ourselves. In a couple of hours, the rest of the crew will be all over it. Until then . . .” He grinned.

I saluted in acknowledgment. “Will do. Roger and Paul can just focus on finding archaeology in their part of the cellar until after lunch. I'll be back as soon as I can.” I trotted down the passageway and started up the steps, carefully holding the glass lantern, mentally rehearsing what I was going to say to Daria. The door loomed at the top of the stairs. I gave it a hearty shove.

It didn't move.

“Well, of course you're stuck. That just figures.” I set down the lamp and shoved at the door with both hands.

It still didn't move.

I sighed a sigh of the martyred, and threw my full weight against the door.

Nothing happened other than my shoulder protested the action.

“Great, now I have to go down and get Gunner, and he shouldn't be walking up and down stairs on his owie foot. I just hope you're happy,” I told the door, giving it another shove.

I stomped back down the stairs to Gunner.

He looked up, surprised that I was back so quickly. “Change your mind?”

“No. The door is stuck. Can you work your manly magic on it so that I can get us coffee and Daria and chairs and more lights?”

He frowned, but followed me back to the door.

Ten minutes later, I started to panic. “What do you mean it's going to take more than you to get it open? You opened it less than half an hour ago! Why can't you open it now?”

“Because I was on the other side of it then, pulling the door toward me. Now I'm on the top of a narrow stair, and I can't get a running start to throw myself on it. And even if I could, I wouldn't, since I'd likely fall and break several more bones.” Gunner was silent a moment, rubbing his shoulder where he'd repeatedly attempted to force the door open. “I'm afraid we're stuck here until someone notices we're gone.”