Forbidden Pleasures (10 page)

“It was the oddest thing, Rina. The second our eyes met I felt as though someone had hit me in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I knew Michael Devlin even though I had never before set eyes on him. Go figure that one out. Don’t put the spread on.”

Rina chuckled. “Okay,” she said, grinning. “Then I had better get going. I’ll go get you some birth control samples from Sam. Pills or the patch?”

“Devlin went to get condoms. It’s okay for this weekend,” Emily replied.

“Unless he gotcha the first time,” Rina considered.

“Rina, you know women don’t get pregnant the first time,” Emily told her.

Rina Seligmann looked both astounded and appalled at the same time. “Who in the name of God ever told you that?” she wanted to know. “Not your grans.”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking too straight at that moment,” Emily muttered.

“Oy vay!” Rina muttered. “When your editor goes home tomorrow you come right over and let Sam have a look at you, Emily Shanski. I promised both your grans on their deathbeds that I’d look after you, and I’m not about to break such a promise.”

“You mean I could have gotten ... could be pregnant from that one time? Oh, my God, Rina! Then why the hell did my friends in college say stuff like that if it wasn’t so?” Emily looked distinctly unhappy. “God, I’m Katy O’Malley all over again, and I’ve tried so hard not to be.” She looked like she was going to burst into tears.

Rina put comforting arms about Emily. “Sweetie, it’s all right. More than likely you aren’t pregnant, but you’ve got to be careful. Girls in school believe all kinds of silly things in order to justify behavior they know damned well they shouldn’t be doing.” She laughed lightly. “Come see Sam Monday after Hot Stuff has gone back to the city, but I’m sure you’re okay.” She set Emily back a pace, and wiped a tear from her cheek. “And you are nothing like Katy O’Malley. You are sweet and thoughtful and very dear. That woman who birthed you has none of those qualities.”

“You never liked my mother, did you, Rina?” Emily said.

“No, I don’t like her. But neither do I dislike her. She just isn’t my cuppa, sweetie. I guess it’s that too-cool, too-sure-of-herself attitude that gets me. I remember when your gran died. Her own mother, and she didn’t show up until the morning of the funeral. Came in a limousine, as I recall. And left immediately afterward. Didn’t even stay for the luncheon you had arranged for the mourners.”

“She had to get back to D.C., she said,” Emily remembered. “An important deposition, as I recall. Some big case she was working on.”

“She could have rescheduled it. It was her mother, for God’s sake,” Rina said sharply. “But your gran always said Katy let nothing stand in the way of her success. Not even having a baby.” She took up the sheets. “I’ll stick these in your laundry on my way out. I don’t want to run into himself on his way back from the drugger.”

“Thanks,” Emily said. “And Rina ...”

The older woman turned. “Yeah?”

“I love you,” Emily told her.

“Go on with yis,” Rina Seligmann said, using what had been a favorite expression of Emily’s grandmother O’Malley. Then with a smile she hurried down the stairs.

Emily looked about the room. It looked the same, and yet she would never look at this room again in the same way. It was in this room that she had lost her virginity. She still felt a little sore, but she would live. She heard the front door open and close as Rina left. Well, she had better go downstairs herself and decide what to do for dinner. There was beef left over from last night. And gravy. Lots of gravy. Open-faced hot roast-beef sandwiches and a salad sounded good. And a dessert. She’d do a simple yellow cake with raspberry jam between the three layers and powdered sugar on the top.

Michael Devlin found her in the kitchen when he returned from his shopping expedition. “Mission accomplished!” he told her, holding up a little bag. “But before I take you to bed again, Miss Shanski, I want to know something about this book you are going to write. And I want to know if there is a wonderful restaurant in Egret Pointe where we may have dinner tonight. I’ll book a reservation now.”

“I thought I’d do dinner for us. Just leftovers, and this cake I’m putting in the oven now,” Emily told him. “But we could have it for tea.”

“No, I want to take you out,” he said firmly.

“Let me think,” Emily said. Lord, Saturday night was the night that everyone who was anyone in Egret Pointe ate out. If they saw her with a strange man it was sure as hell bound to cause talk. And she did not want to answer any questions. At least, not yet. “I think the nicest restaurant around is the old inn up in East Harbor. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s along the bay road, and quite pretty. Would you mind?”

“No,” he said. “How long a drive?”

“About half an hour,” she told him, closing the oven door on the three cake pans and setting her timer for thirty minutes. She drew open a cabinet drawer and pulled out the local Yellow book. “Here. Better call them now. Saturday night’s a big night, especially at this time of year. Spring seems to bring everyone out again.”

He took the directory from her, found the number, and, using his cell, called to make a reservation. “Eight o’clock all right for you?” he asked.

Emily nodded, then said, “I’ll go get my notes. With cake in the oven I’d rather do our work here, if you don’t mind.” He didn’t, and she was quickly back, carrying a wire basket and a pink file folder. “Sit,” she told him, and took a chair for herself.

“You haven’t written anything yet?” he asked.

“No,” Emily answered him. “Only a couple of descriptions. I wanted to run some things by you first. I always did that with Rachel, and talking over the plotline usually makes everything clearer for me. Can we work that way too?”

“Of course,” he agreed. “I’m not here to change your work habits. Just to help you to get back on track. Sex, as you’ve now discovered,” he said with a mischievous grin, “does happen in real life, and so your plot should reflect real life too.”

“I don’t know enough about sex yet,” she told him, “so why don’t we just start with the main focus of the plot?”

“Go,” he said with a nod.

“You know the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel?” Emily asked.

“I do. Great swashbuckling tales of Sir Percy Blakely by Baroness Orczy.”

“Same sort of thing, but with my heroine in the Sir Percy role,” she told him.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why is she traveling into France to rescue people from the Terror?” he wanted to know. “There has to be a damned good reason.”

“Her mother is a French noblewoman, her father an English earl. Caroline is seventeen, and has been in Normandy with her mother for almost a year. They had gone the previous summer to visit her mother’s family. The earl learns that his wife and daughter have been caught up in the arrest of his wife’s family. They have all been imprisoned in her grandparents’ cellar. Her father is pulling every string he can to get them released. Meanwhile in France, his wife and daughter are struggling to survive. Caroline catches the eye of their jailer, but her mother saves her by submitting to the man, who afterward hands her over to several of his men because she hasn’t given him the pleasure he anticipated from raping a hated aristo. Caroline’s mother grows mortally ill from her harsh treatment just as the order comes through from Citizen Robespierre, who has accepted a large ransom from the English earl for the release of the two women. The mother swears her daughter to secrecy about what has transpired, and then dies as their ship is in sight of the English coast. I may make some changes, though, before I even begin to write it.”

“Great opening!” he said. “Dramatic, poignant. I like it. Okay, so how does she end up rescuing others? I mean, if she’s seventeen she’s hardly in a position to do something like that in Georgian England.”

“Her father is so distraught by his wife’s death that he commits suicide. But before he does he makes certain provisions for his daughter. The earl’s heir is his wastrel brother, and while he is going to inherit the title, the earl’s estate isn’t entailed upon an heir. The earl makes a will that gives his daughter the bulk of his fortune, leaving the rest in the form of a trust to care for the estate and provide his younger brother with a small income.

“Then he goes to a friend of his, the Duke of Malincourt, who is an elderly man with no children. He arranges with the duke to marry Caroline so her fortune will be kept safe from his brother. The marriage, of course, is in name only. The fortune will be hers when the duke dies, so she will, as a young, beautiful, and wealthy dowager duchess, be an excellent marriage prospect for the man she will eventually fall in love with. Without a husband for Caroline, her uncle would have had access to her monies, and probably would have gambled them away, leaving her impoverished. Caroline knows nothing of her father’s plans, but as an obedient daughter, and still in shock over what has happened in France, she accepts his decision to marry her off to the duke. The day after the wedding the earl puts a pistol to his head.

“Grief-stricken, Caroline is horrified to learn the truth from her kindly old husband as to how her father has protected her before taking his own life. She vows then and there to get back at the revolutionaries in France for destroying her family. She seeks out others among her class who are like-minded, and begins her operations. She is known to her enemies as Lavender, for she always leaves a sprig of the flower behind when she has snatched someone from the clutches of Madame la Guillotine.”

“Very nice,” he said, “but where are we going to fit the sex in, m’dear?”

“The old duke dies when Caroline is twenty,” Emily continued. “His heir is his nephew, and the nephew wants to make Caro his wife, a fact known to the old duke, who fully approved. He even suggested to Caroline that after a proper period of mourning she marry his heir. But of course, Caro fears a young and alert husband will discover what she has been doing, so she resists. But the new duke, Justin Trahern, seduces her. She tells him she will be his wife, but she will be answerable to no one but herself. He agrees because he is deeply in love with her.

“By accident—and don’t ask me how because I haven’t decided yet—he learns what she is doing. At first he is outraged that a woman would behave so. Then he becomes frightened for her. He tells her he knows, and in an effort to make him understand why she does what she does, Caro tells him the truth of what happened to her mother. Trahern realizes the only chance he has of stopping the woman he loves from putting herself in constant danger is to find the jailer and the men who raped her mother, and see them dead.”

“I like it,” Michael Devlin told her. “I like it very much. It’s clever, and we should be able to make the love affair between Caro and Trahern sizzle. Women who have had tough times will identify nicely with the heroine. She’s suffering survivor’s guilt, of course, and that does make you do things you might not otherwise do.”

The timer on the counter pinged, and Emily got up to check her cakes. They were perfect. Turning off the oven, she drew each pan from inside, carefully setting them on her counter to cool before turning them out onto her cake racks.

“Smells good. What kind of cake is it going to be?” he asked her.

“Just an old-fashioned kind my grans taught me. Raspberry jam between the layers, and powdered sugar on top,” Emily explained.

“My gran in Ireland used to make that,” he said. “It was always my favorite.”

“I think everything is your favorite.” She laughed. “There isn’t anything I’ve cooked so far that you haven’t scarfed up like a starving man, Devlin. I think you have a tapeworm,” Emily teased him.

“Roast beef, chocolate trifle, cake with jam,” he replied. “What isn’t to like?”

She laughed again. “I like you, Devlin,” she told him. “I was really upset when I learned Rachel had gone, but I’m not as upset now.”

“I haven’t edited your manuscript yet,” he said with a small grin. Then he said, “I think turnabout is fair play, Emily Shanski. I’m going to make you lunch. I’ll need bread, rat cheese, honey mustard, and olive oil or butter. And a cast-iron frying pan.”

“Grilled cheese sandwiches!” she said. “Now, those are my favorites.”

“Get going, woman, and fetch me my supplies.” He chuckled, giving her bottom a small smack.

“Yes, sir!” Emily replied, and she bustled off to find what he needed. “And I want you to know I’m a connoisseur of grilled cheese. These had better be good.”

“I’m good at everything I do, Emily, as you are about to discover,” he said.

And she laughed. “I’ll be the judge of that,” she told him.

He grinned, suddenly realizing that he was happy. And Michael Devlin couldn’t remember the last time he had been really happy.

E
mily hurried downstairs. Devlin was waiting for her in Gran’s old-fashioned parlor, which was across from the more modern living room. It was filled with the furniture that had been in the house when Gran was a girl. “How do I look?” she asked as she came into the parlor. She was wearing a violet-sprigged cream-colored dress with a fitted bodice, and a flirty, floaty skirt with a scalloped hemline. She twirled to give him the full effect. He had made love to her a second time this afternoon, and then they had napped together in his bed. It had been even better the second time, and Emily was feeling more relaxed than she had ever felt in her life. Making love was quite a revelation, yet she couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been different with another man. Better, or worse?

The green eyes looked her over admiringly. Then he said, “Are you wearing panties and a bra, Emily?”

“Of course. We’re going out,” she replied.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought I made myself clear this morning. When you are with me you do not wear undergarments. Take them off.”

“We’re going to be in a public place, Devlin,” she protested.