Emily remained silent, her attention
blatantly fixed on his lower body, her lip caught between her teeth.
A flush stained her cheeks and if he didn’t miss his guess, given
the slight smile teasing at the corners of her mouth, raunchy
thoughts filled her mind.
The blood immediately left his head
and rushed south, his cock rising to the occasion and letting him
know it was taking notice. Crap, he’d be in deep trouble here if he
didn’t get his mind—and hers if he was reading her right—off the
sexual and onto the mundane.
“Um, Emily, the room. Remember? I
still need a bed for the night.” Great, why did I have to mention
bed?
Emily gave him one last lingering
look before she spun about and strutted down the hallway.
“There are only the two bedrooms and
a bathroom up here and this bedroom I’ve turned into my office.” She
paused at the entrance to a small room.
Nicholas glanced inside. The room was
totally disorganized, papers lying everywhere. On the desk. On top
of the computer. All over the floor. Had someone broken in here as
well? Or was this the way she normally worked?
Suddenly, he heard it. A slight
noise. A rustle. A scratchy sound like someone dragging something
along the wooden floor. And it was coming from the other side of the
large desk.
He motioned to Emily to be quiet,
slid his hand under the back of his jacket and drew the standard
issue Glock 17 from the pancake holster attached to his belt. All
his protective instincts rose to the fore. A rush of adrenaline
invaded his system. It sharpened his senses and focused his mind.
Cautious, breath held, he crept toward the end of the desk.
“That’s Ria, my cat. You won’t need
the gun. She’s really very sweet. Well, most of the time.”
When Emily stepped up behind him and
popped her head around his arm, Nicholas jerked in reaction. Taking
a deep breath, he loosened his grip on his weapon and stared.
A jet-black cat with the most amazing
yellow eyes squatted among broken shards of pottery. An errant
thought, that the cat was very like her mistress, flitted though his
mind. He quickly dismissed it as he realized how silly he must look,
standing there holding a gun on a cat. He tucked the weapon away,
bent down and extended his hand.
“Look like she’s knocked a pot off
your desk.” He tried to pick up a piece of the broken pottery, only
to have the cat snake out a paw, claws extended, and smack him on
the wrist. Blood welled immediately from the scratch. A loud hiss
issued from the animal’s mouth. Nicholas glared at the cat, but the
bloody thing simply bared its teeth at him, its mouth curled back in
what looked like a sneer.
“Oh, she knocked that off a few weeks
ago. That’s how I found the papyrus. A friend on an archaeological
dig in Egypt sent the pot to me. The papyrus was hidden inside.”
“Why haven’t you picked the broken
bits up? If you walk on them with bare feet, you’ll cut yourself to
pieces.”
“Ria won’t let me. For some reason
she took an instant dislike to the pot. I’ve never seen her hiss at
anything like that before. It’s a marriage pot. History shows the
ancient Egyptians filled them with scented massage oils used to
anoint the bride in a mating ceremony. The old folklore says if you
introduce one of those into your household, your days are numbered,
you’ll soon be mated for life.”
Emily chuckled. “Maybe Ria is worried
I’ll get hitched and won’t have time for her. Cats are very
territorial. She knocked the pot flying as soon as I set it on the
desk. Now she won’t let me touch it.”
“Why not clean it up when she’s out
in the garden?”
She shrugged. “Why bother? It’ll only
upset Ria. If she wants to stand guard over a busted pot, who am I
to say she shouldn’t? It’s lucky she didn’t rip the papyrus to
shreds.”
Nicholas closed his eyes, shook his
head and prayed for patience. “Where’s the papyrus now? Somewhere
safe, I hope?”
“Oh, perfectly safe.” Emily reached
inside the front of her shirt and extracted a folded plastic sleeve
containing the ancient scrap of writing material from her bra. “No
one would think of looking for it here.”
He groaned. No one but this woman
would hide a priceless object in her underwear.
“Nicholas, are you all right? You’ve
gone quite red in the face. Perhaps I should show you where you’re
sleeping. Maybe you need to have a lie-down.”
She led the way into the other
bedroom. A large four-poster bed dominated the room, flanked by two
small bedside tables. A lacy cover and embroidered throw cushions,
as well as the lace curtains hanging from the canopy of the bed,
turned the whole room into a scene for seduction.
French doors framed by the same lacy
fabric opened out onto a covered balcony. A cheval mirror stood to
one side and an antique rocking chair, piled high with fluffy
cushions, held pride of place near the open doors.
Open?
He ran his hand through his hair.
Lord, she’d be the death of him. She’d gone out and left these
unlocked, too. Shaking his head in disbelief, he turned again to
face the bed.
“Ah, Emily, there’s only one bed.
Where am I supposed to sleep?”
Emily beamed at him. “Oh, I’ve
thought about that. If you’d been a man, I mean a straight man, we’d
have a problem. As it is, we don’t have to worry.”
“What do you mean by that?” A feeling
of dread settled inside him.
“Well, you’re too big for my little
couch and I know for a fact I can’t sleep on it. Seeing as how
you’re…you know…gay, I thought we could both share the room. It’ll
be like having a sleep-over.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, she expects me to sleep with her?
He found himself wildly attracted to the biggest kook he’d ever met
and now he had to sleep with her?
With a silent curse, he struggled to
damp down the surge of anticipation rippling through his body. He
couldn’t believe how hard it was to discipline himself, to clear his
mind of the vivid mental pictures of himself and the crazy professor
cuddled up together in that bed. Come to think of it, that wasn’t
the only thing that was hard.
He groaned at life’s little irony.
Here he was, with a woman who looked like an Egyptian goddess and he
was supposed to pretend she didn’t turn him on. Nicholas Farley, the
heartthrob of the agency, the man who never had a problem with
women. A man for whom self-control had never been an issue. And now
his body was betraying him and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
He was supposed
to be gay.
Copyright ©2007 Alexis Fleming
