A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man (2 page)

Piper was savvy enough to understand why the trustees had approved her idea for the Harrington exhibit. First, it would be dirt-cheap to install, because she’d already convinced prickly family matriarch Claudia Harrington-Howell to loan all of her ancestor’s personal effects to the museum without compensation. Second, the subject matter would offend no one. And then there was the fact that the trustees had long sought to lure Claudia—and her deep pockets—into the museum’s fold.

Somehow, Piper didn’t think revealing that Claudia’s beloved ancestor was a hot mess of a slut would help with that.

The security guard cleared his throat. “So what are you up to, then? You’re here awfully late.” Melvin began to glance around the room—with suspicion in his eyes, Piper noticed.

Was he on to her? How? It was only moments ago that she’d decided to violate every ethical guideline of her profession and remove antiquities from the museum premises.
Without permission.
She’d never done anything without permission.

“Nothing!” she announced, louder than necessary. She pushed herself to a stand, still wobbly from the restricted blood flow. “I just lost track of time, I guess. You know how I can be. Well, I should probably get going home now.”

Piper stumbled to her desk to grab her messenger bag. She turned off her desk and worktable lamps. She limped toward the door.

“You know your lips are blue, Miss Piper?”

“Oh, right.” She shrugged. “An ink pen. What a mess.” Piper clomped toward the elevator on her concrete stumps.

“You hurt your legs or something?”

“No! They fell asleep. Sitting for too long in one position can compress the arteries, thereby preventing nutrients and oxygen from reaching the nerve cells.”

“Huh.” Melvin cocked his head and produced a quizzical smile as he held the elevator door open. “I’ll get you safely to your car. Half the lights are out in the parking garage—budget cuts and all.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Piper said, trying to sound casual, thinking about what she had crammed down inside her bag and the fact that she wasn’t the type who usually spent time in a women’s prison—her six years at Wellesley aside. “I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“It’s the middle of the night, Miss Chase-Pierpont,” Melvin said. “Here, let me help—”

“No!”

He looked at her like she was crazy. Maybe she was. Maybe this was what happened to single, lonely, pornography-stealing women about to turn thirty.

Piper and Melvin remained awkwardly silent on the elevator ride and through the garage, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness.

“Here we are!” she announced, gesturing to her rusty Honda Civic. She flung open the passenger door and placed the messenger bag on the floor.

“Thank you again, Melvin!” she said, racing around to the other side of the car. “Have a good night!”

Without warning, Melvin smacked his hand on the roof of her Civic. Piper was so startled that she nearly jumped from the pavement. She panted, clutching her car keys to her chest.

Suddenly she pictured her criminal trial in great clarity—her mother in a front-row courtroom seat, her shoulder bones rattling as she sobbed, her father shaking his head in disapproval (if he could even bring himself to witness the public shaming of his only child), and the jury box? That’s right—it would be filled to the brim with members of the museum’s board of trustees, hearing aids and all.

Now, wouldn’t that be something? The first time in thirty years that Piper Chase-Pierpont doesn’t play by the rules and she gets sent to the big house.

“Hairspray and baby oil!” Melvin announced, laughing.

Piper blinked. “Uh…”

“I’ve been racking my brain for how my wife got that printer cartridge ink off her fingers a few years back, and that’s it! Hairspray and baby oil!”

“Oh.” Piper began to breathe normally again, bracing herself against the car door. “That’s an excellent idea. I’ll try it as soon as I get home. Good night!”

She burned rubber on her way out of the parking lot, another first in a night full of them.

I tightened my arms about his neck and cried out at his entry, my sob of aching satisfaction disappearing into his hot mouth.

No wonder it was taking Piper forever to copy these diaries. Every time she found an efficient rhythm while managing to maintain the rigorous preservation standards the job required, she’d run across another word or sentence or paragraph that would stop her cold.

He said, “I will bury my hands in your hair and drive my cock deep, then pull it wet and slippery from your lips, only to do it all again.”

Seriously. Her priority needed to be copying each page, not reading for her own titillation. The heat and humidity of her post-war, no-frills box of an apartment was the worst possible environment for these artifacts, and the window fan she’d strung up from the kitchen pot rack was doing nothing but stir the sticky heat around. Each second she wasted put the fragile paper, leather, and ink in further peril.

Piper suddenly felt evil feline eyes boring into the back of her head. “I
said
I was sorry,” she snapped at Miss Meade, dabbing her own forehead with her sleeve, her gloved fingers carefully fisted against contamination. “I told you I can’t run the air conditioner and this behemoth at the same time or I’ll trip the fuse box again.”

In response, the Divine Miss M. raised her overstuffed, gray tabby hind leg and licked daintily at her kitty giblets, her disapproving gaze still focused on Piper.

Back to the task at hand. The original journals had to be returned on Monday to the museum documents room, where they could be stored properly. She’d keep the copy with her at all times, to read, reread, study, make notes on, and use to painstakingly compare to the known historical record.

Clearly, there was no time for diversion. If she stopped to linger over every provocative phrase and erotically tinged word she encountered in Ophelia’s elegant and fluid handwriting, she’d be standing at the copy machine for the rest of her natural life.

Piper carefully lifted Volume II from the glass surface and forced herself to concentrate. Though she followed document-handling protocol to mitigate damage, each turn of a page had resulted in some additional injury to the journals, the paper tearing slightly along the hand-sewn spine. It was unavoidable. The pages were brittle with time, pockmarked by insects, and weakened by mold and mildew. Yet it could have been far worse, she knew. The diaries were in surprisingly good condition for their age and had remained mostly legible, thanks to the way they’d been wrapped and stored.

Ophelia Harrington had meant business when she packed these away in the false bottom of her trunk, a task that she accomplished on or after April 16, 1825, the date on the
London Examiner
news sheet used to wrap them. Nearly six layers of newsprint had encased each volume.

In addition, the trunk itself had offered a good deal of protection from humidity and light. Whoever built the travel chest had been a master craftsman, fitting the seams so tightly that the secret compartment and its spring release were invisible even upon close examination. In the three months Piper had been poking around the trunk (along with all of Ophelia Harrington’s belongings), she’d never suspected such a feature. And it would have remained a secret—the diaries lost forever—if Piper hadn’t knocked the trunk on its side when she tripped.

She cautiously turned the page, lifted the journal, carried it to the glass plate and turned it over for copying. That’s when her eye caught the phrase “my masked lover” and her pulse spiked once more.

This stuff was addictive! Mind-numbingly erotic! Historical and sexual C-4! And Piper knew if she lost her focus and started reading the diary entries as a woman instead of a scholar, then she’d be in serious trouble. She’d already seen enough to know that Ophelia Harrington had lived a far juicier life than Piper had. Furthermore, she’d done it in an era of limited rights for women, a strict social construct, and before the girl even turned twenty-five!

Piper, on the other hand, lived in a time where she could be anything and do anything she wished. And what had she done with thirty years of freedom?

She’d studied. Worked. Read the classics. Traveled when she could. Tried to please her parents. Dated men who weren’t quite right for her, and only occasionally.

With the discovery of these journals, Piper had to face the fact that compared to Ophelia Harrington, she was in danger of becoming a dried-up, frustrated, bitter, and
boring
woman.

The most hurtful event of her life flashed through Piper’s brain—the way it often did in moments of self-pity—and in her mind’s eye, she watched Magnus “Mick” Malloy’s strong and straight back as he walked out her door.

God, the thought of Mick Malloy still made Piper’s belly clench in shame. She’d followed his superstar career over the years, of course. It would have been hard not to in their line of work. Mick Malloy had become the unofficial cover model for
The Curator, Archaeology Today,
and
Science Magazine.
She’d even heard the rumor that Malloy was getting his own cable reality show. And why not? He was made for TV. Sexy. Sun-bronzed. A real-life Indiana Jones with a brilliant mind, a sharp wit, and a devastatingly fine …

Forget it. It doesn’t matter anymore
.

Piper sighed. The details she wanted to know about Mick weren’t to be found in magazines or TV shows, anyway, and she’d never dare come right out and ask someone.

Was he happy? Had he ever married? Had a woman ever captured his mind and heart the way archaeology had? If so, who was she? And in how many ways was she the complete opposite of Piper?

I will not go there.

Piper straightened her shoulders and carefully executed the task at hand, reminding herself that these journals were not about her or Mick or how she’d blown her chance with him a decade ago. The diaries weren’t some kind of yardstick with which to compare her own adventures—or lack thereof. These journals were a historical treasure with yet unknown repercussions.

Ophelia’s firsthand accounts of her life as a London courtesan would not only add a fascinating complexity to her role in history, but it could improve understanding of early nineteenth-century underground London economy, its social mores, and the indiscretions of the rich and powerful. This was a serious scholarly matter, not a
Cosmo
quiz.

“Mrrraow.”
Piper turned to the yellow demon stare of Miss M., who had draped herself over the back of the Queen Anne chair in dramatic fashion, her tail swishing in the stuffy air as if she were fanning herself.

“You think I’m enjoying this?” she asked her cat. “I’m exhausted. It’s ninety-four degrees outside. My life is about as fun as one of Mom and Dad’s dinner parties! And this girl—this
courtesan
chick who ran around calling herself ‘the Blackbird’ and bending over to light men’s cigars so that her mammary glands fell out of her dress—” Piper gestured toward the diary she held above the copier. “My God! What a complete
tart
that girl was!”

Miss Meade blinked, then looked away as if offended by the outburst.

The phone rang, saving Piper from further crazy cat-lady conversation. She eased the journal into its makeshift cradle of organic cotton batting covered by acid-free cloth, and checked the caller ID. Suddenly, chatting with her cat seemed like a perfectly reasonable endeavor. Piper let the call go to automated voice mail, but clicked on the speaker.

“It’s your mother,” the clipped voice said through the telephone console. “Unless I hear otherwise, I’ll assume you’re not coming for dinner tomorrow. I am concerned about you. We haven’t seen you for going on a month. You haven’t returned my calls. Your father thinks you might be back on dairy and are experiencing symptoms of bloat and/or depression. Are you back on dairy? Are you depressed? Are you bloated? Call me, please.”
Click.

This would be as good a time as any to take a break, Piper decided, heading into her tiny kitchen for some ice cream. The real stuff, too. Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Bean. Five hundred eighty calories and thirty-six grams of fat in a one-cup serving.

As Piper opened the freezer compartment and stuck her head inside for a quick respite, she thought about how she’d like to answer her mother. If she had the nerve. She might say,
“Hell, yes, I’m back on dairy, Mother dearest! And by the way—you seem to have forgotten your only child’s thirtieth fucking birthday!”

A sudden tingle that went through her had nothing to do with the open freezer. She found it immensely satisfying to speak to her mother like that—especially using the f-word—even if only in her head.

She smiled to herself. Oh, if her mother only knew …

Just yesterday, Piper had enjoyed a Polish sausage, fries, and a giant vanilla shake. And three days prior to that she’d gotten completely out of control and had a huge slice of New York cheesecake—the chocolate marble swirl kind.

Piper was aware that her bingeing on dairy was a classic case of rebellion, the kind she should have experimented with at seventeen. But she hadn’t had the nerve at seventeen. Or eighteen. The truth was, it sucked being the only child of the founders of the Caloric Restriction and Human Longevity Lab at Harvard. They were among the country’s most revered biomedical researchers—and two of the most tightly wound, repressed human beings ever to inhabit the earth.

Birthdays weren’t celebrated in her family. Her parents said holidays were just an excuse to overdo. For her birthday, Piper could count on a kiss on the cheek and a new book, but never cake and ice cream or a beautifully wrapped gift.

“Will vanilla work for you?” Piper asked Miss Meade, who was rubbing against her ankle and purring, a sure sign of her improving mood.

As she scooped out two bowls of the heavenly substance, it suddenly struck Piper as pathetic. Her idea of debauchery in the twenty-first century was a cup of vanilla ice cream. Ophelia Harrington had spent part of 1813 studying the erotic arts, under the tutelage of a masked man she knew only as “Sir,” who served as her professor of gluttonous depravity for seven days and seven nights.