Cottage by the Sea (30 page)

   "I'll draw you a map and put it under your plate at dinner."

   "Are you serious?" she demanded, glad for a chance to escape the vaguely sinister musings that lurked at the back of her mind whenever they made love at the cottage.

   "Absolutely serious," he said solemnly. "Look under the soup course."

That evening Blythe felt a frisson of anticipation when she surreptitiously lifted her soup plate and retrieved a hand-drawn map sketched on a small piece of stationery imprinted with the Barton Hall letterhead. She caught Luke gazing at her with a lecherous gleam in his eye from across the mahogany dining table as she tucked the provocative note into the pocket of her slacks. To hide her embarrassment, she quickly turned to Richard and asked him if he'd be willing to help her count rolls of polyurethane when they arrived in the morning.

   "Oh, yes, please," he said happily. "What's poly—what is that, Blythe?"

   "Sheets of very strong plastic… sort of temporary windows for the potting sheds."

   After dinner Richard invited her to join him at a card table set up in the library where he had been working all summer long on a gigantic jigsaw puzzle depicting a wall of paintings that hung in the Louvre in Paris.

   "This is a nightmare, Dicken," she groaned, fingering a puzzle piece colored an unrelieved shade of brown and signifying nothing, as far as she was concerned. "How do you have the patience?"

   "Look!" the boy said excitedly. "You've got a bit of the
Mona Lisa's
hair!" He took the piece from her fingers and snapped it into place.

   "Brilliant!" Blythe said, admiringly.

   She had purposely sat with her back to the BartonTrevelyan-Teague genealogy chart. Luke stretched out on the brown leather sofa, cracked with long use, reading the newspaper. The two Labs were curled up in their wicker dog baskets flanking the fireplace and snored or scratched in blissful contentment.

   The instant the clock on the mantel struck nine, Luke sat up, folded his newspaper, and announced, "Bedtime!"

   "Oh, Dad," Richard protested, "can't we have fifteen more minutes? Blythe's just found the corner of the
Mona
Lisa's
mouth!"

   "No. Sorry. Can't be done. Off with you, now."

   "It's not fair!" Richard protested stubbornly. "Blythe and I were just—"

   "Not another word!" Luke interrupted sternly.

   "Will you come with me upstairs?" Richard asked Blythe in a small voice.

   She darted a glance at Luke, wondering how far she should go in offering comfort and companionship to the tenyear-old who looked at her with a beseeching expression.

   
He's not your son!

   Richard's father hesitated and then rose from the leather sofa. Instantly Derek and Beryl sprang from their baskets.

   "I'll take you up," he replied quickly, and the awkward moment passed. "I'm a bit tired myself tonight," Luke added, winking at Blythe over his son's head. "Would you mind, Blythe, if I turned in too?"

   "Not a bit," she answered, doing her best not to smile. "I'd like to read for a while. I spotted your copy of du Maurier's
The King's General and thought
I'd give it a try. Night, you two."

   "Will you read me a story, Daddy?" Richard demanded.

   "A very short one," Luke conceded.

   "Good night, Blythe," Richard said, his good spirits completely restored.

   "Good night, buckaroo." Blythe smiled and impulsively gave him a hug.

   "Don't stay up too late," Luke warned, a ghost of a grin on his lips. "The chaps delivering the plastic rolls should be here around eight." He turned to the dogs. "Off to the kitchen with you lot… come!"

   When they had shut the door, Blythe pulled Luke's handdrawn map out of her pocket. At the bottom of the directions to his bedroom in the south wing Luke had scrawled, "I'll be waiting in the BBB. The curtains will be closed, but please don't let that stop you."

   Blythe reached her hands over her head and stretched. She felt a fillip of excitement fluttering in her chest. The Bawdy Bed of Barton. How deliciously wicked that sounded! Luke had told her that generations of his family had lived, loved, given birth, and died in that four-poster.

   "I try not to think about it too much," he had laughed.

   She was consumed with curiosity to see what a piece of furniture with that much history attached to it looked like.

   Despite Blythe's best intentions, she found her glance drawn to the wall over her shoulder where the enormous family tree looked down on her from its ornate gilt frame.

   Taking a step closer, she couldn't resist staring at the long line of Teague ancestors that proceeded from Lucas's name directly back to Garrett's entry into the history of Barton Hall.

   "Born… 1772. Died… 1848…" she murmured, carefully refraining from putting her hands near the glass. Well, at least poor Garrett had finally married someone in 1799 at age twenty-seven, she reflected, noting that Joan Vyvyan was ten years younger than the heir to Barton Hall. They had had a son to carry on the line and several other children as well.

   She glanced over at the revolving bookcase, recalling the memory of seeing young Garrett urgently calling her namesake to escape with him into its depths. Had she slipped into some time warp that day, somehow catching a glimpse of the tumultuous events in the lives of Luke's ancestors? Or had she accessed a wayward notch on her own genes, as Valerie Kent described it?

   She gazed once again at the chart, her eyes drifting from Garrett's name to her namesake's. Blythe recalled how she had pushed against the glass at that spot but had lost her nerve and had called a halt to the phenomenon.

   Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself silently, just as the clock struck nine-thirty. Blythe then felt a delicious shiver run up her spine. The thought of Luke waiting for her in the Bawdy Bed of Barton was a powerful aphrodisiac, even more powerful than the undeniable magnetism that had previously drawn her to unearth the lives and loves of their eighteenth-century counterparts.

   "Night, all," she whispered, switching off the light. The library was plunged into darkness, and Barton Hall seemed, for once, devoid of ghosts.

Later that night Blythe acquired a new understanding and appreciation of the lengths to which Lucas Teague would go to please her in bed.

   Sure enough, when she finally found her way to the castle's master suite, the red velvet curtains of the enormous four-poster were shut tight. The drapery hung from the immense bed's oak canopy, which was ornately carved with cherubs clutching various family crests. The massive overhead structure was supported by spiraling Jacobean bedposts hewn from single tree trunks. Blythe closed the door gently and padded across a thick Persian carpet to the side of the bed.

   "I feared you'd got lost," a deep voice rumbled from within.

   "One wrong turn, but here I am," she laughed shakily.

   "Are you removing your clothing, my darling?" the voice asked calmly.

   "Y-Yes," Blythe replied, her fingers fumbling with the buttons on her silk blouse.

   "What, exactly, are you removing?"

   "My blouse."

   "Excellent. And now what?"

   "Luke!" she protested. "You're getting positively prurient."

   "What?" he insisted.

   "My slacks…"

   "Standing in your knickers and bra, are you?" he inquired with sweet solicitude.

   She remained silent for a moment.

   "Panties only," she announced softly, feeling the muscles in her abdomen tighten excruciatingly.

   "Please, dear heart… keep them on and come in here."

   She drew the velvet curtain aside and gave a little gasp. Two brass sconces attached to the velvet hangings installed above the padded velvet headboard cast a golden glow over the scarlet enclosure. Luke's bronzed chest had turned to burnished amber in the shadowy light. He had thrown back the duvet and was lying on his side, looking to her like a capsized nude statue that sported a marvelous tan.

   "Extremely hazardous, those," he announced, nodding to the candles burning above. "But it's worth the risk, don't you think?" Then, with elaborate ceremony, he placed two boxes on the feather duvet. One box contained a row of condoms wrapped in individual packets of foil; the other displayed an array of chocolate-covered cherries.

   "One for you," he murmured, popping a chocolate into her mouth, "and one for me," he continued, placing a condom on the bedside table. Before she could seize a candy to present to him, Luke snatched the confections off the bed and again chose one for himself. "I've saved the best for you," he said with a smug smile, and then placed it between his teeth.

   Shaking her head, she responded, "Englishman… you never cease to amaze me." Then she crawled on her hands and knees across the wide expanse of the bed and faced him nose to nose. "Now, give me that!"

Within the confines of the Bawdy Bed of Barton, the candles had burned so low, they were nearly sputtering out. They cast an eerie glow inside the red velvet world that had served as their plush cocoon. The dancing liquid light played across Luke's immobile features and long, lean body as he lay face up, eyes closed, like some effigy in a crypt, beautiful and timeless. Blythe recoiled from the image as soon as it wafted through her mind. She pulled herself to her knees and promptly blew out the tapers, careful not to splatter wax on the plush fabric. The interior of the Barton Bed was plunged into darkness, and instantly Blythe regretted not now being able to see Luke, to behold the man who had given her such pleasure and who had inspired her to return it in kind.

   She sank down beside him, stretching out on her back, feeling uncomfortably like a companion effigy on a tomb, her left foot lying beside his right calf.

   Now the curtained walls seemed close and confining, no longer the cozy refuge they had been from the moment she had slid into Luke's lair. It disconcerted her to think that some two hundred years earlier Blythe Barton and Kit Trevelyan had spent their wedding night in this very bed. What had her namesake done when all her attempts to escape her fate had failed and she was confronted with the reality of facing her new husband and physically surrendering to him? And where had Ennis and Garrett slept that night in 1789?

   As she listened to Luke's even breathing, she thought about what it must have been like for women in earlier centuries, forced to marry against their will and to join their bodies with men they didn't want—or worse, couldn't physically abide. What would she have done in the same situation?

   Blythe's thoughts drifted to the memory of her first glimpse of the slashed painting of Ennis she'd found in the stable loft. When had Blythe and Ennis first betrayed Kit? she wondered. Before or after Collis Trevelyan forced her to the altar in St. Goran's Church? And was it only Ennis whom Blythe took into her bed? From what little she had pieced together, Garrett Teague had somehow become entangled in the young woman's desperate need for love and affection.

   Try as she might, Blythe couldn't refrain from mulling over the strange parallels between her sister Ellie's committing adultery with Christopher, and Blythe the First's betraying Kit with his brother, Ennis. Her sister had done to her what Ennis had done to Kit… coveted what didn't belong to them. They had seized what they wanted from their siblings, what they desired, and the devil take the hindmost.

   But was that what had really happened? Blythe asked herself bleakly. Wasn't there more to it than simply that Ellie and Ennis were bad, or that Chris Stowe and her eighteenth-century namesake were highly sexed and faithless? Was she, Blythe Barton, utterly blameless in this twenty-first century?

   Blythe reflected on the impressions of the eighteenthcentury world that she had glimpsed so mysteriously. When she had stepped outside the bare facts of her namesake's tangled affairs, she had been amazed to discover that she could empathize with everyone: the first Blythe Barton, Kit, Garrett, and even the roguish Ennis Trevelyan. None of them was perfect, but neither were they evil. Their flaws had been their undoing, and not some inborn rapaciousness engraved in their characters.

   And if Blythe was scrupulously honest with herself, none of Luke's ancestors exhibited the all-consuming malevolence she had ascribed to Eleanor Barton. Even the essentially self-centered Ennis Trevelyan hadn't nurtured the degree of malice that Blythe had ascribed to her baby sister and that had brought her to the conclusion that there was such a thing as justifiable homicide.

   She peered through the gloom at Luke, concerned that her insomnia might disturb his sleep. She could see by his even breathing that she was wrestling with the ghosts of Barton Hall completely on her own.

   There was no excuse to be made for Ellie's behavior, Blythe considered moodily, but could there be a
reason
behind it that Blythe had never understood? Some notch on the "memory gene," which Valerie Kent claimed might exist, that made her sister Ellie feel that it was payback time?

   And what if Luke was falling in love with her—Blythe Barton, late of Hollywood—merely as an unconscious echo of the secret love his forebear, Garrett Teague, had silently harbored for his cousin's wife? Or the original Blythe for him, for all anyone knew?