“I most certainly am not!” Beth retorted, sitting a little more erect. “It is sensible of me to avoid corruption when it is placed like a lure before me.”
Devon broke off a piece of piecrust and put it in his mouth. He was at least enough of a gentleman to not speak while eating, but his eyebrows moved with eloquence, and Beth turned even more prickly.
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll submit, just this once. Go ahead and ask again.”
“Knock knock.”
She sighed. “Who’s there?”
“Hoo.”
“Hoo who?”
“Why, Miss Pickering, I did not know you were an owl.”
She stared at him, and he took another bite of the dreadful pie so he wouldn’t laugh. She was beautiful in the drift of golden light and silvery shadow, with her hair a long damp braid that had left distracting wet patches down the front of her nightshirt, and her bare fingers a great deal more interesting than he’d expected. Their ink stains, scratches, and short, crooked fingernails attracted him as no manicure had ever done. But then, everything about her attracted him. Even her weary exasperation.
“That’s your idea of a witty joke?” she asked.
He did laugh then, almost choking on the pie. “No, darling, that’s my idea of a joke suitable for your ladylike taste. You’d almost certainly combust in flames of offended dignity if I told you something I considered witty.”
“Tsk,” she said, shaking her head. The wine had failed to loosen her attitude (although she was tilting a little to one side), and Devon suspected that, if he really did tell her a risqué joke, she’d lecture him until he surrendered with a promise to become a better man. And God, how awful would that be? Iniquity was an excellent defense against vulnerability, and he had no intention of relinquishing it, not even for the sake of a beautiful woman.
He reached automatically for his wineglass, drank what was in it, and grimaced as his throat burned. “I can’t believe you gave away that deathwhistler feather. Selling it would have bought us a decent bottle of chardonnay, if nothing else.”
“Unlikely,” she said. “It was just an underwing covert. Besides, the calamus was—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Sorry.”
Devon frowned mildly in confusion. “Why?”
“I talk too much about birds,” she said with wry amusement. But she would not meet his gaze, and he noticed her fingers twisting in the billows of her nightshirt.
“I’m an ornithology professor,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to talk too much about birds. ‘The calamus was—’ what?”
She looked at him then, her eyes dark at first with suspicion but slowly lightening as he smiled encouragingly, then beginning to shine with outright excitement. “It was marred with significant vertical cracks,” she said, her words racing after each other as if they’d been waiting offstage, clutching their scripts and jiggling their knees, desperate for an opportunity to be spoken. “This might indicate the deathwhistler was an unhealthy specimen, or it might have been in the process of pulling the feather out to facilitate molting, or else you caused the damage during your theft of the bird.” She gave him a reproachful scowl, and he tried not to grin. “Also, the plumulaceous portion was yellow, which suggests a juvenile bird, although it’s hard to be certain, since the deathwhistler retains its first underwing coverts until late in the transition to adulthood. In any case, the feather’s value was sentimental only.” She sighed. “Coming away with just one small covert I found in the dirt seemed appropriate for that particular venture.”
Devon tried not to wince as a strange little pain flicked through him. “I don’t apologize for stealing the bird,” he told her, “but I am sorry you didn’t get the chance to observe it more. If it helps, my measure of the wing chord placed the bird’s age somewhere in its third year.”
Beth gazed at him wide-eyed, seemingly having forgotten the necessity of breathing. “Did you happen to notice the unusual formation of its beak?” he asked, just to keep the delightful expression on her face.
The delight flared even brighter, warming his heart. “Yes! I actually took a note of it…” She leaned sideways, reaching for her satchel, and brought out a field journal and spectacles. Opening the book at a steep angle, so as to protect its contents from him, she shared her observation of the deathwhistler’s mandibular rostrum. While he listened, Devon regarded her thoughtfully, trying to decide how much of her defensiveness was from mere caution and how much from actual dislike of him. He found neither particularly daunting. More than once, he’d spent hours on a freezing, windswept beach, coaxing some wary shark gull or sword-billed sanderling closer so he could study it. Convincing a woman to talk to him was easy in comparison. And he very much wanted Beth to talk—about birds, or anything, really. He’d luxuriate for as long as he possibly could in the precise, polysyllabic tones of her voice and the interesting things she had to say.
So he started detailing the deathwhistler’s measurements, keeping his manner light, and sure enough, Beth gradually lowered the book. She wrote his descriptions alongside a sketch she’d made of the bird, her penmanship delicate and clean, turning his words into something lovely. Her eyes looking up at him over the rim of the spectacles were wing-dreaming skies he wanted to lie back and stare at for hours. And when she bit the end of her pencil while listening to him explain the deathwhistler’s toe structure, he had to lay a pillow across his lap to hide the effect it had on him. Conversing with this woman was like the most delicious foreplay, only with technical descriptions of an avian species in lieu of touching.
At last, the hearth fire burned low. “We should probably go to sleep now,” Beth said reluctantly, putting the journal away. Devon felt a strange little swoop in his heart, as if he’d been abseiling with a rope that had suddenly slackened. Beth reached up to remove her spectacles, and he had to force himself not to catch her hand, stop her, since he couldn’t think of a reason for doing so beyond you’re so damned sexy when you wear them, I want to keep handing you things to read. Which, he guessed, she’d find impolite.
“I’d like to take the earliest possible train tomorrow,” she said, her voice brisk again now they had stopped discussing birds. “I’m certain Hippolyta already has a plan in action.”
“And you want to catch up with her.”
“I want to beat her. We may have been associates for the past couple of years, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t rivals now in this competition. To be honest, I’m glad I missed the ferry. It means I didn’t have to tell her to her face that I was parting ways with her.” She lowered her head as she carefully packed the spectacles into her satchel, and Devon could have sworn he heard her muttering in a self-deprecating tone, “I’m not sure I have enough apologies in me for that.”
“Maybe, if she was the one who lured us into that trap in Calais, it was her way of not having to tell you that she wanted to part ways.”
“Maybe. But why would she involve you?” Beth shook her head. “Really, it could have been anyone who did that. Ornithology is hardly a walk in the park. Er, except when it is an actual walk in the park to observe birds, of course.”
He grinned at her. “Very true. As for the train, there’s an eight o’clock to London we can catch. The innkeeper has agreed to knock on our door if we’re not awake on time.”
A tight little pause followed.
“I appreciate your assistance thus far,” Beth said slowly, “but we should probably keep in mind that there can be—”
“Only one Birder of the Year,” he recited with her. “Yes, I remember.” The pie turned over in his stomach. Standing, he gathered plates and empty wineglasses, then stepped across the thin space of bare floor to stack them on the hearth shelf. Vapor arising from the clothes hung to dry on bedframes made his breath feel hot. Lust spiraled like a small, frantic bird in his gut. Scowling, he vehemently wished himself somewhere more comfortable, such as the Indian jungle during monsoon season.
A small noise made him turn, and his blood leaped as he found Beth standing close to him, an empty plate in her hands.
“I hope we won’t have a long walk to the train station,” she said, even as Devon contemplated which of her cheek or throat or earlobe he would most like to kiss first. “My shoes are quite ruined. It was discourteous of Miss Marin to hijack the carriage rather than simply share.”
Devon huffed a laugh. “Discourteous certainly is a nice way to describe having a gun pointed at you,” he said, and held out his hand to take the plate from her.
At that same moment, she leaned forward to place it atop the others on the hearth shelf. His fingers brushed against the front of her nightgown. The plate clattered onto the shelf.
“Sorry,” Devon said, stepping back.
“Sorry,” Beth said, stepping back at the same time.
“It’s fine,” they both answered at once.
He tried to go around her, just as she tried to move out of his way. He shuffled in the opposite direction—so did she—and they laughed nervously. There simply wasn’t enough space in the room, although at this point Devon suspected there wasn’t enough space in the entire world for him to comfortably breathe, knowing that Beth Pickering existed.
