And then she arrived, so sweet and summery in her floral dress and pale gold boater that the grimy shadows in both the office and his heart seemed to fade away. Home, he thought with a silent sigh. Which was ridiculous, considering he’d only known the woman for a short while. And yet somehow, Beth Pickering had become a safe hearth for him.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded with a censorious frown. Devon struggled not to grin delightedly.
“Fieldwork, same as you.” Leaning back in the chair, he set his booted feet on the desk in a deliberate provocation. And sure enough, her frown deepened. He loved to see it. He wanted to push her against the crammed bookshelves and kiss all the most interesting places on her body until that frown was twisting with pleasure. But more than that, he wanted to be the kind of man this bookish, brilliant woman might come to like. So he just sat quietly.
“Villain,” she said, not fooled in the least.
He shrugged. “Ornithologist. I’m actually surprised we’re the only ones here. At the very least, I thought you’d reunited with Mrs. Quirm.”
“I left her on the train, heading for the Cotswolds.”
He grinned. “Ruthless woman.”
“Ruthless enough to shout for a custodian to drag you out of here and have you arrested for trespassing and—and—academic espionage.”
It was a lie. She was flirting with him. Did this mean she liked him? Not that it mattered, since she would absolutely stop liking him when she learned of his fundamental defect, but nevertheless the question remained, did she like him? And what could he do to get her liking him even more? (A subsidiary question, was he going to recollect sometime soon how to breathe? was dismissed as being unimportant.)
He continued regarding her in silence, partly because it made him appear masterful, and partly because his body had a most emphatic response of its own to those questions, and he desperately needed time to drag it back into control. Never before had he been more thankful for the challenges of receiving a university education at a young age, alone in a foreign country; it had taught him, if nothing else, how to hide all kinds of feelings behind a calm facade. Finally he stood, rounding the desk.
Beth did not move, although judging from the darkening storm in her eyes, she was feeling rather woozy too. Devon walked toward her, coming so close he felt the anticipation sparking off her as their arms almost, almost brushed together…and then he veered away.
“I’m not here for academic espionage,” he said, crossing to the bookshelves while Beth struggled to inhale behind him. He randomly inspected books, wooden birds, snuffboxes. “Gladstone is chairman of the International Ornithological Society.”
“And?”
He cast a wry smile over his shoulder at her. “And you know there’s something suspicious going on. Carnivorous lapwing, feuerfinch, frostbird: three trained magical birds, the first appearing in Paris on the same day news of the competition was published. Only people with advance knowledge, and access to such rare birds, could have been involved. IOS is the obvious suspect, and therefore, by association, Gladstone. Tell me that clever brain of yours hasn’t reached the same conclusion.”
“Why would IOS do such a thing?” Beth asked—but he knew it was in a Socratic way, already having her own answer and wanting to elicit his. So she fancied playing teacher with him, did she? He liked that game. Turning back toward her, he prepared to make another seductive approach.
But Beth walked away. Captivated, he watched her move to Gladstone’s desk, where she donned her spectacles and began shifting papers, opening drawers. Finally his brain shook itself back into action.
“Perhaps they want to create drama,” he said. “And keep ornithologists busy.”
She glanced up at him over the rim of the spectacles, approval in her eyes, and Devon’s stomach went all twinkly like it used to do whenever he got an answer right in school.
“Why wouldn’t ornithologists be busy enough hunting the caladrius?” she asked.
Time to turn her game back onto her. “Why do you think, Miss Pickering?”
“I think the caladrius isn’t in the wild at all,” she said, her tone far lighter than the statement warranted. Devon was rather stunned that she’d just come right out and said it. He couldn’t imagine any other competitor doing the same; indeed, had Hippolyta Quirm or Klaus Oberhufter been standing in this room instead of her, they’d probably have whacked Devon over the head with the taxidermied dodo by now and stolen his wallet.
Picking up a notebook, Beth flipped through its pages. Devon waited breathlessly for the next word out of her mouth, as if it would be gold.
“It seems to me that IOS would not run a competition without being confident of there being a good outcome,” she said as she paused at one page, then another, assessing their contents. “Even with dozens of ornithologists on the job, finding one small white bird in all of England is like trying to find a needle in a Philetairus socius’s nest. This suggests IOS has possession of the caladrius and intends to rig the contest as they see fit. I came here to present my theory to Professor Gladstone in return for some answers. But he’s not here. He may have left behind revealing information, however.”
“How angelic of you to tell all of this to your rival,” Devon remarked.
Setting down the notebook, she shrugged. “Prevarication seems rather pointless, considering we’re both operating under the same conclusion. We are, aren’t we?”
Their eyes met, and between them shot an understanding so mutual, Devon had to think very fast, very firmly, of cold showers and ice storms.
“We are,” he said. Turning away with some effort, he put his hands on his hips as he regarded the cluttered room. “Although we’ll be lucky to find any proof of our theory in this mess.”
Beth lifted a piece of paper from atop a ramshackle stack and stared at it. “You mean like a letter between Professor Gladstone and the IOS secretary, explaining everything?”
“Seriously, there’s a letter?” he said, striding across.
“What?” She looked up at him vaguely, then at the paper again. “Oh. No, this is just his grocery list. But I mean, such a letter would be the ideal proof.”
Devon laughed. “My God, I love—”
“Of course!” she exclaimed suddenly, snapping her fingers. Startled, confused, Devon felt himself actually blushing.
But she was not even looking at him, let alone cognizant of what he’d almost said. Casting aside the piece of paper, she began to stride across the office. Devon shifted awkwardly on his feet, not knowing, for the first time in years, what to do. As Beth disappeared through the doorway, he hurried after her like a duckling.
“Where are we going?” he asked as they made their way along the dusty corridor.
“I am going to my office,” she said.
He almost tripped over his feet, for entering Beth Pickering’s office was even more a titillating prospect than being invited into another woman’s bedroom. When she stopped at a door and began rummaging through her satchel for the key, it was all he could do to not lean seductively against the wall, smile, and call her beautiful out of sheer habit.
Opening the door, she astonished and delighted him by not shutting it in his face. He followed her into the room, looking around surreptitiously so as to see everything while still appearing rakishly insouciant. It was all exactly as he’d guessed it would be, from the scrupulously tidy desk to the watercolor paintings of birds set in a precise line on one wall, to the books he was willing to bet were shelved alphabetically—and, in one corner, a rubbish bin overflowing with scrunched papers, which was the officewares equivalent of her battered fingernails.
Beth said nothing, but the awkwardness of her movement as she walked behind the desk revealed just how shy she felt in allowing Devon to see her professional space. He was touched, and also more enamored of her than seemed reasonable for a man who had spent the past decade of his life developing unsentimentality into a fine art. Usually by this point in his relationship with a woman he’d be suggesting interesting ways to mess up that desk of hers. But instead he found himself fighting back the desire to buy some beeswax polish and offer to polish her furniture until it shone. And the fact that this wasn’t a metaphor disturbed him considerably.
Shoving his hands in his pockets and a bland expression on his face, he watched Beth remove her hat as if she were at home, brushing back fine strands of hair that drifted over her cheekbones and the soft curve of her mouth. His hands fisted, and when she began opening desk drawers and shuffling through their contents, his capacity for lewd metaphor came rushing back in a great torrent. From sheer self-preservation, he forced himself to look away. On the wall behind her were several framed qualifications, and he could imagine how they must daunt her students. The woman was accomplished. He also suspected she put those qualifications up not to daunt but to reassure people that she knew what she was doing, because she was nice (and ignorant of human psychology).
“Aha!” she declared, holding up a three-ringed binder triumphantly.
