“Visiting Gladstone, I mean,” he added.
“Oh. Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “We must get there before them.”
A moment’s very interesting silence followed.
“First thing in the morning?” Devon suggested.
Beth understood what he was really asking. After all, she might be nice, but that did not mean she was stupid. And she knew exactly how to answer.
“Yes,” she said.
Suddenly, a raucous laugh from Oberhufter and Hippolyta’s room echoed down the corridor. Beth flinched. “But we can’t stay here,” she said. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” And without even one attempt to argue, Devon picked up his suitcase, took her hand, and led her back downstairs. As they slipped past the innkeeper and out into the cool gray evening, Beth found herself wondering if his manhandling continued in all situations…and for a wild, corrupted moment she regretted the loss of the magnificent honeymoon bed.
“This way,” Devon said, tugging her eastward.
Then, fifteen minutes later: “This way,” he said, tugging her to the north.
But it was no use. They found only two other inns, both of which had been fully booked via telegram that very afternoon. Directed at last to a private boardinghouse, they were welcomed on account of their pitiful expressions (and willingness to pay double).
“We’re at full occupancy, but I do have one room you can use,” the landlady said as she ushered them into a cozy, dark-paneled foyer. “However, I’m afraid there’s a small issue with the beds…”
—
“None,” Devon said in a dull voice, shaking his head as he surveyed what appeared to be a disused office. It contained a solid oak desk, an old filing cabinet, stacks of books, and—“No beds whatsoever.”
“But cushions!” Beth said brightly from behind an armful of them. “And a blanket. We can…make…”
Her voice faded as Devon pinned her with a dark, vehement stare. Her heart (or at least something) began to squirm.
“Three cushions and a blanket is not going to be adequate for our needs tonight,” he said. His tone could have melted railway steel faster than a feuerfinch.
Beth clenched herself into stillness, even while she raced frantically through her vocabulary for a clever response. But she found only bird facts and the dusty remnants of a joke she’d told in 1887.
Her eyes were eloquent, however, and Devon obeyed their request, striding toward her. She tossed the pillows aside, he caught her face in his hands, and they were kissing even before the narrative could summon a metaphor in preparation.
Beth’s good manners were instantly immolated. She reached for Devon with a kind of homing instinct, clutching his coat lapels, pulling the solidness and wildness of him closer to her heart. He wrapped his arms around her, encompassing all the shy uncertainty, desperate hunger, and textbook facts about courtship that tumbled confusedly within her. As their tongues slipped against each other in the secret dark, Beth wanted more, more, even knowing that a hundred years of this would not be enough, even as her bones seemed to melt into something that felt like pure liquid gold. Had the caladrius appeared in the room at that moment, interrupting them, Beth would have shot it.
Slowly, their kissing gentled, grew lush and silky, easing the storm of passion into true feeling. Tugging at the pins in her hair, Devon had it unbound in seconds, his hands smoothing the satiny ripples. His tenderness, and the palpable longing Beth could feel in his touch, brought her to tears. All the lonely years dissolved. Devon kissed away from her mouth in a glimmering trail down her throat, but before she could miss him he came back, kissing each sliding tear before touching his damp lips to hers again reverently. For the first time in a life of endless academic successes, she discovered what real happiness felt like.
Outside, night sank over the world, leaving only a soft wash of lamplight in the room. It swayed with breezes that slipped through cracks in the window frame and down the ashy chimney. Neither of them noticed. Without pausing between kisses, their fingers tangled while they worked to remove Devon’s coat and unbutton his shirt. As the cotton parted, Beth brushed a hand against his exposed chest, smiling when she felt the pulse beneath it tumble into disarray. Her fingers were snowy in comparison to his warm-colored skin. Ancient Greek script was tattooed across his left pectoral major: the wind is blowing, adore the wind, she translated, tracing the letters.
“Pythagoras,” she whispered, utterly seduced. His breath catching, Devon set a thumb beneath her chin and tilted it up.
“Let me see that beautiful cleverness,” he said, his voice husky with desire.
“Now you’re the one who needs a new dictionary,” she told him, her smile slanting. “Cleverness is incorporeal, therefore cannot be beautiful.”
“To hell with semantics,” he said, and bent to kiss her again.
Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!
At the sudden loud rapping, Beth jolted. Her forehead smacked into Devon’s, and they stumbled back with cries of pain.
Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!
Beth looked around for a giant woodpecker, despite their being endemic to Prince Edward Island, thousands of miles away, but Devon, scowling beneath the heel of the hand pressed against his forehead, strode toward the door.
“Wait!” Beth whispered urgently. “Your shirt.”
He stopped as if he’d collided with a wall of pain. For a moment, he did nothing but breathe; then he rebuttoned the shirt, tucking it impatiently into his waistband, before flinging open the door. On the other side, the boardinghouse landlady leaped back with an alarmed squeak.
Beth watched, fascinated, as Devon harnessed his temper and transformed it in less than a second into calm, endearing charm. “I’m sorry, you startled me,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair, smiling at the woman until she blushed. “Can I help you?”
“Um—um—” the landlady said, struggling to manage her flustered nerves. She held a folded newspaper, and Beth sighed even as she saw the heave of Devon’s shoulders that suggested he was doing the same.
“I just wanted to let you know,” the landlady said, “that I have a proper bedroom free after all…‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith.’ ”
She winked broadly, and Beth realized the pseudonym they’d given when checking in had not withstood their portraits’ existence in the evening news. Devon glanced back over his shoulder at her, and his expression was so scandalous, she went from pleasantly warm to steaming hot.
Hurrying over to the door, she offered her own smile to the landlady. “Thank you for such kindness. Is there any chance the new room has two beds, since we are after all merely professional colleagues, entirely innocent of all improper behavior?” She asked this as if she wasn’t standing disheveled, her hair unbound and lips swollen from kissing, beside an equally disheveled man—as if her good reputation wasn’t almost certainly destroyed, her job no doubt gone, and the entire birding circuit sniggering over newspapers at her thoroughly shocking behavior. Kissing a man! Sharing a room with him! Going about in public without a hat! Nice customs might curtsy to great kings (and grovel before Hippolyta Quirm and Herr Oberhufter), but they demanded scrupulous obedience from England’s lady professors.
And yet, when the landlady murmured apologies for there being only one bed, all Beth felt was secret erotic delight.
“Before we go downstairs,” the woman said, “perhaps you’d be so kind as to provide an autograph?” Holding forth the newspaper in one hand, a pen in the other, she shrugged obsequiously.
“Of course,” Beth said, taking the pen.
