Scandal

Uh-oh. Not good. Remembering the dreams, staring down at Nick’s picture, Jordan felt heat and moisture rush to her core. She squeezed her thighs together, willing the tingling to stop.

Now it didn’t even take the dreams, just the memory of the dreams, to push her to arousal. In the middle of the afternoon. In her office! And that just couldn’t be.

“Damn you, Nick,” she said out loud. “First you came around, haunting my dreams, boinking me silly, and then you don’t come into my dreams. I’m turning into a crazy person!”

This part had to be sheer frustration. While the visions were coming every night, she looked forward to going to sleep, just to meet and stoke the fire with her dream lover, eager to find out whose myth they’d be acting out tonight.

Until a week or so ago, when the dreams stopped. No nightmares, no fantasies, no Nick. Clearly, it was the disappointment over losing her dreams that was making her even nuttier than she was before, even more obsessed.

Jordan gulped and sat up straighter in her chair, deliberately putting the photos aside. “It’s not my fault. It’s just…stress. Stress over not finishing the dissertation.”

But she grabbed the photographs back before they’d even left her hands. She couldn’t not look.

So handsome. So mesmerizing.

In the first picture, the wedding portrait, he stood tall and starkly handsome, in an immaculate long, dark coat with a stiff white shirt and white tie, with a small flower pinned to his lapel. Nick’s posture—shoulders back, chin up, facing square into the camera—was comfortable, assured, maybe even arrogant. Next to him, his new wife looked remote and unremarkable.

Jordan chewed her lip. Who cared about the wife? She was doing her best to block out the fact that he’d even had a wife.

“That’s bizarre,” she chided herself. “Why should you care if a guy from 1893 was married? For all you know, they were the love story of the century. Or he was a jerk, or she was a saint, or…”

But she did care. Because, in her heart, she was having a love affair with him, and she didn’t want him to be married.

For whatever reason, she felt completely connected to Nick. She’d known from the moment she’d spotted those pictures on eBay that he was important to her. The overheated dreams only made that more obvious.

And that was why she continued to moon over his photos during the day, and then toss and turn at night, hoping she could reach the dreams where the two of them tangled together, naked and aroused, in the very positions depicted on the arch.

“The dreams have stopped. So let’s not even think about them anymore,” she said quickly. But she couldn’t stop thinking about them, not when she looked into his face in the pictures. It was that face that haunted her fantasies.

His features were beautiful, with high cheekbones, dark brows, a slightly crooked nose that gave him character, and perfectly shaped lips, a little fuller on the bottom. She really liked the look of those wide, sensual lips, with the hint of a dimple on one side. She remembered tasting and nibbling those lips in her dreams. She remembered those lips trailing fire up her thigh…

“Okay, not thinking about that,” she ordered herself, squirming a little in her hard wooden chair. “Not!”

But if she didn’t look at his lips, then there were his eyes. They were so intense and compelling, pinning her, pulling her in, hypnotizing her. They weren’t exactly safe, either.

The other photo was a little less sharp, but even more attractive, because he was smiling. Hatless, with his dark hair tousled by the wind, he looked carefree and adorable, as if his whole life were ahead of him and he couldn’t wait to jump right in.

It made it that much more affecting to realize he’d died just a few months after it was taken. The more attached she became to Nick, the more tragic that seemed.

“I feel like I know you inside and out, Nick,” she said softly, fingering the hard angle of his jaw in the small photo. “And you know me. Like it’s always been that way. But why?”

She’d felt guilty taking time away from her main research into Isabella and the arch, but she’d done it, anyway, to glean more details about Nick. Not that she’d managed to find much. She knew when he was born and married and when he died. She’d read about his travels to Europe with Isabella from reports in the society columns at that time, and it sounded as if the brother and sister were fairly close. But when he got married to Lydia Trent, and when he died just a year after that in, of all things, America’s first car race, his beloved sister wasn’t there. Not in the list of wedding guests, and not in the list of mourners at his funeral. She wasn’t even mentioned in his obituary.

“Do I keep staring at you because it seems weird your sister didn’t come to your wedding or your funeral?” Jordan questioned aloud. “Or because it’s so hard to think about you dying just a year after your wedding?”

Or because he was handsome and tragic and amazingly hot?

“Or because I am one crazy, mixed-up chick,” she whispered. “Because fantasizing about a guy who’s been dead since 1895 is not exactly sane.”

“Jordan?”

Recognizing the voice, she looked up, hastily shoving the photos back inside her drawer as Daniel edged into her office. Daniel. Her boyfriend. Sort of her fiancé. Really just her boyfriend, though. And she needed to get a grip and stop thinking about Nick and the tree and his thighs and her thighs and his lips and his…

Yeah, time to get a grip.

2

How to Be a Scandalous Woman, Rule 2:

Gossip is great. It’s when they’re not talking about you that you have to worry.

1893

N ICHOLAS B ONAVENTURE T EMPEST was bored. Bored down to the soles of his fine leather boots.

Alone in the third-floor music room of his family mansion, leaning back with his feet propped on a wooden table, Nick aimed and then tossed a souvenir Columbian Exposition half-dollar into an empty china cup he’d set on a piano stool about five feet away. Clink. In again. Just like the past eleven times he’d played this game. After an even dozen, he supposed he ought to move on.

Not for the first time, he reached for the brandy decanter at his elbow. He’d already had quite enough to be thoroughly sloshed, but in the mood he was currently in, there just wasn’t enough liquor in the world. Tedious dinner parties, tedious women, tedious conversation…Even his father’s best Napoleon brandy wasn’t enough to make that nonsense palatable.

“Ah, well. I’m done with it for one more night, at any rate.” He saluted himself with his glass. “Until tomorrow.”

“Nick, darling, it’s already tomorrow,” his sister, Isabella, noted sweetly as she swept into the room.

Nick sat up straighter. One look told him something was up. Trouble was pretty much the norm with Isabella, but the sparkle of mischief in her pretty blue eyes was even more ominous than usual. He hoped she hadn’t fallen in love again. He didn’t need to get into any more fights defending Isabella’s honor. Not that there was any honor left as far as he could tell, or that she cared. Still, a good fistfight might provide a diversion.

“Are you just getting home?” he asked. “A bit late, isn’t it?”

“Not for me. I don’t believe in living my life by the clock. Besides, you’re hardly one to talk,” she pointed out. “You’re the one who has to make an appearance at the store bright and early.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Isabella was clearly too wrapped up in her own good mood to pay attention to his gloom. She discarded her cloak and gloves, dumping them on a nearby music stand. “It’s not my fault you’ve become such a respectable citizen. I warned you time and again that Father would turn you into a drudge if you let him.”

“I’m hardly a drudge. I run the place.”

“You’re a drudge. And you’re much too good for that.”

She began humming some cheery tune, dancing around in her loose artist’s smock, the kind she always wore over her gowns when she was working on a sculpture. That explained why she was coming in so late. When she was in the middle of a project, she didn’t notice anything else. It did not, however, explain her good spirits. Ever since she’d come home from Europe, Bella had been moody and unhappy about her future as a sculptress.

Spinning around to look at him, she set her pretty face in a pout. “Play something on the piano for me, will you, Nick? You’re so much better at it than I.”

“And wake up the entire household? I don’t think so.”

“Not just a drudge but a shriveled-up old prune,” she mocked him. “I want the old Nick back. My dashing brother, always running off after some fast woman or fast horse. He would’ve played me a tune in the wee hours if I asked him.”

“One of us had to grow up,” he commented dryly. “It certainly wasn’t going to be you.”

She shrugged. “I hope I never grow up. It’s quite disgusting.”