A Week to Be Wicked (Spindle Cove, #2)

by Tessa Dare

A man might engage in flirtation with disinterest, even disdain. But he never teases without affection.”

He quietly groaned. Again and again, he’d witnessed this phenomenon with his friends. They got married. They were happy in that sated, grateful way of infrequently pleasured men with a now-steady source of coitus. Then they went about crowing as if they’d invented the institution of matrimony and stood to earn a profit for every bachelor they could convert.

“Colin, you shouldn’t have made the boy such promises. You’re always doing this. I’ve no doubt you meant well, but your good intentions land like mortar shells. Again and again, you fire off that mouth of yours, and the innocents around you get hurt.”

“Jesus,” he finally managed, pushing water off his face. “Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. For that matter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.” Still not enough. He needed to reach back to the Old Testament for this. “Obadiah. Nebuchadnezzar. Methuselah and Job.” “Be calm,” she said, taking him by the shoulders. “Be calm. And there are women in the Bible, you know.” “Yes. As I recall it, they were trouble, every last one. What is this place? I can’t see a bloody thing.”

As he watched her, Colin was visited by the strangest feeling, unfurling warm and buttery inside him. It was a sense of privilege and mute wonder, as though he’d witnessed one of those small, everyday miracles of spring. Like a licked-clean foal taking its first steps on wobbly legs. Or a new butterfly pushing scrunched, damp wings from a chrysalis. Before his eyes, she’d transformed into a new creature. Still a bit awkward and uncertain, but undaunted. And well on her way to being beautiful.

She looked like a memory, interrupted. A torrid dream. Or a glimpse of the future, perhaps.

She tried to feign sleep as he moved about the room, removing his boots, casting watch and cufflinks aside. Stirring the fire. Making all sorts of unapologetic, manly sounds. Men never hesitated to declare their presence. They were permitted to live aloud, in reverberating thuds and clunks, while ladies were always schooled to abide in hushed whispers.

Perhaps, she thought, people were more like ammonites than one would suppose. Perhaps they too built shells on a consistent, unchanging factor—some quality or circumstance established in their youth. Each chamber in the shell just an enlargement of the previous. Growing year after year, until they spiraled around and locked themselves in place.

“And I will curse the gods along with them, Min. Some wild monsoon raged through me as I looked at you just now. It’s left me rearranged inside, and I don’t have a map.”