Page 31 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

F reddy was enraptured, a thousand miles away from the Cotswolds, standing on the bow of a ship. He could feel the mist. He could see the stars. He could taste the sea air.

That was how he had lost track of time after his bath.

He had only intended to glance at this, to get a feel for it before revisiting it tomorrow, and instead he’d been gripped by the throat and pulled directly into the page and over the bow of the pirate ship. He was flattened on the deck. He was gone.

“Freddy!” came his wife’s indignant shouted whisper. “What are you—oh.”

He glanced up, his vision a little muddled, swimming in a blur opposite the letters on the page he was holding and all the imagery that lived behind them. He blinked, forcing her into focus, where she stood in the doorway to his little bedroom with her arms crossed and her eyes in glinting slits.

She looked devastating, of course. She was damp, a blood-red velvet robe clinging to her body. Her long, honey-brown curls were pinned to the crown of her head with loose tendrils framing her beautiful face.

He had never in his life been so taken with reading that he’d forgotten something like that was waiting for him here in the real world.

“Oh,” he said sheepishly. “Oh, I was … I’m sorry, Claire. I was reading.”

He watched her eyes travel from his face to the open collar of his dressing gown, lingering on his chest, on the exposed dusting of golden hair there, and then onward to his hands, holding one of her fairy tales.

She pressed her lips together, examining the scene in front of her, the open purple box at the foot of his bed and the sheets strewn in front of it.

“Which one is that?” she said, unable to maintain her outrage in the face of feedback. “The Golden Quill?”

“No,” he said, fanning the pages between his fingers. “The Pirate King.”

Her eyes widened, her face flaring into color as she lunged forward as though to snatch it from him. “Oh, not that one! That one was not supposed to be in there!”

He laughed, jerking it immediately out of reach and making her hop in place. She crawled onto the mattress after it, making him take it farther, holding it up above his head.

“What’s wrong, wife?” he asked when she sat back on her heels and bared her teeth at him. “It is a good story. I daresay some of it sounds very familiar.”

“Give it here, Freddy!” she exclaimed, pushing herself back up and making another swipe for it, her blush reaching all the way down into her decolletage and vanishing under the V of the dressing gown.

“The pirate king himself is very dashing,” Freddy commented, waving it lazily above his head. “So very fair and blue-eyed and charming.”

She managed to get the corner, crawling over him and bracing herself on his shoulder to reach upward. She hesitated, frowning as she realized that if she tugged at the pages, she might rip them. She didn’t let go, though, her buffed fingernails gleaming with her feeble grasp on the prize.

“Why, I don’t see why our princess heroine resists him at all,” Freddy cooed, wrapping an arm around her waist despite the fact that he knew she hadn’t half-straddled him on purpose.

He gave a little tug, making her collapse into his lap.

He openly enjoyed the way she squeaked in protest and caught herself with her bare palms to his exposed chest under the dressing gown. “They seem very well matched.”

“I am going to kill you, Freddy,” she was panting, squirming as he held her firmly in place. “I am going to murder you.”

“You can’t,” he clipped smugly. “I am never going to die, remember? That was your choice.”

“You will die if I damn well say you should!” she hissed, and tried to lurch up again only to find herself held firmly in the crook of his arm, unable to move at all beyond her wriggling.

He tilted his head up, squinting at the page he was still suspending above their heads, and quoted, “He looked as though he was carved from gold and bathed in heat. His touch burned as hot as a sword freshly pulled from the forge. She knew she could not decline him, should he touch her again.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned, giving up on her protest to slap her hands over her face, her curls quivering with the force of it. “Please stop.”

“No,” he said shortly, then continued through the scene, which unfolded in copious detail until the pirate and the princess were interrupted by a knock at the door.

Sadly, the on-page tryst was interrupted before anyone could lose enough clothing for Freddy’s taste, but even so, reading it aloud back to its author was stirring in ways he had not quite anticipated.

He grinned through the entire scene, feeling her melt from horror to agony to begrudging investment in her own words. When he looked back at her, dropping his head from the pages above, her hands had slid down her cheeks, leaving only the very tips of her fingers on her jaw.

“See?” he said, letting himself drop the pages right onto the bed beside them. “It’s quite good. I was completely lost in it.”

She stared at him, her cheeks still pink as peonies. “You were?”

“I was,” he confirmed, releasing the pages to touch her instead. He eased his grip on her, trusting that she wouldn’t run off now, and explored the texture of her velvet dressing gown along the sides of her body. “You are very talented.”

She watched him, her eyes darting back and forth over his face, hands still touching her own. “You have to say that,” she said at last, “because you are my husband.”

He chuckled, dropping his grip down to her hips and drawing her closer, more firmly into her seat in his lap.

“Did you know that I spent the last few years of my exile as a voracious reader? First, I read everything in Joe’s flat, because there was nothing else to do while I lived there in his absence, and then, when I reached the end of his collection, I began to feel as though a central need I’d developed without intention was not being met. ”

“A central need?” she repeated, staring at his mouth as he spoke.

“Yes. And he had only been gone for a month or two. That was when I started taking my walks.” He slid his palms around to her backside, dragging leisurely stroking fingers over the swell of it while he talked.

“I walked to Bow Street. I walked to Covent Garden. I walked to Cheapside and Camden and Canary Wharf. While I was walking, it was enough, but then, inevitably, I’d just end up home again with naught to do but make too much food or re-polish the bannister. ”

“The bannister,” she echoed weakly.

“So I started to buy books. I learned which ones I liked. I read quite a lot of indulgent, brooding nonsense, Claire. I read the entirety of Lord Byron.”

That seemed to startle her enough to get her focus back up to his eyes. “Oh?” she said, clearly intrigued. “I have as well.”

“Then hear me when I say this,” Freddy told her, giving her bum a squeeze. “What you wrote here is so much better that I feel a comparison would only insult your skill.”

A sequence of things flashed over her face, a little flicker of her eyelids at the way he was touching her, an immediate instinct to argue, a flush of pleased understanding.

“Oh, well, then I suppose I shouldn’t make any of the changes I had planned,” she said evenly, batting her lashes at him.

She squeezed her knees into his hips to steady herself, leaning over and carefully picking up the stack of pages, transferring them to the bedside table.

“If you think it cannot be improved upon.”

He watched her, his breath suddenly caught in his chest, fascinated with a couple of clinging drops of water that still sat on the ends of her curls and beaded down the back of her neck. “I am not the expert,” he managed to say, his throat gone a little dry. “Perhaps if you explained the edits …”

“Oh, I suppose I could,” she said with a primness that made him immediately start to grin as she straightened back up, the dressing gown sagging over one of her shoulders. “In the scene you just read, for instance. Were you satisfied with the way things concluded?”

“Not remotely,” he confessed, unable to resist reaching up to touch the newly revealed skin and immediately getting slapped away, the sound of her reactive little swat echoing off his knuckles like he’d been an errant schoolboy reaching for candy that wasn’t his.

It brought the simmering grin all the way out, splitting across his face in earnest.

“I see, I see,” she said, adjusting in his lap, wiggling deliberately this time in a way that made his vision blur back up. “It was that knock at the door that was the problem, hm?”

“One of them,” he managed to say, somehow.

“Oh, are there other problems?” she demurred. “You must tell me.”

He opened his mouth to begin a sentence, getting so far as speaking the single sound of the letter I into the world and then failing anything else.

“Perhaps you wish they had embraced in more detail,” she speculated, “after the kissing. I suppose I could add a few more sentences to that.”

He nodded, his eyelids flickering as she adjusted again, smirking down at him with complete awareness of what she was doing, mimicking her earlier squirms.

“What if the pirate king”—she considered, taking his hand and holding it up in between them, grasped in her smaller ones—“touched her face?”

She pressed his palm into her cheek, considering it. “Hmm, not quite right, is it?”

“Claire,” he managed to get out, strangled as all hell.

“Yes, perhaps her throat,” she amended, dragging his fingers lower, gathering up all those delicious little beads of bathwater on the palm of his hand. “Still no?”

He could feel her heart absolutely thundering, the pulse point in her throat jumping against the pads of his fingers like it was striking a war drum. Perhaps she could bluff, he realized, marveling in horror at how composed she seemed. Perhaps she had been able to all along.