Page 92 of The First Taste

Thirty-Two

“This is unbelievably dull, even for Scotland.”

Ella smirks and covers her mouth with her hand. “Shh.”

She nods toward the female docent, who is talking in front of a small crowd of onlookers. My gaze drops to Ella’s tits; she has small, firm breasts that I want to press my face between. I want to tongue her puffy nipples, just the same rich color as deep earth.

“This painting of a vestal virgin dates back to 1847, to the very beginnings of the Scottish Realism movement. We know the date of the painting for three reasons. One, because of the types of fruit depicted here, in the corner…”

My attention wavers, my gaze drifting away from the woman talking. I look around the tiny museum we are in, eyeing the place. The walls are a dark grey, the color purposely chosen to contrast with the sparse paintings hanging two or three to a wall. Isla is standing off to the side, a notebook in her hands. She’s listening carefully to what the museum docent is saying and taking careful notes. She reminds me a bit of my brother James when he was young. He went through a long phase of journaling his inner thoughts.

As the older sibling, I was someone who found that numbers made perfect sense where words could be easily mistaken. So I felt no little joy in ribbing James all through his teenaged years, shouting into the void of endless notebooks.

Isla glances up as the woman begins walking backward, heading into the next room. She gives me a ghost of a smile and follows her. But when I see Ella about to follow suit, I grab her wrist.

She flushes and gives me a hard look. She pulls free from my grasp and puts a finger to her lips.

It’s been a while since I last touched Ella’s silky skin and felt its heat under my hands. I dreamt about her all last night and now my hands itch to touch her. I have been watching her walk around in her short little white cotton dress, probably not even realizing that she is a walking pricktease.

After half a minute, the group has moved on to the next room. I turn to her, jerking my head toward the exit.

She raises her brows but follows, quietly sneaking under my arm when I hold the door open. Once we are outside, I heave a big sigh.

“That museum is a little…” Ella says, then pauses, moving away from the doors. She continues, dropping her voice. “On the boring side.”

“I thought for a moment that I had died and gone to hell. I’m not afraid of going to hell if it’s all fire and brimstone; I’m only worried if the whole place is stodgy and tedious.”

“Hah.” She rolls her eyes. “I get the feeling that your parents didn’t put the fear of the devil in you like my parents did.”

“Oh?” It occurs to me that I don’t know a fucking thing about her parents. I sit down on the wide stone balustrades of the broad sweep of limestone steps that lead up to the museum. “You are from Atlanta. That’s the southern part of the country, right?”

Her lips twitch and she gives me an amused gaze. “It’s in the southeast. But everyone calls it The South where I’m from.”

“And your family is… some denomination of Christian, I’m guessing?”

“Southern Baptist.” She pauses. “My mother is Latina, and she was raised to be a good Catholic girl. But when she met my father, she converted to his denomination. And for most of my young life, we went to church two or three times a week.”

My head rocks back. “Two or three times a week? What, were they giving away free money or something?”

“You’re hilarious. No, they were giving away salvation.” She shrugs. “The people at my parents’ church were nice, but they were so damned nosy. Just everybody in everybody’s business. I was always looking for a reason not to go… and then I found ballet.”

She smiles, as if she’s reminiscing. I tilt my head, imagining a young version of Ella trading going to church for dancing. I can see it; honestly, all the ballerinas I have ever known were so dogged and spent so much time practicing that they could call it a religion of sorts.

“Well, my family was not very interested. Sure, we attended on holidays. I think Mum and Dad still do. And James probably does, too, now that there are voters to be swayed by a pious enough politician.”

“Tell me how you really feel, Keir.” Ella gives a surprised laugh. “So I suppose that neither of us is particularly devout.”

“No.” I glance down at my hands, smirking. “I think after I told my parents that I was going to divorce Kingsley, they sort of gave up on me. One day, I was the future prime minister. The next, I was a divorcee. No longer the presumptive heir, as it were.”

She looks up, her brow knitting. “Oh?”

I nod, squinting off into the distance. “All of a sudden, things just mattered less because no one was going to count how many times I missed services. My parents decided that James had a much better shot at being elected, although he was not married. And I was sort of shoved aside.” I screw my face up. “Luckily, my grandfather, that is my mother’s father, passed NewsCorp on to me.”

I glance down at my hands again, nodding slightly.

“It sounds like a lot of changes in a very short time.”

Glancing up at Ella, I find her expression kind, but otherwise unreadable.