Scandal. Julie Kistler
though she’d scanned them into her computer to use with her dissertation, she still kept the originals in her desk, safe inside small plastic sleeves. That made it easy to take them out and look at them if she needed to, which she’d found herself doing more and more often lately.
There was just something about Nick. Something that got under her skin, inside her brain, deep inside her fantasies.
“My dream lover,” she whispered.
The first picture was ordinary enough, a sepia tone wedding portrait, with the words “Mr. & Mrs. Nicholas Tempest, May 1894,” scrawled in spidery handwriting on the back. The other was a more candid shot, showing him standing next to an early version of an automobile. That one was marked simply “1895.” He was unsmiling, even a little grim, as he stood next to his new wife in the first photo, and grinning with health and happiness in the second, but hot as blazes in both.
“It’s not just the hotness factor,” she argued to his picture, feeling a shade defensive to be this gaga over a guy she knew only from a couple of old photos. But the hotness factor was hard to deny. She whispered, “Okay, so you are totally hot.”
Totally. Amazingly. Overwhelmingly.
Maybe it was just that she’d spent so much time looking at sketches of that damn arch, with all its salacious imagery, and in her mind, Nick Tempest had become part of those steamy couplings. She didn’t want to think about it or admit to herself just how deep this went. But it was deep.
Almost immediately after she’d found his pictures, she’d started to have dreams about him. Erotic dreams. Extremely erotic dreams. Like nothing she had ever known. They always involved the positions and stories from the arch, and they always involved Nick.
In the first one, Nick was playing Apollo and she was Daphne, and he was naked and hard and taking her up against a tree. She could remember how vivid the images were and how potent the clash between them. As he thrust into her, slamming her into the hard trunk again and again, as she wrapped her legs around him and took him deeper, she knew she hated him, she loved him, and mostly she wanted him so bad that it didn’t matter. It was plain, straight-ahead, no-frills, banging-up-against-the-wall sex, and it blew her mind.
She’d awoken in the morning, sweaty and exhausted, wondering if she was going to find splinters in her bottom from the tree. That’s how real it was. But there were no splinters, just rumpled sheets and a sleeping boyfriend. He’d been studying late and spent the night at her place, and she hoped she hadn’t thrashed or moaned too loudly, giving away just what kind of dream she was having. But he was oblivious.
And the dreams went on.
A few nights later, with Daniel, the boyfriend, safely in his own apartment, Jordan had dreamed that she was Artemis to Nick’s Orion. Since in that story she was the goddess and he was the mortal, this time she was in charge, riding him for hours, teasing him, denying him, and then taking what she wanted and demanding more. And when she woke up, she’d actually felt as thoroughly sated as if she had been romping all night with a warrior.
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