Mad for Love (18 page)

She took a deep breath of the cooler air. “Much, thank you.”

“Ye’re most welcome. But now that we have a bit of space, it’s time for ye to get changed.” He dropped his voice to a low, intimate whisper. “So let’s go ahead and get that dress off of ye.”

Chapter Seventeen

For a long moment, Rory thought he had finally succeeded in saying exactly the wrong thing.
 

And then Mignon lowered her chin, and smiled. “From a man who speaks French and lived in Paris, I had hoped for a little more
finesse
.”
 

And just like that, he was done in. “Let me rephrase,
chère Mademoiselle
.” Rory kept his voice low, in case the emptiness of the exhibition rooms should make their voices carry. “We will both need to change—ye into yer jumps and quilted petticoat, and me into my livery—before the runners come out for their next round of checks. And I would be honored to assist ye.”

She presented him with her back. “Would you—” She blushed, and exquisite swath of madder red painted across her cheeks. “Would you apply your honor to the laces?”

“I had much rather apply my lips.” He had to dredge his voice up from somewhere deep within. “But that would not be of the necessary assistance to ye. So I will settle for using my hands.”

His normally clever fingers faltered only momentarily, but soon enough he was undoing the simple gown he had so recently done up. And it was going to take all his considerable self-possession to help her unclothe, and leave it at that. Because they needed to stay on schedule, despite all inducements to the contrary. And they were severe inducements.
 

The inducement of her softly scented skin. And her soft sighs. And her angelically trim little body. And the invitation she was clearly giving him out of the corners of her wide, dark eyes, even if she didn’t entirely understand just exactly the extent of that invitation.
 

The invitation he was going to accept. Someday.

But not today. Not in the middle of a very small closet, in the midst of a very large burglary. Which might go to hell in a hand cart any minute.

But still, he had to kiss the soft spot along her spine where her stays and chemise gave way to sweet skin. And the even softer spot just at the side of her nape. And the sweeter spot under her ear.
 

And then he set her away, though the plain gown gaped temptingly.

She received this tacit command with a sigh. “I suppose we must stick to the matter at hand, and retrieve the parcel.”

He did so, pulling the brown paper package out from the spot where he had stuffed it under the stair, and then fishing his small dirk out of his cuff, and quickly slicing through the string.
 

“What else have you got in those pockets of yours? Besides picklocks and knives?”

“All manner of bits and bobs.” He pulled out the stub of a candle as evidence. “It’s just the thrifty Scot in me.”

“You said that before.” She smiled and frowned all at the same time—it was perfectly calibrated to enchant. “So that is different from being English? But you don’t sound different. I can understand everything you say.”

Rory had to work to stifle his laugh. “Had the roughest edges of the Scots burr rather forcefully schooled out of me.”

“That does not sound pleasant.”

“It wasn’t. But it got me where I am. Which is with a beautiful young woman this evening.”

“In the middle of a burglary.”

“Aye.” He still smiled at her. “We had best get to it.”
 

Mignon carefully shook out the clothing. “Shall I leave on my chemise and stays? Or—”

“Aye. I mean, leave them on.” Suddenly the closet felt too small and too warm for him. “Or we’ll never get to the statue.” He took a deep, fortifying breath to clear his head of all thoughts of her stays sliding to the floor to pool at her feet along with the gown. “Ye stay here—there is room enough with only one of us—and do yer best with the charwoman’s clothes, while I will be back in a moment. I’m going to shut the door,” he warned her. “But it won’t be locked. Just try to be as quiet as may be.”

He left her to dress, and nimbled off, tip-toeing around the passage at the back of the stairwell to retrieve the key to the small closet on the other side. From which he procured a suit of striking livery with the requisite red and white cording, and into which he changed in the dark confines of the passage.

No sooner was he done attaching the eye hooks over the waistcoat, than Mignon cautiously peeped out from the closet, and gasped when she saw him, looming in the shadows.

“It’s just me,” he assured her as best he could in a whisper. “Though I do not wear a wig. I am hoping they will leave them off at night, when they are off duty to some extent, and out of the public eye.”

“Where did you find the coat?” she mouthed.

“Right through that wall.” He pointed through the interior of the closet. “Guard’s storage. It’s as full of livery as this one is of mops and brooms. And speaking of which, we had best get ourselves back inside.”

He passed her the neat bundle he had made of his black wool superfine.

“What are we to do with our clothes?” she asked.

“Yer dress, I should think, will fill the bottom of this pail quite nicely”—he demonstrated by pooling the grey poplin in the bucket, where it would make a perfect nest for receiving the Diana—“but I shall unfortunately have to abandon mine.”

Understanding lit her face. “Which is why you had such strictures for what to wear. Which I followed, though I felt quite naked coming out without so much as ear bobs.”
 

At the word naked, Rory’s mind exercised itself with visions of her just so, clad only in the vermillion pink of her blushes as she lay herself before him, while and demure, and all together nak—

“Rory? Are you quite all to rights?”

“Aye, what? Well done,” he babbled to cover both his inattention.
 

“But I haven’t done anything.” Her voice was only slightly chiding.

“Ye’ve done everything right so far.”

“Thank you.” She tucked her chin to smile. “I suppose it is rather exciting, in a mundane way.”

“Let us hope it stays mundane—that is how we’ll know we’re succeeding.”

“Oh. Very good.” She seemed to relax a tad. “Then what next?”

“We wait.”

“For what exactly?”

“For a little while longer.” He gave her his most charming smile so she would know that he was teasing her only half as much as he was teasing himself with naked thoughts of her. But since they had some time before the next scene in their little burglary of a play, they might as well enjoy themselves, at least as much as they had been going before they changed into their present costumes. “Until we get the details right. Yer fichu for instance”—he pointed to the fine linen kerchief still modestly covering her bosom—“is far too fine, and far too modest for a charwoman.”

“Is it really?” she asked, but her nimble little fingers were already untucking the kerchief, uncovering an absolutely divine swath of skin so smooth and white and fine it was everything he could do to keep from simply letting his head drop into the shadow between her perfect little breasts. “Into the bucket with it?”

“Aye.” And though he would have been happy to perform the duty for her, he was glad that he had no excuse to bend down along the length of her body. There was no way he could have done it and still remained a gentleman.

As it was, it was hard enough to keep his eyes from the lovely expanse of skin and bosom rising out of the top of her tatty old quilted jumps. “On second thought, perhaps we ought to cover ye up. There is no way that a person as lovely as ye is going to be able to escape the regard of the runners.”

“Come now. I am going to be bent over a bucket, am I not? A bucket concealing the statue? At least if the runners are looking at the tops of my bosom, they will not be looking elsewhere.”

Her logic was sound. And he was deeply appreciative of how well her mind worked in figuring out some of the details he had yet to tell her. “Clever lass. And very good thinking. Though I dislike intensely the idea that any other man should ogle ye in so callow a manner.”

“As opposed to the way you yourself are ogling me now?”

He liked her rather French directness. “Entirely unlike the way in which I am regarding ye now, which is a look filled with reverence of yer person, and awe of yer beauty.”
 

“And will your reverence keep you from trying to kiss me again?”

“Nay,” he said immediately. “It will not.”

This time when he bent his lips to hers, he did not hold back. He kissed her with everything that he had held in check all evening—all the lust and longing bottled up behind gentlemanly behavior, behind reverence and awe. But along with the reverence and awe was heat and need and something just a step past civilized to be altogether nice.
 

He kissed her with heat and all of his pent-up passion, backing her against the wall where he could lean his weight into her, and ease some of the hunger growling its way out of his chest.

And she was kissing him back, opening her sweet little mouth, wrapping her arms about his neck, and pressing those luscious little breasts of hers against his chest. They kissed and kissed, tangling tongues, tasting, biting and sucking at each other with hedonistic abandon until all he could think of was putting his hands to her jumps, and lowering her bodice so he might put his mouth, if not his hands, to what he was sure would prove to be the delicate pink whorl of her nipple.

But he did not. He was a gentleman—albeit a gentleman thief for the evening, but a gentleman still. And he wanted more from Mignon Blois than a tumble in a dark closet while he was recovering her father’s artwork.

He pulled back, gasping for air, and shoving his fingers deep into his own hair to dispel the itchy need to fill his hands with her flesh. “We ought”—he struggled to get his breath back—“That is to say,
I
really ought keep track of the time.”

He made a show of consulting his pocket watch, though it took him more than a few seconds to get his brain to work properly enough to read the time. “They’ll be out again in twenty minutes or so, but we’ll need to surprise them before that.”

“Surprise them how?”

“By setting off the alarms.”

Alarm was exactly what showed on her face—her dark eyes went wide with it. “But I would think that would be the last thing you would want to do.”
 

 
“Not necessarily. Remember that runner earlier, who didn’t know if Rembrandt were Dutch? Think for a moment if ye were he, or any one of these runners—used to being out and about on their own, roaming the city in their thief taking—locked up in here, night after night, guarding a lot of art work they can’t afford, don’t understand and don’t care about. How would ye feel were that ye?”

“Irritable.”

He kissed her nose as a reward for her insight. “At best. And we are going to take advantage of that circumstance, and make them even more irritable by setting off the alarm.”

“But will they not know we have done so when the statue is gone?”

“But we shan’t take the statue. Not yet. Not until we have made them irritable beyond caution.”

“You mean to harass them into inaction? Good God, that is diabolically clever. What a scoundrel you are.”

Upon her lips, it sounded like a compliment. “Thank ye.” This time, he rewarded her by kissing her plum sweet lips. “I only hope it works according to plan. I have done my research on Mr. Tildesley’s patent intrusion alarms, and the secret, I think, will be in setting it off, but in making it look like a malfunction. Wish me luck.”

She tipped her head up, and shyly, slowly leaned in to offer him a soft kiss.

It was all the reward he could ever ask for. “I always knew I was the luckiest man in the world. All right then.” He checked his watch one last time.

It was now or never.

“Stay here,” he instructed, before he shuttered the glim, eased open the closet door, and cautiously tiptoed out into the empty exhibition space.

Empty, except for one very special, very well protected statue of Diana by Verrocchio.