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Nick had slept late, as he always did, but Alice was already hard at work in her study.
There was a striking contrast, he thought, as he watched her pen dance across the parchment.
The scarlet corset–wearing wanton by night, and the prim, cotton-garbed scholar by day.
He liked her contrasts... and her moans of pleasure.
Last night had been extraordinary. And Nick wanted more.
He drew closer and leaned over her shoulder, intending to kiss her cheek until a word on the page caught his eye.
Surely that didn’t say...
He stared at the page, reading and rereading.
After the fifth pass, it still said what he’d thought it had said: When she raises her thighs and keeps them wide apart and engages in congress it is called the “yawning position.”
Good God. Was his prim, scholarly wife writing an erotic novel? Perhaps she wasn’t quite as innocent and chaste as he’d assumed.
“Ahem.” He cleared his throat, and she jumped.
“What are you working on, Dimples?” He tapped his bare foot on the rug.
Her eyelashes flapped rapidly. He knew by now what that meant. She was trying to think of one of her evasion tactics.
He grabbed the top sheet of parchment from the stack.
“Give that back,” she cried, reaching for the paper.
He caught her wrist in his hand and leaned away, reading aloud, “When a man wishes to enlarge his organ, he should rub it with the bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing it for ten nights with oils, he should again rub it with the bristles...”
He gaped at her. Her cheeks were rapidly turning bright pink.
“What in the name of all that is unholy is this?” he asked.
“A recipe,” she replied defensively. “A lady’s private recipe. Not for your eyes.”
“Bristles?” he sputtered. “I have no need for bristles.”
“Not everything is about you,” she huffed.
“Then whom is it about?”
She let out an exasperated puff of breath. “This is the translation I’m working on. Now give it back.” She reached for the sheet again but he held it out of reach.
“This is the translation? Of an ancient Hindu manuscript? But... I thought you said it was stodgy and staid.”
Reverently, Alice touched the thin, elongated dried palm leaf pages which were bound together with a cord that looped through holes drilled in their centers.
“I never said anything of the kind. You made an assumption. It’s a treatise on pleasure in all its many variations.”
“Those bristles don’t sound pleasurable to me.”
“The recipes are quite antiquated, though there are some that hold interest for a modern reader.”
Nick shuddered. “Not this reader.”
“You happened to have read one of the more painful-sounding recipes.”
