he knew at once that he’d come to the right place. The marble arch she’d described was standing in the center of the room, all by itself, shining in the soft morning light. He set his jaw. So this was Isabella’s handiwork.
It was lovely, in an obscene sort of way. As he came nearer, Nick wasn’t sure whether to avert his eyes or appreciate the enthusiasm with which his sister had depicted the men and women pleasuring each other. There was a certain undeniable power to the blasted thing.
Nick shook his head. He simply couldn’t look at it. It was too carnal, too raw, knowing that his own sister had created something like that.
One thing was certain—that arch was guaranteed to shock the petticoats off every society woman in town.
“I suspect the ladies of the Anti-Corset Brigade down in the auditorium wouldn’t be too fond of it, either,” Nick said dryly. Even if the women on it were certainly free of corsets.
Free of corsets, free of dresses, free of drawers…And free of good sense, it appeared. If anyone saw it, Isabella would be a pariah, and the Tempest family would no doubt be shunned along with her.
Which raised the question of what he was going to do with it. The piece was too big to carry away, and even he wasn’t enough of a monster to take a sledgehammer to something his sister considered her masterpiece. This just wasn’t the right venue for it. If she could take it somewhere less conspicuous—far less conspicuous, as well as far, far away—he supposed it might be of use to someone. After all, wealthy men the world over had collections of erotica.
“Perhaps if it were in a private collection in Siberia,” Nick said with a certain edge. Anywhere but here.
He glanced quickly around the room, looking for some tool or device that might suggest a temporary solution to the problem. If he could move a marble stand or two in front of it, place some statuary there, maybe even shove a display case that way, he might be able to camouflage it. Awfully heavy work by himself, however. But if he went to get a crew of workmen, he risked them seeing and gossiping about the thing. Of course, Isabella had hired a crew to get it this far, so it seemed that genie was already out of the bottle.
Hmm…He noticed a pile of heavy canvas tossed in the front corner of the room, near the entrance, as if painters or movers had carelessly left a drop cloth behind. That might just do the trick.
But as Nick bent to unfold the fabric to see if there was enough to cover Isabella’s sculpture, he heard a curious noise behind him, back by the arch. There was a distinct thump, and then, just as he spun around, a louder thud.
“What in blazes?”
Where there had been no one before, now a young woman lay under Isabella’s arch. A very oddly dressed young woman. Pretty, too. He felt the strangest zing of awareness and recognition, as if he knew her, as if he knew her well. But he was sure he didn’t. Not someone who looked like that. Her arms and legs were bare, her hair was loose, she had no hat or gloves or proper coat…In fact, she appeared to be wearing less than the lightskirts down by the river. Much less.
Plus there was the fact that she had appeared out of nowhere. First he was alone in the room, then he turned away from the arch for a few seconds, and suddenly, poof, a mysterious woman landed in the room as if the gods themselves had dropped her from the sky. Truly bizarre.
“Where did she come from?” he asked out loud, looking around. It just didn’t make sense.
She would’ve had to walk past him to get into the gallery unless she’d been hiding behind a potted palm or something when he arrived. And if she had, why run out into the middle of the room and throw herself under the arch the moment his back was turned?
Given that she was still lying there, motionless, he took a step her direction. “Miss? Are you all right?” But she didn’t answer, just reclined there with her eyes shut.
“Damnation,” Nick swore.
He crossed immediately to her side, kneeling next to her. Quickly, he lifted her head an inch or two off the floor, feeling around for any sort of injury. She had a lump, all right, just at the crown of her head.
As he stripped off his coat and pillowed it under her head, he wondered what he should do next. “Damnation,” he said again. Well, he’d wished for a diversion, hadn’t he? It looked like he’d gotten what he wished for, in the form of one beautiful, strange young woman.
Glancing down at her, he concluded, “Definitely beautiful. Definitely strange.”
People from all nations had gathered in Chicago for the World’s Fair, including Egyptian dancing girls with their undulating bellies and barefoot Polynesian ladies wrapped in a few yards of bright cloth, but even so, he’d never seen anyone dressed remotely like this . In fact, she looked as though she’d cobbled together her small costume by grabbing a scrap of this and that from the flotsam of a shipwreck.
Speaking of cobbled…He gave her feet a gander. What in blazes had she done to her shoes? There were no more than a thin strap bound around her toes and another around her heel, balanced on very high heels, with more foot left bare than covered. And her toenails appeared to have been painted or dyed. Painted toes? He suddenly had visions of exotic women lying about in some tropical paradise, sewing together fragments of denim and silk for garments and carefully painting each other’s toenails with the tiniest of brushes.
It was an intriguing image, if one he felt hadn’t the slightest chance of being true. So where did she come from? And how had she come to be here?
He knew it was a risky maneuver, but he leaned in closer and began to feel around her waist and bodice. “Steady,” he told himself. “It’s not prurient. Has to be done.”
Yes, indeed. No choice but to paw an unconscious woman.
“I’m not pawing,” he argued with himself. “Just checking for hidden belts or pockets where she might be carrying something that could help identify her.”
Right. That’s why it was imperative, for example, to search around the plunging neckline of her silk camisole, revealing some sort of curious, even briefer undergarment, a sinful shade of red, peeking out around the edges of the first one. Or edge a finger or two up under the lace hem of her camisole, where her stomach was soft and warm, or trace a line all the way up her beautiful bare leg and under the brief slash of well-worn denim barely covering her hips.
So little clothing. So very dangerous to let his fingers roam around that skin. She was luscious, that was for sure, slender and yet curvy, with all the right assets in the right places. Her strange attire seemed to offer all of those assets up for his perusal, not covering anything completely, just teasing enough to stoke his appetite.
“Ah, well,” he murmured, his hand flat over her left breast. “I can now safely say that she’s still breathing, can’t I?” He withdrew his hand, regretfully. No matter how fetching she was, it wasn’t right to sample the wares when she was out cold.
In the end, his clumsy search produced nothing in the way of identification and nothing to explain her bizarre appearance. All he found was one small pocket right out in the open, over her hipbone, sewn into the minuscule denim garment. She let out a soft moan as he poked into the tight pocket, making him almost drop the lone coin he pulled out and held up to the light.
Hmm…Nothing earth-shattering, just a souvenir Columbian Exposition half-dollar, much like the one he’d been tossing around back home. Fifty cents would get her one camel ride down Cairo Street on the Midway Plaisance, or two trips on the World’s Fair steamship. Not much. And she didn’t appear to have anything else.
Strange. The coin he’d extracted from her pocket had a small scratch across Columbus’s eye. So did the one he’d been playing with in the wee hours of morning. After throwing one coin into a cup for hours, he’d gotten pretty familiar with it.
He examined this one more closely. There were thousands of the coins circulating around the fair and the city, but it looked exactly like the one he’d had earlier, scratch and all. Strange. Had she stolen his half-dollar