At that, I used all my strength to push up and flip Duke over onto his back, where I straddled him across the hips, held him down with one hand, and pointed my finger in his face with the other.
“I guess you told me,” he said, grinning.
“No, we can’t,” I said in no uncertain terms.
“We can,” he said, raising his hand to stroke my cheek with his fingertips. “We absolutely can.”
“There’s no way we can be together. None. Never. Never ever. We’ll get caught. I’ll get fired. Your books—”
“Rainy, darling, just because we don’t know how to be together now doesn’t mean we’ll never know. It’s a mystery. That’s all. The mystery of us. And didn’t you always want to solve a case with me?”
Better question…would I? Surely as long as Duke wasn’t out of his books for more than an hour or two or three…but no, I shouldn’t. Then again, there was his face to think of, his smile, his everything. If we were careful, nothing bad would happen. I looked down at Duke luxuriating on my pillow.
“We can try,” I said. “But if we get caught—”
He pulled me down, and the last thing he said before he kissed me was…
“I promise, darling, you won’t regret it.”
Book Two
MYSTERY
Chapter Seven
Present Day
Reader, I regretted it.
Two years have now passed since I woke up to find Duke in my bed.
For one glorious year, he and I secretly dated. I’d visit him in his stories, or I’d pull him out to visit me in the real world—sometimes on purpose, sometimes simply by dreaming about him. He’d assist me with my missions, and occasionally I’d help with his cases. It was a passionate affair, clandestine, forbidden…and utterly doomed.
We got caught. Of course we got caught. And we got caught by the worst person who could possibly catch us—my boss, Dr. Fanshawe.
Duke and I were forbidden from seeing each other, which effectively broke us up without even a proper goodbye. Even worse, because I did have a bad habit of yanking Duke out of his stories by the sheer force of my love and longing for him, my Duke of Chicago books had been seized by Dr. Fanshawe like illegal contraband.
Bad enough to lose Duke, but to lose his stories as well?
I tried to move on, but it wasn’t easy. Yes, I was living in Fort Meriwether with Pops, but I’d left my heart in Chicago.
Which brings us to the present. Even after a full year of penance, I was still in the doghouse with Dr. Fanshawe. So while the rest of Fort Meriwether was outdoors, enjoying what was probably the last sunny day before the winter doldrums set in, I was in my home library up to my eyeballs in Gothic romance novels. An army of young women inwhite nightgowns raced across fields and moors, fleeing bad men and burning castles. And it was my job to save them.
The books, I mean, not the girls in nightgowns. The ladies were on their own.
All these books had come out in the 1960s and ’70s and had never been digitized. The only remaining copies were these decaying mass market paperbacks. My job was to magically heal the broken spines, mend the torn covers, and return the loose pages to the fold. When I’d finished with that, I had to not-so-magically catalog them so they wouldn’t be entirely lost to the ravages of time.
Come to think of it,The Ravages of Timewould have made a good Gothic romance title. In the stack of books I was currently working on, we had some banger titles.The House of Doom. The Castle of Evil. The Mirror Never Lies.And my personal favorite,A Dark and Wicked Desire.
That one…I might set aside to read in bed later.
True, the titles were a little melodramatic, and all the couples in the books needed marriage counseling, divorce lawyers, or restraining orders, but they were fun reads. Lust, corruption, sinister patriarchs guarding scandalous family secrets! Heady stuff wrapped up in moonlight and silk.
Plus, I identified with these heroines. I also felt like my life was one castle fire after another.
I couldn’t help but think Dr. Fanshawe had an ulterior motive for assigning this particular genre to me, as each musty book was a vivid reminder that romance was more trouble than it was worth. After my seventh full-body sneeze, I was willing to entertain that possibility myself.
Every time Nixon-era dust shot up my nose, I reminded myself that I was helping to preserve the secret history of women warning other women that they shouldn’t always trust the authority figures in their lives. And when all else fails, burn the evil castle to the cursed ground and run for it.
