King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,22

seating area over by the window with tables, chairs, and a sofa. Straight back from the door, a raised dais housed the bed: a massive four-poster with gold-fringed, green velvet bed hangings, a rumpled green coverlet, a huge steamer trunk waiting at its foot. The bedside tables were topped with white-veined green marble, topped with lamps with green and gold shades. Two sets of double doors stood open, and she glimpsed a huge walk-in closet and an elaborate marble bathroom.

“Wow,” she breathed.

“It’s stupid-fancy,” Kay agreed, distracted. “Oh, look at this.” She was over in the sitting area, gathering mugs. She brought them over to Rose. “Set these in the hall. There’s more on the nightstands.”

There were, Rose saw when she returned. She hadn’t noticed them at first, lost to the dark, velvet grandeur of the space. But Beck had enough mugs to host a large brunch party scattered across the room, along with the promised candy wrappers, she noticed when she approached the nightstand on the near side of the bed. He had a thing for Werther’s caramels, it seemed, the distinct gold wrappers piled up on the marble. Rose smile as she picked one up and twirled it in the light, the sweet scent wafting toward her. He had so many admirable qualities, but his vices made her smile: the cigarettes, the whiskey. And now she could add old-lady hard candies to the list. It was sweet, really; the color of them matched his eyes and hair. A nostalgic, quirkily charming choice of sweet.

“I brought a trash bag,” Kay said, producing one from her pocket and snapping it open with a few good shakes. “Let’s start putting those in it. And then I’ll need help with the linens. The bed’s so damn tall and wide I can’t wrestle the sheets by myself. They’re like ship sails!”

Kay was like a little whirlwind of activity. Wrappers went into the garbage, mugs and spoons went into the hall. Clothes were picked up off the floor and carried out to the laundry chute. It was a distraction, and a good one, at first. But in the midst of tugging the old sheets off the bed, Rose was struck by the obvious – but oh-so-shiver-inducing – realization that this was Beck’s bed. The place where he slept, and dreamed, and maybe had nightmares. The pillow where he laid his head; the sheets he slid between when he was damp and pink from the bath; maybe in silk pajamas; maybe in nothing but his skin. The sheets smelled like him: cedar, and smoke, and faint traces of something muskier that must have been his skin and sweat, his natural scent.

“Yoo-hoo,” Kay said.

Rose stood stock still, a corner of sheet held up to her face. She was sniffing it.

Her face heated, and Kay laughed. “You got lost in fantasyland there for a sec.”

“No.” Rose went back to wrestling with the sheets, movements clumsy in her haste.

Kay laughed again, but not unkindly. “Aw, honey, it’s only natural. No shame in it. You’re young, and he’s pretty. Those legs.”

“Kay!” A helpless laugh bubbled in her throat.

“Hey, you don’t have to play innocent with me, honey. Every girl’s got her fantasies. No harm done.”

But Rose hadn’t had any fantasies, per se. Nothing concrete, no particular scenarios that played out in her imagination involving Beck’s long fingers, and longer legs, and the way his hair would fall in his eyes. She noticed the way his pants rode low on his hips; the shadows beneath his collarbones when he undid another button on his shirt. The clean, hard length of his forearms. But she hadn’t thought of touching him any of those places.

Until now.

She had the sense of a floodgate being opened, and was shocked by it, even as she bundled up sheets and piled them on the rug, her pulse thumping hard in her temples – and regions farther south.

She was straightening to go back for the pillow cases when she lifted her head and saw them: the portraits.

They were on the front wall of the room, to the left of the door; visible from the bed and the sofa, but half in shadow now, in the afternoon, the silver light slanted. She walked toward them, pulled by an inexorable curiosity. She’d studied the portraits on the staircase, aunts and uncles and great-grandparents and second cousins. Beckets from previous decades, and a previous century. But who had pride of place here, in Beck’s room? Only a glance away from the