for that matters, so when he sagged over her, his weight briefly resting on her back, Emmy just let herself fold to the floor, and they collapsed onto each other in a messy pile, Eric maneuvering himself under her to provide her with some protection from the cold hardwood floor, which made her smile.
"I like how you're all gentlemanly," she said in a fog of post-coital exhaustion and goodwill, as he wrapped an arm around her waist and tugged her closer to his mouth so he could kiss her.
"I wish I'd had the foresight to throw some pillows around the floor."
"Next time," she said, nudging him, and he tightened his hold on her.
Exhaustion notwithstanding, they did make it to the bedroom eventually, and Eric insisted on bringing a tray — a classic Japanese red-and-black lacquer number — with the barely touched dessert plates, into the bedroom. His bed was vast — California king at least — to fit his endless legs. It looked downtown, through another glass wall, albeit one equipped with blinds, judging by the dark line of fabric at the ceiling's edge. There were a few personal touches in the bedroom, a line of elegant Japanese etchings (not, she noted with some relief, the pornographic kind) down one of the walls, and a couple of modern paintings that Emmy didn't recognize, but liked immediately.
Not that she was paying a great deal of attention to the furniture when Eric dropped the tray onto his bedside table and pulled her down onto his bed for more languorous kissing, followed by assiduous feeding of morsels of the leftover tart. Emmy admired the precision of his gestures as he dug the slender silver fork into the sugar-dusted pastry, angling it so it broke neatly before shoveling it delicately on the tines and delivering to her mouth without dropping a single crumb onto his monogrammed linen sheets (which, puzzlingly, read A.S.).
He caught her staring at the embroidered initials.
"They're not mine originally — they used to be my great grandmother's. Part of her wedding trousseau, although as it happens she never married. And my mother was keeping them for her daughter — but in the absence of one, she figured she could do worse than set me up with some decent household linens."
"Wait a minute — did you just say your great-grandmother was effectively an unwed mother?"
"Let's just say she lived a rather unconventional lifestyle for the time. My great grandfather was quite a character."
Eric paused and contemplated the mouthful of pastry perched on the end of his fork before giving Emmy a considered look.
"He would have loved your hair."
"What?"
"Seriously. He was an artist. An artist who loved women."
"Really? And he liked redheads?"
"Oh, he liked all kinds of women, so much so that he lived in this big rambling house in East Sussex — in Southern England — with a virtual harem. He had a wife and a couple of mistresses on the go at any one time. And they would all have had glorious tumbling tresses like yours."
Emmy let out a surprised giggle. This wasn't at all what she'd expected.
"Oh God — when was that?"
"Turn of the century — he was loosely connected to the Arts and Crafts movement. All about setting up a new society and breaking free of the old rules. If he'd been around sixty years later, he'd have lived in a hippy commune, you know the kind of guy. My grandfather was the son of one of his later concubines, who was also one of his models, obviously. That was my great grandmother, Alice Sedley, original owner of those sheets."
Just listening to Eric sent Emmy's imagination reeling. In her mind's eye she saw a ramshackle red tiled brick house set in the middle of a wild garden, creepers and honeysuckle everywhere, bathed in golden sunshine. A bushy-bearded patriarch in a white blouse and a straw hat stood at an easel, trying to capture the likeness of a statuesque beauty with waist-length loose curls, draped in a Grecian tunic. It was such a pastoral scene, Emmy could almost hear the birds singing in the undergrowth.
"Wasn't that quite scandalous for the time?" she ventured.
"I should think so. But my grandfather was lucky. He had two older half-brothers — legitimate children — but they died in the trenches of the Somme in 1915, so he became the only heir. Respectability was acquired. By the time my mother was born after the next war, he was a pillar of society."