"Oy vay!" Rina muttered. "When your editor goes home tomorrow you come right over and let Sam have a look at you, Emily Shanski. I promised both your grans on their deathbeds that I'd look after you, and I'm not about to break such a promise."
"You mean I could have gotten… could be pregnant from that one time? Oh, my God, Rina! Then why the hell did my friends in college say stuff like that if it wasn't so?" Emily looked distinctly unhappy. "God, I'm Katy O'Malley all over again, and I've tried so hard not to be." She looked like she was going to burst into tears.
Rina put comforting arms about Emily. "Sweetie, it's all right. More than likely you aren't pregnant, but you've got to be careful. Girls in school believe all kinds of silly things in order to justify behavior they know damned well they shouldn't be doing." She laughed lightly. "Come see Sam Monday after Hot Stuff has gone back to the city, but I'm sure you're okay." She set Emily back a pace, and wiped a tear from her cheek. "And you are nothing like Katy O'Malley. You are sweet and thoughtful and very dear. That woman who birthed you has none of those qualities."
"You never liked my mother, did you, Rina?" Emily said.
"No, I don't like her. But neither do I dislike her. She just isn't my cuppa, sweetie. I guess it's that too-cool, too-sure-of-herself attitude that gets me. I remember when your gran died. Her own mother, and she didn't show up until the morning of the funeral. Came in a limousine, as I recall. And left immediately afterward. Didn't even stay for the luncheon you had arranged for the mourners."
"She had to get back to D.C., she said," Emily remembered. "An important deposition, as I recall. Some big case she was working on."
"She could have rescheduled it. It was her mother, for God's sake," Rina said sharply. "But your gran always said Katy let nothing stand in the way of her success. Not even having a baby." She took up the sheets. "I'll stick these in your laundry on my way out. I don't want to run into himself on his way back from the drugger."
"Thanks," Emily said. "And Rina…"
The older woman turned. "Yeah?"
"I love you," Emily told her.
"Go on with yis," Rina Seligmann said, using what had been a favorite expression of Emily's grandmother O'Malley. Then with a smile she hurried down the stairs.
Emily looked about the room. It looked the same, and yet she would never look at this room again in the same way. It was in this room that she had lost her virginity. She still felt a little sore, but she would live. She heard the front door open and close as Rina left. Well, she had better go downstairs herself and decide what to do for dinner. There was beef left over from last night. And gravy. Lots of gravy. Open-faced hot roast-beef sandwiches and a salad sounded good. And a dessert. She'd do a simple yellow cake with raspberry jam between the three layers and powdered sugar on the top.
Michael Devlin found her in the kitchen when he returned from his shopping expedition. "Mission accomplished!" he told her, holding up a little bag. "But before I take you to bed again, Miss Shanski, I want to know something about this book you are going to write. And I want to know if there is a wonderful restaurant in Egret Pointe where we may have dinner tonight. I'll book a reservation now."
"I thought I'd do dinner for us. Just leftovers, and this cake I'm putting in the oven now," Emily told him. "But we could have it for tea."
"No, I want to take you out," he said firmly.
"Let me think," Emily said. Lord, Saturday night was the night that everyone who was anyone in Egret Pointe ate out. If they saw her with a strange man it was sure as hell bound to cause talk. And she did not want to answer any questions. At least, not yet. "I think the nicest restaurant around is the old inn up in East Harbor. It's a bit of a drive, but it's along the bay road, and quite pretty. Would you mind?"
"No," he said. "How long a drive?"
"About half an hour," she told him, closing the oven door on the three cake pans and setting her timer for thirty minutes. She drew open a cabinet drawer and pulled out the local Yellow book. "Here. Better call them now. Saturday night's a big night, especially at this time of year. Spring seems to bring everyone out again."
He took the directory from her, found the number, and, using his cell, called to make a reservation. "Eight o'clock all right for you?" he asked.
Emily nodded, then said, "I'll go get my notes. With cake in the oven I'd rather do our work here, if you don't mind." He didn't, and she was quickly back, carrying a wire basket and a pink file folder. "Sit," she told him, and took a chair for herself.
"You haven't written anything yet?" he asked.
"No," Emily answered him. "Only a couple of descriptions. I wanted to run some things by you first. I always did that with Rachel, and talking over the plotline usually makes everything clearer for me. Can we work that way too?"
"Of course," he agreed. "I'm not here to change your work habits. Just to help you to get back on track. Sex, as you've now discovered," he said with a mischievous grin, "does happen in real life, and so your plot should reflect real life too."
"I don't know enough about sex yet," she told him, "so why don't we just start with the main focus of the plot?"
"Go," he said with a nod.
"You know the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel?" Emily asked.
"I do. Great swashbuckling tales of Sir Percy Blakely by Baroness Orczy."
"Same sort of thing, but with my heroine in the Sir Percy role," she told him.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why is she traveling into France to rescue people from the Terror?" he wanted to know. "There has to be a damned good reason."
"Her mother is a French noblewoman, her father an English earl. Caroline is seventeen, and has been in Normandy with her mother for almost a year. They had gone the previous summer to visit her mother's family. The earl learns that his wife and daughter have been caught up in the arrest of his wife's family. They have all been imprisoned in her grandparents' cellar. Her father is pulling every string he can to get them released. Meanwhile in France, his wife and daughter are struggling to survive. Caroline catches the eye of their jailer, but her mother saves her by submitting to the man, who afterward hands her over to several of his men because she hasn't given him the pleasure he anticipated from raping a hated aristo. Caroline's mother grows mortally ill from her harsh treatment just as the order comes through from Citizen Robespierre, who has accepted a large ransom from the English earl for the release of the two women. The mother swears her daughter to secrecy about what has transpired, and then dies as their ship is in sight of the English coast. I may make some changes, though, before I even begin to write it."
"Great opening!" he said. "Dramatic, poignant. I like it. Okay, so how does she end up rescuing others? I mean, if she's seventeen she's hardly in a position to do something like that in Georgian England."
"Her father is so distraught by his wife's death that he commits suicide. But before he does he makes certain provisions for his daughter. The earl's heir is his wastrel brother, and while he is going to inherit the title, the earl's estate isn't entailed upon an heir. The earl makes a will that gives his daughter the bulk of his fortune, leaving the rest in the form of a trust to care for the estate and provide his younger brother with a small income.
"Then he goes to a friend of his, the Duke of Malincourt, who is an elderly man with no children. He arranges with the duke to marry Caroline so her fortune will be kept safe from his brother. The marriage, of course, is in name only. The fortune will be hers when the duke dies, so she will, as a young, beautiful, and wealthy dowager duchess, be an excellent marriage prospect for the man she will eventually fall in love with. Without a husband for Caroline, her uncle would have had access to her monies, and probably would have gambled them away, leaving her impoverished. Caroline knows nothing of her father's plans, but as an obedient daughter, and still in shock over what has happened in France, she accepts his decision to marry her off to the duke. The day after the wedding the earl puts a pistol to his head.