Imogen looked from her half-naked father leaning over me, to where I lay prone on the ground, my hands somehow having found their way onto his arms, where they might have been stroking his biceps in a wholly shameless manner.

“Imogen. Hi. Um…this isn’t what it looks like,” I stammered, snatching my hands back from Nikola’s silky flesh.

“It looks to me like Papa is seducing you,” she said with a frown at her father.

“That is exactly what was happening. If you leave us now, I will continue, although your interruption has no doubt broken the mood, which means I will have to begin all over again with Io, and it is no easy task to seduce her when she is in one of her resistant moods.”

I gawked at him. “You say that like all I do is resist you!”

“You do.”

“May I remind you that I was the one who seduced you first? I jumped you three times before you got around to reciprocating.”

He grinned (which melted my innards) and kissed me on the tip of my nose. “Annoyed, sweetling?”

“Not in the least. I told you that I wasn’t interested—” It took until that moment for Imogen’s words to register in my smut-riddled brain. I shoved Nikola back and sat up, looking over to her. “Did you say lizards? You don’t mean…”

She nodded, her gaze unreadable as she watched her father, with an exaggerated sigh, pull on his shirt and fancy embroidered waistcoat. “My uncles are here.”

“Now?” I shook my head. “They shouldn’t be here for two more years. Er…that is, I’m sure it’s nothing, Imogen.”

“Arnulf and Rolf are here now?” Nikola did not look happy as he pulled on his boots. I got to my feet and hiked up the neckline of my dress. It had a tendency to expose more boob than I was comfortable seeing displayed. “They should not be here for months.”

Imogen sent me a look fraught with anguish.

“No,” I told her. “It’s got to be just a coincidence.”

“One that could have dire repercussions,” she argued.

“I sense that you are excluding me from this conversation, and I do not enjoy the sensation. You will both cease it immediately, and tell me of what coincidence and what repercussions you are speaking, not to mention how lizards are involved, or what it is that only Io knows.”

Imogen watched me for a few seconds as I wadded up a handful of the gown I was wearing, not sure how to begin to broach the subject of Nikola’s demise. I wasn’t even convinced I needed to at that point, since his half brothers’ arrival could be nothing more than a coincidence.

Could it?

14 July 1703

Nikola disliked mysteries. He disliked mysterious women who ran into his horses, he disliked people having conversations around him that were deliberately intended to not be understandable to him, and most of all, he disliked the feeling that something was going on to which he was not privy.

That, along with sexual frustration, general hunger, and a desperate need for Io to admit that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, all contributed to a surliness that was evident in his greeting to his half brothers.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded as he stomped into the sitting room where two men of middling years lounged with more ease than grace.

“Ever the charmer, eh, Nikola?” Rolf said with a sneer on his thick, oily lips.

Nikola considered his sibling with distaste. Both men were in their early sixties now, and time had not sat well on their countenances. Balding, with a fringe of brown and white hair, Rolf tried to disguise his enormous belly by means of stays that creaked and groaned when he walked. Arnulf was as thin as his brother was round, his body full of angles and sharp points that hurt just to look at.

Although Nikola had tried to love his half brothers as he should, he had never been close to them. Far from it, the two had always mocked him, made fun of his scientific interests, dropping sly innuendos about a range of subjects, and generally conducting themselves in a manner unpleasant to the point where he resented them intruding upon his well-ordered life. “What is it you want?”

Rolf, the elder of his two brothers, smiled, showing blackened broken teeth. “Do we have to want something to visit our dear brother?”

“You usually do, yes. If it’s an increase on your allowance that you’re after—”

“We shouldn’t have an allowance,” Arnulf said, stepping over his brother’s sprawled legs to stand in front of Nikola. “We’re your brothers, for the lord’s sake. Our mother’s estate should have been handed over to us as was right and proper!”

“If she had wanted you to have it, she wouldn’t have given it to me to hold in trust,” Nikola said, wearily wondering how long he could bear the company of his brothers, and whether it wouldn’t save them all grief if he just had them removed from the house now.

“That’s because you convinced her we were unworthy!” Arnulf snapped, and clearly would have continued the timeworn argument had not Rolf interrupted.

“We have not come for an increase on the allowance, brother,” he said with another of his oily smiles. With a grunt, he hoisted himself to his feet. “We are here to discuss a matter of the gravest importance, one which, once we determined its veracity, we knew would require your immediate attention.”

“What sort of a matter?” Nikola asked, despite his intention to get rid of his brothers. Damn his curiosity—he had never been able to quell it as he would like.

“A highly personal one. It seems, brother dear, that someone close to you, someone very close to you, desires to see you—”

The door behind him opened as Io and Imogen entered the room, the latter arguing quite forcibly with the former.

“—don’t tell him, then I will be forced to. It’s just too dangerous for him not to know.”

His eyes narrowed on Io. What is too dangerous for me not to know?

Io looked startled for a few seconds, before glancing over to his brothers. Er… I think we may need to have a talk.

One involving lovemaking? I approve of this plan.

Er…

“I have no time to hear whatever it is that you believe is so important,” he told his brothers, grabbing Io’s arm and pulling her toward the door. “Iolanthe wishes to feed me, and as you know, I hold true to the precept that one should never discommode a lady.”

“Papa!” Imogen said as they left the room.

“Don’t look so shocked, sweetling—your uncles found out the truth about me years ago. Now, my little strudel,” he said as he closed the door behind them. “Let us go to my bedchamber so that we might have this talk you so fervently wish for.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. And stop reading my smutty thoughts. Just because my mind and body want you to do all those things you’re thinking about… Really, Nikola? Do you have a tub big enough for that?… Just because the rest of me says, ‘Oh, lordy, yes, let’s get down and boogie’ doesn’t mean that we’re going to.”

He paused at the foot of the stairs and gave her his best smoldering look.

She just thinned her lips at him and crossed her arms over those delicious mounds of breasts that he knew were created just for his satisfaction.

Right. The smolder was out. He switched it to a pathetic pleading expression. Surely she couldn’t resist that. “It shall be as you wish, of course. I do need to feed, but I will find another.”

Her jaw tightened, and her eyes narrowed until they were tiny slits. Damn. Perhaps he had been wrong trying to make her jealous.

He sighed, and said with as much pathos as he could muster, “Or I can just wait until such time as you see fit to feed me. It won’t be easy controlling myself around you when I am so hungry, but your wishes come first.”

She rolled her eyes at that, and punched him in the arm. “Oh, like I don’t see through that shallow attempt at passive-aggressive manipulation? Please, my mother was the master of it. I’ll be happy to let you…er…dine…but our discussion should probably wait until we have some time for a really long explanation.”

“What if I have a quick nibble now? One that won’t take much of your time.”

“Like any nibble you take is going to be quick? I know exactly what you’re thinking, buster, you just remember that.”

“A light repast, then.”

“No.” She punched him in the arm again.

“A sip or two. That’s all, I swear.”

She considered that for a moment, but unfortunately, his gaze drifted down from her face to her breasts, and soon his mind was filled with all the things he wanted to do to them.

She crossed her arms again. “Do you seriously think I don’t know what you’re doing, Mr. Guilt Trip? You’re not even that hungry, so don’t give me those big blue puppy dog eyes. I’ll feed you later, when we have time to talk. How come your half brothers are here? Imogen said they shouldn’t be here until Christmas.”

“They wished to impart some important message to me. They were about to do so when you burst in and distracted me with your adorable breasts, and—”

“Thighs, and all the parts in between, yes, I know,” she told him with a look that made him grin. “Nikola, I meant it when I said I don’t have sex with men until I’ve known them for some time.”

“How long, in whatever measure of time you choose, does ‘some time’ translate?”

“I’ll know when it’s happened,” she told him, turning to face Imogen when she emerged from the sitting room, his annoying brothers on her heels.

“Papa, I really must tell you—”

“Imogen,” Io interrupted, hurrying forward to take his daughter by the arm and tug her down the short hall to where the ladies’ withdrawing room was located. “I think we should continue our conversation before you say anything more.”

“I don’t think—”