Father Fever. Muriel Jensen

must show me,” he teased.

      At which point she turned and obligingly lowered her head, revealing slender shoulders dusted with little honey-colored dots.

      It was all he could do to stop himself from lowering his lips to a small scar he saw there. He’d been celibate a long time, but he hadn’t realized it had been this long.

      “Are you hungry, Constance?” he asked briskly.

      He saw her blink once. “Famished,” she replied.

      “Then come with me.” He tucked her arm into his and walked her toward the buffet table in the dining room. He handed her a plate.

      The spread was impressive. There were large succulent prawns on ice, fancy meat and pastry roll-ups, several fruit salads, vegetable sticks and luscious chocolates.

      While she pondered the table, he went into the kitchen to snatch two glasses and open a bottle of champagne. He returned to find her plate holding a very modest amount of shrimp and raw vegetables.

      He led the way back to the stairs, walked halfway up, then settled them comfortably on a carpeted stair, letting his legs stretch down to make room for hers.

      “Tell me, Constance,” he said, placing the glass on the stair and pouring champagne, “Are you a member of the historical society?”

      She bit a shrimp in half, then shook her head as she chewed. “No. But I’m glad I happened to be here for the party.”

      “You don’t live in Dancer’s Beach?”

      “I’m…visiting.”

      “Family?”

      “Friends.”

      “Friends are important,” he said. “I value mine.”

      She nodded. “The other two Musketeers?”

      He laughed. “You noticed. I guess the costumes are corny, but we saw them and sort of related, I guess.”

      “To the fight against despotic evil?”

      “Nothing so noble,” he denied candidly. “To the camaraderie, the tankards of ale, the wenching.”

      She tsked. “Wenching isn’t healthy.”

      “Yeah, well, like a lot of men, I talk more than I do.”

      He drank his champagne to cover his close observation of her as she admired the elegantly carved stairway. He was trying to imagine her without the mask.

      “I don’t recall that the Musketeers had such elegant surroundings,” she said.

      “Mmm.” He refilled her glass, then his own. “When we’re not Musketeering, we need someplace comfortable to be.”

      “But this is so big.”

      “I know. It needs children, parties.”

      “Do you have them?”

      He smiled. “The children? No. No wife yet, either, but I’m looking.”

      “Ah.” She took another bite of prawn. “The prospective Mrs. D’Artagnan might be here tonight.” She pointed with her glass toward a very attractive woman dressed as Cleopatra. “The Queen of Egypt is very fetching.”

      He glanced at the woman, agreed with a nod, then turned back to his plate. “But there are all those palace intrigues and I understand she has something going with the Emperor of Rome. Are you single?”

      She nodded absently, then asked, “Do you know anything about the history of this wonderful house?”

      “Just a little,” he replied. He didn’t want to talk about the house, he wanted to talk about her. And him. “It was built before the turn of the century by someone who married into the Buckley family that founded Dancer’s Beach.”

      “It’s nice to have a house with history. Are you the owner?”

      “I’ve just recently moved in with a couple of friends.” All he could think about was how beautiful this woman was, even with half her face covered. “We’re not very settled yet, but we’re working on it.”

      “What do you do, Mr…?”

      “D’Artagnan,” he replied, liking the mystery. He didn’t have to share his past, his fears, his regrets. “I’m a defender of France, a—”

      She put a hand on his arm to stop him and he felt the small, sizzling jolt of it go right to his heart.

      “No,” she said seriously. “What do you really do?”

      There was a subtle urgency in her voice that alerted him to something, he wasn’t sure what.

      But she smiled sweetly at him, and he decided it was the sudden rise in volume of the room’s noise level. Too many years as a secret agent had left him with a certain paranoia that was difficult to shake.

      The musicians had arrived and set up in the conservatory off the living room. Their tuning up rivaled the laughter and conversation of the hundred or so guests moving through the first floor.

      A mellow mood settled over him and suddenly the last place he wanted to be with this woman was wedged on a stair in a room grown so loud that conversation was becoming difficult.

      “Will you come upstairs with me?” he asked.

      It wasn’t until he saw the flash in her eyes, even behind the mask, that he realized how that abrupt question must have sounded.

      “No, no, no,” he assured her quickly. “I meant upstairs to the sitting room. I can’t even hear myself think down here.”

      She continued to look suspicious.

      Oh, no, he thought. She’d been so warm and interested in what he had to say a moment ago. That careless question couldn’t mean the end of what had seemed so promising.

      He remembered her interest in the house—though he was suddenly having a little difficulty focusing on the details that might interest her—and said quickly, “And I have more to tell you.”

      “About what?” she asked a little stiffly.

      “About the house. About…why I’m here.”

      She sat still for one more moment, then she picked up her plate and stood. “All right,” she said. “I’d love to hear more.”

      AT LAST! Athena thought. The prospect of information she could use!

      She preceded him up the stairs, then waited at the top for him to take the lead. He’d left the little reading alcove near the head of the stairs, she noticed, a half-moon-shaped spot where the railing looped out to look down on the floor below.

      Her aunt’s cane-seated rocker was gone, but in its place was a high-back leather chair and matching ottoman. The stained glass lamp depicting birds in flight, which she’d always admired as a child and had looked forward to sitting beside one day, stood nearby.

      But D’Artagnan was moving along the corridor to a room at the far end. They passed several bedrooms on the way, but she knew that the sitting room he was heading for connected to the master bedroom.

      His step was unsteady, she saw, as he changed course ever so slightly to avoid collision with the doorway. She wondered what accounted for that. He’d had several glasses of champagne while they were sitting on the stairs, but the glasses were small. He hadn’t eaten, though, and champagne did have more of a kick than other types of alcohol.

      There was a green futon where the gold brocade settee had been. Her aunt used to read them bedtime stories in this room when she and her sisters were very small, then they would all scamper off to their own bedrooms.

      She put her plate on a low bamboo table and sat down.

      He refilled their glasses, sat beside her on the futon, then raised his glass to hers. “To