Cordelia pulled the slender volume from the shelf. She leaned against the bookshelves, idly leafing through the pages. And the wall began to move at her back. As she leaned against it, it creaked and groaned and swung inward. It was the strangest sensation and it all happened so fast Cordelia had no time to react. The section of shelving turned inward, and Cordelia found herself on the other side in a strange chamber, staring backward at the hole in the wall.

Leo looked up from the chessboard at the creaking groan from the wall of bookshelves at his back. He turned and stared, his mouth dropping open. Cordelia, barefoot, in a thin linen shift, stood in his room, gazing up at the gaping shelves with astonishment.

"How… how… how did that happen?" She spun round, relatively unsurprised at seeing him. It would take a lot to beat the astonishment of the last minutes. "Oh, Leo. I didn't realize you were next door. Look!" She pointed back at the wall again. "It… it just opened. I was leaning against it and abracadabra! I was only looking for something to read." She brandished the Catullus as if she needed proof of her statement.

Leo was recovering slowly from his own astonishment. His first reaction was that Cordelia had deliberately engineered this little trick, but her amazement was clearly genuine and he couldn't see how she could have known in advance about the mechanism. "Go back to your own chamber and I'll try to close it from this side."

"Oh, how tame!" She stepped farther into his room, fulfilling his every fear. "Why do you think it's here? Isn't it intriguing?" Her hair was cascading around her shoulders in a blue-black river, ringlets framing her face, her eyes gray now, glowing like charcoal braziers in the firelight. "What was it for, do you think?"

"Presumably, it suited someone to have secret access to the next door chamber," he answered, trying to sound cool and in control. "Now go back to bed."

"Do you think it was for assignations?" Her eyes gleamed wickedly, but he didn't think she was playing her usual flirtatious games; she seemed genuinely fascinated by the situation. "In a monastery. How shocking." She turned to look back at the hole in the bookshelves again. "But I suppose these are the guest apartments. But what was some monkish architect doing designing such a thing?" Laughter bubbled in her voice. "Maybe monks have their secrets too."

"I'm sure they do. Now, will you go back the way you came, please."

"I can't sleep. I'm all excited and apprehensive and wrought up," she said cheerfully. "And you're not sleepy if you're playing chess. Are you doing problems? I like doing them too. But since there are two of us awake, shall we have a game?" She bent over the chessboard and without further ado swept aside the pieces of his problem and began to set the board up for a game.

"Cordelia, I was doing that problem!" he protested. "How dare you sweep it away like that?"

"Oh, I do beg your pardon." She looked up at him through her hair. "I didn't mean to be discourteous, but I thought you agreed to play a game." Again, he was certain that she was behaving without artifice. This was the impetuous, high-spirited Cordelia who had thrown flowers at a stranger from an upstairs window.

"I did not agree to anything. You didn't give me a chance to voice an opinion," he snapped. "Put those pieces down and go to bed at once." He smacked the back of her hand as she placed the black king on its square.

"Ow." Cordelia looked injured, rubbing her hand. "There was no need to do that. And why should we both sit alone and sleepless, when we can do something pleasant that will take our minds off the things that are making it difficult to sleep?"

She sounded so rational, her expression radiating bewildered hurt, that Leo felt the now familiar bubble of inconvenient laughter forming in his chest. Laughter and the equally familiar surge of desire at the lines of her body beneath the thin shift. While he was struggling for composure, Cordelia took advantage of his momentary disadvantage. She hooked a stool with her toe and plunked herself down before the chessboard. Removing a black and a white pawn, she held them in clenched fists behind her back, juggling them, before stretching her hands out to him.

"Which hand do you chose, my lord?"

It seemed that short of bodily removing her, he was destined to play chess with her. Harmless enough, surely? Resigned, he tapped her closed right hand.

"You drew black!" she declared with a note of triumph that he recognized from the afternoon's dicing. "That means I have the first move." She turned the chess table so that the white pieces were in front of her and moved pawn to king four. Then she sat back, regarding him expectantly.

"Unusual move," he commented ironically, playing the countermove.

"I like to play safe openings," she confided, bringing out her queen's pawn. "Then when the board opens up, I can become unconventional."

"Good God! You mean there's one activity you actually choose to play by the book! You astound me, Cordelia!"

Cordelia merely grinned and brought out her queen's knight in response to his pawn challenge.

They played in silence and Leo was sufficiently absorbed in the game to be able to close his mind to her scantily clad presence across from him. She played a good game, but he had the edge, mainly because she took risks with a degree of abandon.

Cordelia frowned over the board, chewing her bottom lip. Her last gamble had been a mistake, and she could see serious danger in the next several moves if she couldn't place her queen out of harm's way. If only she could intercept with a pawn, but none of her pawns were in the proper position, unless…

"What was that noise?"

"What noise?" Leo looked up, startled at the sound of her voice breaking the long silence.

"Over there. In the corner. A sort of scrabbling." She gestured to the far corner of the room. Leo turned to look. When he looked back at the board, her pawn had been neatly diverted and now protected her queen.

Leo didn't notice immediately. "Probably a mouse," he said. "The woodwork's alive with them."

"I hope it's not a rat," she said with an exaggerated shiver, and conspicuously united her rooks. "Let's see if that will help."

It was Leo's turn to frown now. Something had changed on the board in front of him. It didn't look the way he remembered it, but he couldn't see… and then he did.

Slowly, he reached out and picked up the deviated pawn. He raised his eyes and looked across at her. Cordelia was flushing, so transparently guilty he wanted to laugh again.

"If you must cheat, why don't you do it properly," he said conversationally, returning the pawn to its original position. "You insult my intelligence to imagine that I wouldn't notice. Do you think I'm blind?"

Cordelia shook her head, her cheeks still pink. "It's not really possible to cheat at chess, but I do so hate to lose. I can't seem to help it."

"Well, I have news for you. You are going to learn to help it." He replaced her rooks in their previous position. "We are going to play this game to the bitter end and you are going to lose it. It's your move, and as I see it, you can't help but sacrifice your queen."

Cordelia stared furiously at the pieces. She couldn't bring herself to make the only move she had, the one that would mean surrendering her queen. Without it she would be helpless; besides, it was a symbolic piece. She would be acknowledging she'd lost once she gave it up. "Oh, very well," she said crossly. "I suppose you win. There's no need to play further."

Leo shook his head. He could read her thoughts as if they were written in black ink. Cordelia was the worst kind of loser. She couldn't bear to play to a loss. "There's every need. Now make your move."

Her hand moved to take the queen and then she withdrew it. "But there's no point."

"The point, my dear Cordelia, is that you are going to play this game to its conclusion. Right up to the moment when you topple your king and acknowledge defeat. Now move."

"Oh, very well." She shot out her hand, half rising on her stool, leaning over the board as if it took her whole body to move the small wooden carving. Her knees caught the edge of the table, toppling it, and the entire game disintegrated, pieces tumbling to the carpet. "Oh, what a nuisance!" Hastily, she steadied the rocking table.

"Why, of all the graceless, brattish, mean-spirited things to do!" Leo, furious, leaped up. Leaning over the destroyed board, he grabbed her shoulders, half shaking, half hauling her toward him.

"But I didn't do it on purpose!" Cordelia exclaimed. "Indeed I didn't. It was an accident."

"You expect me to believe that?" He jerked her hard toward him, almost lifting her over the board, unsure what he intended doing with her, but for the moment lost in disappointed anger that she could do something so malicious and childish. Cordelia's protestations of innocence grew ever more vociferous.

Then matters became very confused. He was shaking her, she was yelling, his mouth was on hers. Her yells ceased. His hands were hard on her arms, and her body was pressed against his. Her mouth, already open on her indignant cries, welcomed the plunging thrust of his tongue. Her hands moved down his body. With an instinctive certainty of what was right, she gripped his buttocks through the dark silk of his britches. The hard bulge of his erect flesh jutted against her loins, and she moved her body urgently against his as her tongue drove into his mouth on her own voyage of exploration, demanding, tasting, wanting. She was aware of nothing but the wanting-an overpowering tidal wave of desire that throbbed in her loins, raced through her blood, pounded in her pulses. Everything she had felt before was but a faint shadow of this wild, abandoned hunger.