“When,” he began in a teasing tone, “did you get that lovely bit of ink on your backside?”

My hand flew to the waist of my low-rise jeans. Oh, right. There, framed perfectly by the top of the fuchsia lace thong I’d donned for Brandon’s benefit, sat the tiny hexagon of my Rose & Grave tattoo. “Last spring,” I said. “With the other girls.”

“I love it,” he whispered. “More than the other girls.” And with that enigmatic statement, his hand slipped around my torso and he traced the spot with his thumb. “Why the hell have you been hiding it all fall?” He shifted and arched his head over my shoulder until he could see my back.

“I haven’t been hiding it,” I replied. “You just haven’t been looking in the right places.”

“I concur.” He spread out his palm, flat against my back. “I’ve been woefully ignorant of all your right places.” And there it was, just a tiny touch of pressure, and I listed forward against his chest. He buried his face in my hair. “You look amazing today, ’boo.”

Brandon hadn’t thought so. Oh, irony of ironies that now the clothes I wore for my ex enticed the man responsible for screwing up the relationship in the first place. But that and other thoughts soon fled. How did George manage to do this? He was barely touching me—just the one hand against the small of my back and his jaw against my cheek—but I felt dizzy with anticipation. My hands went out to grasp the shelves, and I felt the unmistakable ridged metal of a coffee can.

Right. Coffee. Oh, hell, who needed coffee when I could just stand here and drink in the pheromones of George Harrison Prescott? My skin burned. If he would just shift slightly, if he would just move the hand he had anchored against my back, if he would just make the slightest gesture at all, I’d be his in a flash.

But he stood there, holding me, breathing deeply, his body almost, but not quite, touching mine.

Your move, Amy.

“We shouldn’t do this here,” I said at last. Because I’m a chicken.

“Those things you said last night at your C.B.,” said Puck, as if I’d never spoken. And now his hand began to move, ever so slowly, down over my jeans-encased butt. “I sat there and listened to you talk about all those boys you were with—”

“All those?” I said on a breath. “You should talk.”

He chuckled against my skin, and it felt like lightning. “Fine. That moderate number of boys you were with. And you know what I thought?”

Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me.

I heard boots on the steps.

“Caffeine withdrawal is not a pretty picture, Buga—” Jenny swung into the kitchen and stopped dead. “Miércoles.” Her expression flashed with shock, then resentment. “Excuse me.” And she turned and ran.

Crap. Crap crap crappity crap. I dropped my head back against the shelf as George pulled away from me. “I wish she hadn’t seen that.”

“Why? Might do her some good.”

I bit my lip. “No, you don’t get it. Earlier today I saw her arguing with her boyfriend.”

Puck raised an eyebrow. “Luck’s got a boyfriend? That’s impressive.”

“Not if you saw the boyfriend. He’s a slimeball. He was being a total jerk to her and I’d just broken down that little shell of hers and convinced her to let me talk to her about it when you…”

“When I what?” Puck asked. “She acts like I did something to her personally. Always has.”

“She doesn’t approve of you.”

“So? I don’t approve of her, but I’ve never been mean.” His jaw was doing that tight thing again and I wanted to kiss away the tension. “Whatever. I am who I am, and she’s not the first person who has decided to judge me for it. There are plenty of people who hate me just for being a Prescott. My name is on a building down the street, and there’s no way to escape that. People like Lucky will decide I’m evil for breathing their air, and there’s no way to escape that, either.”

“Don’t worry what she thinks. She disapproves of all of us, I’m pretty certain.”

“That wasn’t quite the ringing endorsement I was looking for,” he said, pouting.

“Sorry,” I said. “What would you prefer? ‘Why, Puck, how could anyone dislike you? You’re a veritable icon of sexual power!’?”

“That’s more like it. I’m used to being one of two things: a Prescott or a player.”

According to your mother, it’s one and the same. But I bit my lip to keep from saying that out loud, and pushed him away. “Trust me here, the last thing Lucky needed to see right now was me getting cozy with a guy.” Especially a guy like George. “She’s going through a rough time.” I walked past him to the door of the kitchen, but Jenny was long gone, and now the hall stood empty. I stared at my reflection in the diamond-dust mirror until George came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. I had to admit it: Those two people in the mirror looked good together.

“And regardless of how she treats you, you’re going to help her?”

He didn’t know the half of it. If my hunch was correct, Jenny didn’t simply disapprove of us, she was telling our secrets to her barbarian boyfriend. Funny that she’d been put in charge of rooting out whoever was selling the patriarchs out on secretsofthediggers.com. “That’s what we swore to do, Puck. She can judge the rest of us, but right now, I’m going to be her friend.”

He looked back at the stairs. “Fine. I’ll leave you to your prior engagement, however ill-advised I think it is. I make a habit of not going out of my way to be nice to people who don’t return the favor.”

“So a lot of people are nice to you, then?” I teased.

“And in return, I’m excessively nice to them.” He leaned toward me and put his mouth near my ear. “The next time I see you, Bugaboo, we are picking up where we left off. No more waiting.”

I’d heard a similar sentiment earlier today. Funny, from Micah, it had been the most despicable threat. From George, the most delicious promise.

It was a promise he didn’t get a chance to fulfill for quite some time. Okay, several days. Okay, two. But, trust me, when you’re waiting to have George Harrison Prescott’s hands on your body, time passes very, very slowly. (Especially given that it had also been two days since Jenny had spoken to me. She’d disappeared from the tomb, and failed to respond to seven e-mails and three voice mails. And those were just from me—who knew what the rest of the Diggirls had said to her after hearing my account of the coffee shop confrontation? According to reports, she wasn’t returning any of our calls. It was indeed possible our concern had spooked her.)

And so it happened that one evening I was sitting at my favorite study spot, the window seat in the tomb’s Grand Library, looking out at the moonlit courtyard. Connecticut was shuddering into fall, which meant lots of dismal, gray gloom transitioning us from verdant summer into the fiery brilliance of New England’s peak. Today’s weather was the sort I’d come to associate with New Haven. It spit rain all day, and the ground slushed with the results, soaking shoes and socks and the flares of everyone’s jeans and making them rethink that after-dinner section up on Science Hill or the screening at the Film Studies Center. I could feel the dampness as I sat there, legs crossed beneath me, a middle volume of the tomb’s leather-bound set of The Golden Bough open on my lap. Time was running out to find a thesis topic, but I kept getting distracted. The rotten evening was the perfect chance to dig in, uninterrupted.

Ever since Monday, being present at the tomb usually meant an automatic conscription into Josh’s latest campaign to appease the patriarchs and find the traitor before he caused a permanent break between the club and its most devoted supporters. We hadn’t gotten much further in our search, as Jenny’s efforts had turned up zilch, and everyone seemed too devoted to the cause to be responsible for the leak.