As Bad As Can Be by Kristin Hardy Page B

her a smile that had her pulse speeding up a bit. “You’re just dying to turn me into a bad boy, aren’t you?”
    She wrapped her arms around him, luxuriating in the solid strength of his torso. “Didn’t you know? That’s what we bad girls do.”
    His bark of laughter disappeared in the rev of the engine. He flipped down his visor. “Well hold on, because we’re heading out.”
    It had been years since she’d been on the back of a bike, but the exhilaration came back almost immediately: the heat and throb of the engine between her legs, the feel of the wind whipping her face. She was vividly conscious of the feel of Shay’s body against her, the heat of his narrow hips between her legs.
    To her disappointment, though, he didn’t head outof town or drive along the shoreline highway. Instead he threaded his way through the narrow streets lined with two and three story colonial buildings that made up the heart of Newport’s old town. They held the predictable B&B’s, antiques stores and galleries, but also flats, launderettes and hardware stores.
    He paused at a light, and pulled onto Bellevue Avenue. She’d heard about this part of town; it was impossible to be in Newport and not hear about Bellevue Avenue. Fall mums in bronze and gold spilled out of planters in front of the handful of exclusive shops that lined the opening blocks. Ahead of them, the broad road stretched into a residential area, protected with high brick walls on either side, oaks and maples marching along it in a glorious flood of fall color.
    But it wasn’t the shops or the trees that made Bellevue Avenue special. Once, during the Gilded Age, New York society families fueled by railroad and shipping fortunes fled to Newport to escape the sweltering Manhattan summers. In their cottages by the sea, they’d enjoy the breezes and the summer social season. Of course, some of those cottages, she’d heard, had cost millions of dollars, built at a time when a man might labor all day to earn two.
    And they were built as solidly as man could make. Nearly a century later, many of them still stood, palatial and resplendent behind their gated walls. Some were private homes or museums; others played host to a steady stream of visitors hoping to recapture some of the beauty and grace of a time gone by.
    â€œGood Lord.” Mallory practically broke her neck staring at an enormous Baroque town house that stretched a block and easily soared forty or fifty feet high. The owners didn’t bother with anything so practical as a brick wall. Instead a wrought-iron fence some eight or ten feet high stretched in front of it so all could see its carved stone glory. Urns as tall as a man flanked the steps to the pillared entrance area, late mums spilling out over the top. It took very little effort to imagine carriages pulling up the broad sweep of the entrance driveway to drop the cream of New York society for dinners and balls.
    On the other side of the street, they passed a field-stone Gothic revival that looked like something out of Jane Eyre. She could imagine an imperiled heroine in love with the master, every bit as much as she could imagine an insane relation locked up in the attic. Around the outside marched formal gardens with hedges and reflecting pools; in an elite town like Newport, these acres of open space were perhaps the biggest extravagance of all.
    They passed mansion after mansion marked with the banners of the Newport Historical Society. A person could spend days seeing them all, Mallory thought in wonder. The first fall leaves made bright spots of color on the pavement ahead of them as Shay wove his way along a side street to the highest wall, the grandest gates she’d seen yet. He stopped the bike in a parking area and Mallory got off, her legs still vibrating a little from the engine. The crashing of ocean waves sounded in the distance.
    â€œDid people really used to live