“Prepare to be wounded!” she shouted in amendment. “But not so badly that you cannot sing at my soiree next week! The prince will be there, and you know how he admires your voice!”
“Never!” Mrs. Etterly repeated. “By which I mean never in this context! I of course look forward to the soiree!” And she leaped forward, sword raised. A table crashed over, blades met with a loud metallic ringing, and several patrons screamed.
“Blighters!” roared the innkeeper, waving a cricket bat as he entered the fray.
“Up,” Alex said, climbing on to the bench seat and hauling Charlotte with him.
“Be careful not to spill the tea!” she urged as a chair went flying past to shatter against the bar.
With some difficulty, due to the inconvenient volume of Charlotte’s clothing, not to mention beer mats whizzing past with a stinging speed, they clambered across the table, over the side of the booth, and dropped to the ground unnoticed by anyone (except three waitresses, the bartender, and an old lady who had just been trying to enjoy her fish and chips in peace). As Bixby headed for the front door, Alex led Charlotte out the back into a dark alleyway. He shut the door moments before a plate shattered against it.
“You have destroyed my skirt, sir, with these shenanigans,” Charlotte said, brushing at a slight mark on the fabric. “I declare, you appear to have a genius for mess. If only you weren’t such a scoundrel!”
“If only you weren’t so enchanting,” Alex countered.
This made no sense at all, since she had not done magic, and Charlotte was on the brink of telling him so when he grabbed her, pushed her against the alleyway wall, and kissed her until she forgot every word he said or she ought to say in response.
Kissing was one thing she never disputed. Her body had an irrepressible attraction to the man and, despite the several lectures it received daily from her brain, refused to care about either ill-mannered feuds orwell-mannered behavior. Alex seemed to be caught in the same dilemma. They could barely cross a street without afterward dragging each other into a passionate embrace.
Indeed, by the time they traversed the two hundred yards from the pub to Alex’s cottage on the pier, disheveled, breathless, and significantly unbuttoned, Bixby had brewed a pot of tea and retired with Thomas More’sUtopia.
Later that night, lying beside Alex in his bed, watching him sleep in the gauzy moonlight and trying to pretend there were no spiderwebs on the ceiling overhead, Charlotte attempted to reason through what was happening to her and just where along the way she had left a large portion of her good sense. Captain O’Riley was not a suitable obsession. He seemed just as dangerous asleep as he did awake. His long, dark eyelashes, curving against his cheeks, were akin to a sword at her throat; his dreaming smile was a lure that would draw her out of all propriety.
If only he wasn’t as tempting as he was perilous. If only he lived in a boardinghouse, and worked in an office, and didn’t look at her as if he wanted to lick the bittersweet words right out of her mouth. As she surveyed him covetously, Charlotte wondered whether concern for the amulet had inspired her to hijack his house, or whether she had still been flying a bicycle somewhere inside herself, lawless, longing for freedom, and in love even then with the pirate’s sky-colored eyes.
Well, notin love. In like. Intrigued. She might share his bed, but there was still no call to involve emotions. The fact her pulse rushed when he smiled at her meant nothing beyond physiology. The odd loneliness that made her ache when he left the room for even a short while was inconsequential. She’d been lonely all her life, after all.
No, Charlotte concluded; their relationship was nothing more than temporary fun, and when it was over she would go back to her proper life, taking with her some interesting memories (and the amulet).
She sighed.I am most certainly not in love,she told herself, reaching out through the darkness to touch the pirate’s face.
And Alex, lying quiet with his eyes safely closed, indulged in the comfort of Charlotte’s presence after years of not sharing this bed with any woman out of fear they’d also want to share his heart. (Rugs being different, and beds in other buildings, and a convenient tabletop in more than one case.) He felt the drift of her fingers and tried not to smile. She bewitched him even without incantating. It wasn’t that she stirred his nether regions at a mere glance—although she certainly did that too. It was how her rosy loveliness and her thorn-sharp wit stirred his heart, making it shove painfully against the stone wall he’d built around it more than twenty years ago. That heart wanted to share with her, yearned to share, trembled so fast with its desperation to share that Alex began to feel dizzy, even lying in bed.
He could not allow it. But he could not lie still either while his blood shook and Charlotte stroked her soft, clean fingers against his skin. So he tipped her back and pushed her legs apart, and she arched to welcome him in. They moved together fiercely, wordlessly, holding on to sheets and headboards and each other for dear life.
Not love. Not needing. Just exercise in the dark.
But afterward she wept, and he tried to brush the tears from her beautiful, moonlit cheek. “Did I hurt you?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she said. “I’m—I’m feeling, that’s all.”
“Are you cold? Hungry? Do you want a cup of tea? What is it?”
She caught his hand, holding it against the calm steadiness of her heartbeat. “It’s nothing. Only feeling. Is that not acceptable?”
She sounded so defensive, he kissed her damp face. “Of course it is,” he assured her, although he still did not entirely understand. But tucking her closer, he just let her be.
She held on to him like a pirate holds on to the wheel through a storm. As if she needed him. As if he represented safety. He felt her smile shift across his bare skin, and he sucked in a breath as sensation trembled through him. It was nothing, he told himself—sex always left his body sensitive for a while. This woman was just another lover, another way of getting through the dark. He was not going to gofeelingsimply because she did.
However, there was no harm in smiling too, like a soft, boyish fool, in the darkness where no one could see it.
“The map says there is no shortcut,” Charlotte reiterated as the three of them trudged through town, following the afternoon’s light toward sea-tanged shadows. This was their third day now in Clacton-on-Sea, and Charlotte was so wearied by searching that she had fallen into an uncharacteristic irritability. “I doubt Lady Armitage is even here. Bixby’s information must have been faulty.”
Bixby did not reply to this; his silence, however, was scandalized.
“Impossible,” Alex argued. “Don’t give up, sweetheart. Remember the jewelry store yesterday that was robbed of all its gold rings? And the burned-down church? Not to mention the man who saw an unusual red-doored townhouse on Anchor Road? Parking in that street would appeal to Armitage’s sense of humor.”
“But you are walking in the wrong direction for Anchor Road.”
