Standing in the Bassingthwaite parlor with pirates watching her avidly as they clapped their hands and chantedKiss! Kiss!, Alice felt her gaze loosen in the same way it had all those years ago. Her heart began to thud. The only thing that kept her from hysterics was the knowledge that the student who had so drastically failed the sweeping exercise had been Agent B.
Daniel Bixby.
Who currently stood in front of her with his hands in his trouser pockets and such tension in his body she feared he might use himself as a birch broom and destroy them all.
Kissing was not the problem. Being stared at by a score of people was. It went against every instinct a spy possessed.
And, well, perhaps kissing was part of the problem. Alice had never experienced it. Her heart beat so forcefully, she wondered if she was feeling Daniel’s pulse also.
He blinked down at her. She gazed up at him. The air roared with voices and bright, jagged feeling.
“So here is our first olive,” he whispered.
Oh!gasped her heart, leaping up to wave a volume ofNorth and Southas it recognized the Elizabeth Gaskell reference. Her countenance, however, remained cool. “We should not make a face when we swallow it,” she whispered in reply, and Daniel smiled. Seeing this, her heart clutched the book to its, er, heart with happiness.
Disturbed by such an unprofessional emotion, Alice tipped her face up toward duty. And Daniel set his lips against her cheek.
Immediately she was relieved. This need not count for her first kiss; this was nothing.
And then sensation flashed through her body. She felt not only his kiss but the whole Daniel-ness of him, from his physical presence to every memory she possessed of his warm, fleeting smile and the way his hand had felt holding hers until it pleasantly hurt.
He did not touch her now, besides where his mouth lay briefly upon her skin. She did not touch him. Merely one second later, they stepped apart. And yet, Alice feared she might swoon.
Professional woman, she reminded herself firmly.Pirate.
Daniel set one finger to the bridge of his spectacles, pushing them back up his nose, then turned away, patting her shoulder in a companionable manner as he did so.
The roomful of pirates stared gobsmacked.
“Er, right then,” Mrs. Ogden said.
“I do believe I am going to overheat from the profusion of romance,” Miss Darlington remarked.
“How long did you say you had been married?” Mrs. Rotunder asked in a hesitant voice.
“Three years,” Daniel replied.
“Uh huh.” She turned to look blankly at Miss Darlington, who shrugged her mouth with bewilderment.
“Ah, love!” Frederick’s voice swelled through the awkward quiet. “That beacon for all dreaming hearts. Bestowed upon the most fortunate, and blessing them with the mellifluent—”
“Is it dinnertime yet?” Bloodhound Bess asked.
Alas, it was not, but this did not prevent the pirates from trooping to the vast, gilded dining room. Alice and Daniel found themselves carried inexorably along, propelled by chattering voices, bustled bybustles, and nudged by a few mild skirmishes as ladies literally battled to take precedence. The table settings were already laid, and the company had a moment’s entertainment flicking embossed name cards at each other before sitting wherever they pleased. Two younger ladies appropriated Daniel, tucking their arms around his, practically hauling him to a seat between theirs. Alice was left to find a seat on her own. Every trained inclination in her wanted to stand back against the wall in proper servant fashion, but she was a pirate now, a rotten scoundrel, and so she slipped into a chair, murmuring apologies to her neighbors on either side as she did so. They smiled back in a manner that threatened polite conversation.
Looking down at her fingers tapping together in her lap, Alice silently counted her breath in and out. She would have been far more comfortable storming Starkthorn Castle solo to fight the pirates thanchattingwith them.
It was going to be a long two hours’ wait before the scheduled dinnertime.
Five minutes later, food began arriving. Servants in a pirate household are always prepared for the unexpected.
Alice stared at the plate before her with disquiet. She’d felt obliged to take a little of whatever the footmen presented, and now was faced with a bewildering selection of foods, half of which she could not identify and the other half of which was tumbled together in a most distressing fashion. The roasted mushrooms looked delicious but were rendered inedible by their proximity to the honey-glazed carrots. And the cow’s brain had been spoiled by—well, by being cow’s brain, quite frankly, even had lobster sauce not dripped on it.
As she rummaged delicately with her fork, eating whatever was salvageable, she tried to arm herself for conversation. To her left satMrs. Essie Smith, a young lady infamous for having stolen the Russian empress’s favorite teapot; to her right, Mrs. Olivia Etterly, several decades older, with a swirling froth of lilac hair. Eventually, Alice turned to the latter and attempted some benign small talk.
“Tell me, madam, what do you think of the Queen?”
Mrs. Etterly paused in lifting an asparagus-laden fork to her open mouth. “What an arresting question,” she said. “I have never spoken with Her Majesty, but she seems nice enough, for a queen.”
