Alice gasped, and Daniel found himself shaken abruptly out of derangement by the sound. Lifting his head, he looked down at her carefully. Bloody hell, but she was beautiful. And almost unbearably valuable to him. He should never have started this.
With an effort, he forced his hand to stillness against her knee.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
Her eyes, hazy and dark, tried without much success to focus. “No, I am sorry. It tickled, that is all. I assume—I suppose—touching the leg is a marital maneuver?”
He shifted back a little, wary. “You do understand about, er, marital maneuvers, don’t you?”
“Of course. I read a postdoctoral thesis on the subject.”
The vision of her sitting in a hushed and solemn library, reading about sex while all around her students and librarians sat oblivious, so aroused him he fell to kissing her again without another thought. She drew him in, tiny wordless sounds emerging from her throat to tremble against their tongues, fingers tapping without rhythm against his back. Daniel forgot every rule of proper conduct as he lost himself in the desire that had been lying like dust in his heart, begging for a good sweeping up this past year. His hand continued sliding closer to the hot, dark euphemism that lay so secretly between her thighs. Every finger ached to be the first to enter her.
His self-control began to plummet once again.
With a great force of nobility, he pulled his hand back—but immediately it propelled itself to her bodice instead. Ripping was too messy to be indulged, but his fingers fumbled with the pearl buttons, shoving them through buttonholes, reaching through to tug at the embroidered trim of her chemise—
Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
They flung away from each other in shock. Tumbling off the bed,Daniel was on his feet again in a matter of seconds, gun in hand, blood flaring through his veins as he ricocheted from sexual arousal to homicidal arousal. But the only hazard he saw was Miss Dearlove sitting rumpled on the bed, clutching her open bodice. His breath trembled as he stared at her. She was so flushed, he wanted to cool her down by licking her all over. She had lost her hairpins, and long, fine brown hair cascaded over her shoulders in a sultry mess that gleamed red where the lamplight stroked it, making her look like a portrait of some alluring heathen goddess. (Albeit not painted. Nor on a canvas. Nor even framed. Daniel’s grasp on metaphors tended to have all the strength of a slippery thing trying to hold another slippery thing.) He struggled to recollect that she was a colleague, a highly trained agent of the secret government.
And then she straightened, her mouth tightening and her eyes becoming narrow—and memory snapped back into place. With it came an image of what she’d done to the men in the alleyway outside A.U.N.T. headquarters—and although Daniel briefly wondered if he could convince her to do the same to him, he sensed she no longer was in an amorous mood.
The scowl provided something of a clue.
“Kindly stop pointing that weapon at me,” she said.
For one wild, blushing moment, Daniel looked down at his trousers—but then realized she meant his pistol, and sheepishly holstered it. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “But what on earth was that appalling noise?”
“I have the incantation’s collision prevention phrase sewn into my chemise,” she explained. “It is a special precaution for female agents, especially those working in the households of rich men. I forgot it was there.”
“I see.” He ran a hand through his hair, unsure whether to be more appalled about the necessity of such a precaution or the fact that hisown behavior had tripped it. Snatching his spectacles from the bedside table, he shoved them on and turned to stare at the wall.
Twenty white bouquets decorated the pale blue wallpaper in each vertical row.
Nineteen and a half in the third row from the door, someone having misaligned the paper.
Daniel’s jaw twitched. He wanted to rip the wallpaper away to be rid of that one small error. He wanted to burn it, and beat the ashes, and absolutely stop envisioning himself teaching Alice Dearlove his own thesis on sex. Tightening his hands into fists, then stretching out the fingers, he breathed.
One, two, three.
Four, exhaling.
Behind him, Alice exhaled at the same moment. Daniel was unsurprised. As she inhaled again, he could practically hear the numbers being recited in her mind. No doubt they would sound just as they did in his, echoing the stentorious voice of Academy headmistress Mrs. Aberfinch—which was not exactly something he liked hearing so soon after kissing a woman. He wished he could take Alice in his arms once more and hold her, just hold her, drawing warmth from her body to dispel the endless chill of that voice. But he did not dare.
“Fiddlesticks,” she muttered.
Daniel looked sidelong at her again. She was frowning as she searched for her hairpins across the crumpled bedspread.
“Sorry,” he said on general principle.
“Why?”
He opened his mouth to explain before realizing doing so would probably lead to further kissing in order to prove his point. “Never mind.”
“Have we reached the conclusion of our practice?”
“Yes. No.” He shook his head. “Yes, but no, I—”
