“Hm,”Daniel said.
Alice recognized his tone. “We are here to search, not clean,” she chided. Peering into a box of books, she almost wept at their moldy covers. “My God, these people really are criminals.”
Daniel shifted aside a broken suitcase to reveal a painting of a riverside city. “Bah,” he said with a frown. “Hamburg.”
Alice laughed. The noise so startled her, she clamped a hand against her mouth. Daniel turned to stare at her amazedly.
“Please excuse me,” she gasped. “I have not been amused in years.”
“No, I apologize,” Daniel answered. “I should not have referenced Dickens in such an offhandedly witty fashion.”
“The apology is mine,” Alice argued. “I fear I’m devolving into hooliganism.”
He stepped toward her. “I insist on being to blame.”
She shook her head. “Begging your pardon, but I demand to be forgiven.”
Shadows filled his eyes as he regarded her with an expressionlessness that took her breath away. She found herself moving closer without thinking—and, alas, without looking: she tripped over a candlestick lying on the floor and staggered. Daniel immediately caught her.
“Sorry,” she said, staring up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said at the same time, holding her close.
And then theycontinued on with their search for the weapon like exemplary professionalskissed.
The force of their sudden passion sent them stumbling back. They impacted with a cluttered shelf, and a small vase toppled over. Without pausing in his romantic industry, Daniel reached past Alice to set it upright again. He bit Alice’s lower lip. She rose onto her toes to get even closer, and they stumbled again.
Tongues clashing, they moved a coat rack aside... swaying into a stack of boxes, they aligned it neatly, each using one hand while the other remained busy thrusting into hair or grasping clothes... then they straightened a painting on the wall before Daniel pinned Alice against that same wall. “Why are you doing this?” she breathed as he kissed the dent at the base of her throat and she rearranged a bonnet hanging crookedly on the rack. “There’s no need—no one is here to witness it.”
“By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart,” he murmured, the words humming against her skin, making her sigh. She felt disguise after disguise slide away until she was no more than a shy,unamiable woman who, even long out of childhood, still hugged books and dreamed of having a family. It was a frightening nakedness, and she fluttered anxious fingers against the unrelenting solidity of Daniel’s back. He did not even flinch.
“But—” she tried to say, to no avail. He was kissing her mouth again. He was holding her so near, she could feel thetap-tapof his heartbeat.
Oh God, please, her soul whispered.This one. This man. Mine.
She made one last, weak effort at cynicism: “At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
Daniel shifted back a little to cup her face in both his hands. His smile could have unfolded sheets and dirtied dishes. “Doubt thou the stars are fire,” he said emphatically. “Doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I—”
Crash!
Now was the moment of Alice’s discontent. Daniel pulled her behind the coat rack, into what appeared to be an ancient spider civilization. To have gone from the verge of receiving a romantic declaration to being draped with a veil of cobwebs might have been appropriate, considering Daniel had been quotingHamlet, but it left Alice rueful.
Less than a second after they hid, a section of the wall flung open, knocking a taxidermied dodo to the floor.
“Bloody hell!” Alex O’Riley strode into the room, brushing dust from his long black coat. “Why must secret passages always be so dirty? God knows they’re used so often in pirate houses, people ought to keep them swept.”
A laugh sounded as Charlotte emerged behind him. It was dry, brief; the kind of laugh that has eyes in the back of its head and justknowswhen you’re about to do something stupid. “This coming from a man who didn’t realize one has to use a mop with water.”
“Don’t try being supercilious with me, darling,” Alex replied. “We all know who mopped our floors. And that it hasn’t been done since he left, water or not.”
Alice heard Daniel gasp. She gripped his arm to prevent him from leaping out with an offer to commit housework. Alex and Charlotte might be his friends, but Alice considered them as wayward and dangerous as every other pirate and witch of her acquaintance. Furthermore, she suspected Charlotte would take one look at her and know exactly what she’d just been doing.
“Witches tidy,” Charlotte said. “They do notclean. We really must procure a new housekeeper. Perhaps when we return to London we should—Sufflamino!”
Alex jolted to a sudden halt.
“Really?” he said from his rigid posture, one arm reaching toward a sword that leaned against a grimy old bust of Wordsworth. “You couldn’t have justtoldme to stop?”
