Pleasance shrugged with all the carelessness of a woman who has to tidy away her employer’s voting rights pamphlets at the end of the day. “—that’s all the more reason we should have fun looking pretty. And I declare, if Mr. Bixby does not miss a step upon first seeing you in this dress, I will eat my hat.”
“Good heavens!” Alice exclaimed, staring at the woman. “Don’t do that, it would be dreadful for your digestive system! The straw—let alone the ribbons—!”
Pleasance blinked. “Er...”
Sighing, Alice considered the dress. Hideous thing, absolutely hideous.
“Miss a step, you say?” she murmured, stroking a swathe of lace across the bodice. Its texture was much like Daniel’s unshaven jaw had felt that morning against her cheek...
“Absolutely,” Pleasance said, sensing weakness. “He might even stumble. In fact, it ain’t impossible he could outrighttrip, and end on his knees before you.”
Three minutes later, Alice was encased in itchy, cumbersome layers of taffeta, with her waist cinched as tight as an antiquarian’s grip on Shakespeare’s First Folio, and with no possibility of undressing unless someone else released the dozen buttons down her back. Never in all her years of undercover work had she looked so... so...
Ridiculous, she thought.
“Adorable,” Pleasance said with a happy sigh.
“Hm,” Cecilia added, frowning. “Tell me, Miss Dearlove, why Mr. Bixby married you.”
Alice stared at her blankly.Because Mrs. Kew ordered him todid not seem an appropriate response.
“Because he loves you,” Cecilia replied on her behalf. “You.Is this ensemble representative of you?”
“Uh...” Alice said. A childhood in institutions, followed by a career as a spy, left her unequipped to answer the question. The fact that someone was asking it at all threatened to short-circuit her mental processing system.
“Never mind.” Cecilia’s eyes glinted with piratic determination. “Based on my understanding of you, gained over the twenty minutes I’ve spent in your company—and furthermore my knowledge of Mr. Bixby, which comes from having glimpsed him now and again in Captain O’Riley’s kitchen—I consider myself eminently qualified to make this decision on your behalf. Take off the dress. I have a better idea.”
Daniel had survived a house crash. He had survived several days in company with the Wisteria Society. For that matter, he’d spent ten years as an elite agent, undertaking missions so dangerous they made his debriefers cry, and had survived that with ease.
But making small talk with Ned Lightbourne might just be the final straw.
The pirate bounced his daughter on his hip as he chatted away merrily, undaunted by Daniel’s lackluster replies. At their feet, Dr. Snodgrass lay bound and gagged. Behind them, the red door of Puck House remained closed. Daniel frowned at it. He’d been waitingbloody foreverten minutes for Alice and could not understand the delay. By now,they should be on their way to London. Instead, he was being forced to smile and nod to a man who seemed to think that amiable conversation was perfectly reasonable behavior.
“Such nice weather,” Ned remarked, and Daniel wondered if stabbing him just a little would shut him up. But at that moment the red door of Puck House finally swung open.
And every thought in his brain spontaneously combusted.
Alice appeared in the doorway. She paused, fingers flickering and eyes scanning for danger, before stepping out. Daniel’s eyes, heart, groin, ached as he beheld the vision drifting toward him. Her head bore a nimbus of golden sunlight, her feet seemed to barely touch the grass, and she had been clothèd—not just clothed, insisted his reverent brain, butclothèd—in a plain white dress. Altogether, she looked like one of the angels on the prayer cards Daniel had collected when a child. Her brown hair was smoothed from a central parting to a chignon at the nape of her neck, and it provided the calmest, simplest, most perfect frame for her face—a face such as Byron must have envisioned when he wrote of beauty, a pure and dear dwelling place for her serenely sweet thoughts...
“What an appalling mess!”
Daniel blinked, his reverie shattering. Alice jammed her hands on her hips and frowned at the tumbled remains of the A.U.N.T. cottage. “Could you not have managed things more tidily?” she demanded.
“Um,” he said.
“Is that all you offer in your defense, Mr. Bixby? While you dallied, I have been wrangled into various states of fashion and ruthlessly interrogated as to my opinions on jewelry. My fingers remain sticky even though I washed them, I had a splinter in one, and this dress smells of lavender.”
“Oh dear.” Taking her hand in his, he kissed its fingers softly, brushing his tongue against a tiny scratch he found.
Alice’s frown deepened. “Wrong hand.”
He looked up at her from beneath an arched eyebrow. “Really?”
She shrugged, her expression irreproachable. “Perhaps.”
So he took her other hand and kissed that too, and she rolled her eyes,tsking through a barely repressed smile.
“There,” he said at last, keeping hold of the hand, pressing it tightly within his grip. “All better, I hope. And the bomb is disarmed, and the day saved. I believe a degree of relaxation would not be inappropriate.”
