Or, rather, she felt hot, so hot she’d like to strip off all her clothes, but she wasrhetoricallycool. Which was the important thing.
Caleb demonstrated a skill greatly improved upon that he’d shown at Fortuna Andrews’s party when they were children. His lips pressed gently, and yet it were as if a tremendous weightof emotion was being pressed against Amelia’s very soul. She didn’t care about this, mind you. Nor did she care that his bare hand was cradling her jaw, tilting it as he pleased, with a slightly domineering attitude that, under normal circumstances, would incite a frown or scoff of laughter from her, rather than the tingle happening in her stomach (or a place in that general vicinity).
A flaming teapot hurled across the room, on direct course to smash against them. Without breaking the kiss, Caleb put an arm around Amelia’s waist and pulled her against him, turning them out of the teapot’s path. His hand moved from her jaw to cup the back of her head protectively.
As a natural consequence of this, the kiss deepened, just at the point where Amelia gasped with surprise at being abruptly cuddled against a man’s strong, broad chest. Thus due to physics, and with no intentionat allon either of their parts, the tidy connection of mouths transformed into something more dynamic, lips sliding, clasping, growing heated. It was everything Amelia had imagined a kiss from Caleb would be (not that she’d ever imagined such a thing, merely speculated one or two dozen times, as an intellectual exercise). And yet it was also strange, beautifully strange, as if she’d stumbled into a dreamworld. All her sense of the familiar, and of the innocent friendship between them, was dissolving like sugar against Caleb’s mouth. He tasted of something wilder, darker, and altogether dangerous—a delicious poison, or strong black tea. His fingers tightened on her hair. Amelia leaned into him. The tingle became a throb.
Abruptly her mind slammed up a high, spiked barricade against the desire swelling up from her heart. It stuck reminders like heads on the spikes: if word of this kiss reached Ottersock, she would be forced down to the level of teaching at acommunity college, all her parents’ dreams for her career destroyed.
The teapot fell with a crash to the polished floor, pretty much at the same moment Amelia’s heart crashed also. She began to stiffen in Caleb’s hold. As she did so, he began to soften. In unison, they broke the kiss. At once, they looked around—to check the magic, you understand, and not at all to avoid looking each other in the eye.
A dazed silence hung limp and miserable over the ruined pub. Tea and beer dripped from fallen cups onto the floor. A bouquet of flowers was on fire. And the bacon and egg pie roamed beneath tables, clucking as it pecked at crumbs. Otherwise, nothing stirred.
“Well, that worked,” Caleb said in a completely ordinary tone, as if he’d not just unraveled Amelia’s nerves so completely, she wasn’t certain of her ability to stand upright. Fortunately he was still embracing her.
Unfortunately, however,he was still embracing her.The throbbing grew so insistent, it was as if she had a clockwork model of a heart in her underwear, pulsing in time with her own.
The ridiculous image restored Amelia to her better senses. “Um,” she said awkwardly.
At once, Caleb released her, stepping back. He pushed a hand through his hair, shifting it off his forehead. Instantly long strands began to fall again, tangling with his eyelashes. “We should probably get out of here before—”
“—the spoon causes more trouble,” Amelia inserted.
“—someone clicks that we’re to blame for the mess,” he said at the same time. He flashed a grin, the usual Caleb-type grin to warm her heart and remind her that he was her friend.Justher friend, Amelia added sternly to herself.
Although it wasn’t really a matter ofjust, of course. It was almost everything to her. He was. At the same time, however, he wasnotsomeone to get all soppy over, merely due to a kiss (despite the evidence of actual soppiness occurring within her at that very moment). Nor was she thinkingGod, please let him kiss me again, with or without the involvement of magic.
Or, rather, she was thinking it, but onlyto prove that she wasn’t thinking it. And she didnotfeel attracted to Caleb. Anyone would go a little daft after being kissed so efficiently, to say nothing of the flaming teapot.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” she said, striving not to touch her mouth.
“It was effective,” Caleb pointed out—and if he was gazing at her mouth as though he also wanted to touch it, Amelia felt sure it was just a figment of her now overwrought imagination.
“Perhaps,” she answered briskly. “But what if Miss Tunnicliffe saw and mentioned it to Ottersock or Throckmorton?”
Caleb frowned bewilderedly. “Does she even know Throckmorton?”
“Probably…maybe…I’m not sure, but…possibly,” Amelia muttered. Sympathy crossed Caleb’s face. He moved as if to hug her, and Amelia took a prudent step back. Snatching up the now-inert Hereford teaspoon from the table, she gave him a brisk, sensible nod. “Let us proceed with all haste.”
“Flee the scene of the crime,” Caleb translated wickedly. “That’s my girl.”
“I am not your girl, I am my own woman,” Amelia replied in a pedantic tone to counter the flutters that his words inspired.
“I beg your pardon,” Caleb apologized, and the flutters disappe—
He set a hand against her lower back.Flutterflutterflutter.A veritable typhoon filled Amelia’s interior. This did not suggest attraction, however, merely that…that…
“Be careful where you step,” Caleb said with helpful timing.
Amelia ignored the implication that she needed guidance to walk across a room (and furthermore that she’d most likely caused this whole debacle by feeling jealous when Caleb offered such guidance to Vanity). They made a cautious path through the mess of broken plates, glasses, and food. Emerging into the dreary, overcast late afternoon, they discovered a small crowd of diners, pub staff, and random passersby murmuring together on the footpath. They appeared to be the typical population one found in rural England: plainly dressed, eyes darkened by instinctive suspicion, and at least one pitchfork held up among them. Silence descended as everyone turned to stare at the historians.
“All fixed,” Caleb announced with a cheerful smile.
“What happened?” a waitress asked, twisting her apron anxiously. “Was it a ghost?”
“No,” Amelia reassured her. “There’s—”
“Are you certain?” The woman’s large-eyed gaze shifted to the door Caleb had closed behind them as if she expected a diabolical spirit from the netherworld to smash through it at any moment.
