It promptly leaped higher.
“Tsk,” Amelia said, climbing onto the table alongside him. “Why are you not taller?”
Caleb steadied her as she nudged aside a bowl of fruit to clear a space in which to stand. “I’m tall enough for the important things,” he said, and bent some five inches to kiss her forehead.
“That’s very charming,” Amelia told him dryly, “but please concentrate on the matter at hand. Or, more accurately,notat hand.”
They looked up at the saltcellar where it floated just beyond reach, a tiny moon within a drift of salt stars.
“Pretty,” Caleb said.
“Dangerous,” Amelia countered.
He shrugged.
Suddenly, tiny beams of magic shot out from the cellar, stabbing one of the books on the shelves. A cloud of typeset letters burst forth and began flapping around the room in a broken, scattered manner, like modern poetry.
Amelia frowned. “We need to—”
“Waltz beneath the salty starlight?” Caleb suggested.
“Constrain the saltcellar,” she told him chidingly.
“I’ll hit it with the teaspoon.”
Amelia clicked her tongue. “You will not. There’s a good chance the cellar isn’t especially magical in itself but is absorbing the teaspoon’s energy, just as the clock did. Bringing the two into contact could be disastrous.”
Caleb’s eyes twinkled with luminous, salted magic. “We could always try what we did in the Staveley pub to stop the enchantment.”
Amelia blinked dispassionately in response to this, even as her nervous system got together to throw a raucous surprise party for the memory of The Staveley Pub Kiss.There is no call for capital letters,she told herself austerely, to which came an instant, adamant reply:THE KISS.
As a teacher, however, she was used to people being adamant about things that were actually nonsense, and therefore ignored herself. “Or we could use a silver candlestick to knock it down,” she proposed instead.
“Well if you want to beboring,” Caleb said.
Amelia sighed with exasperation but nevertheless couldn’t hold back a faint smile of her own. “You’re such a pest,” she told him fondly.
“I do my best.”
Her smile deepened. His gaze grew heavy. The saltcellar began to spin, but neither of them noticed. An intense, silentconversation passed between them…We really need to focus—You’re right, as always—So will you focus?—What doyouthink, darling?—I think you’ll go on being silly—See, always right. It was the same conversation they’d been having most of their lives, and for which they no longer required actual words. Had Ottersock witnessed that deep, intimate look, he’d have suffered an apoplexy. They should have stopped; should have focused on work as Amelia suggested. But they kept on just gazing at each other, their faces sparkling with constellations of magic.
And perhaps that magic affected them, or perhaps some strange kind of gravity. For Caleb blinked, swaying just a fraction closer to Amelia, and at the same time she drifted toward him, lifting her face. He bent his head, angling it, moving as slowly as she. Their lips parted; their breath faded away. They kis—
Click.
The tiny sound pinched at the edge of their awareness. Without moving, Caleb looked up through his eyelashes, over Amelia’s shoulder…
And then, abruptly, he was moving very fast, straightening away from her, his expression darkening into a scowl.
“You are infuriating!” he snapped.
Amelia gasped with outrage. “And you are unbearable!”
Caleb’s eyes flashed with an anger that looked hot, so hot, Amelia felt a similar flash beneath her heart, alighting her pulse into a firestorm. “I hate you!” she averred, clamping her hands against her hips.
“I hate you too,” he said, and Amelia was amazed the air between them didn’t go up in smoke.
“Fightingagain?” Throckmorton boomed with disbelieving indignation from the door, which he’d stealthily openedwhile they were intent upon each other. He stormed into the room, thrusting his pipe at them as if he stood in a classroom, chastising two naughty students. “Delinquent! Unprofessional!”
