It meant that she hadn’t asked the right questions. Why, when she met Yardley Whitmer and felt something she’d never felt before, had KC assumed she knew everything she needed to know to navigate what would come next?
She’d never bothered to learn how to do theworkof loving Yardley—how to make herself weak and vulnerable to their love in acknowledgment that she couldn’t love Yardleyby herself. She had to give herself over to who they were together, two women who adored each other and knew nothing about love, not yet, but were ready to knock holes in the ceilings of their lives to let in the light.
“Also, here’s the thing.” Yardley pressed her hand a little harder against KC’s heart, which by this point was beating madly. “I had grown up believing marriage was special. Sacred. It was also something I believed I would never have, not just because of my conviction to give my life to service to my country, but because when the first of my sorority sisters were getting married, it wasn’t legal for me to, and I think my certainty that I neverwouldhad been a balm on that wound. Then the law changed, and I could get married, and my wound has felt a little raw and exposed ever since.” She laughed. “You look so scared. That’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve been too afraid to even ask the question, and so hereI am, ripping it off like a Band-Aid, because no matter what you say, I’ll get a kiss.”
“Yardley—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I made that much breezier than I should have.” Yardley frowned. “I want to know if you want to get married because the real truth is, just theideaof calling a woman my wife makes my heart fall three hundred stories in my chest, like a runaway elevator, thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I’ve never said that word out loud talking about myself.Wife.My wife.” Yardley was bright pink. “I’m working myself up.”
“If I told you,” KC said, “I’d have to kiss you.”
Yardley put both her hands over her mouth and shook her head back and forth. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” She moved so close that KC had to adjust her legs as Yardley buried her face into her neck. “Tell me, though,” she whispered.
“When I decided to give you my mom’s watch, I had to take it to the jeweler to have it cleaned and checked and to have one of the little diamonds replaced. I went to pick it up, and she told me that the maker of the watch also made coordinating jewelry. The pattern of apple blossoms in the gold band and around the face is called ‘spring love,’ which I learned because she pulled out an entire tray of spring love gold jewelry, and in the middle of the tray was a genuinely enormous engagement ring and a wedding band. Which, of course, were the first items she lifted out to show me.”
“Did you freak?” Yardley asked this with a huff of warm breath on KC’s neck that made KC laugh.
“Um, no. I took the ring set from her and proceeded to have a thirty-minute conversation about what my girlfriend might like. I played make-believe. It felt… well, it felt good. I liked telling this jeweler all about you and your tastes and my thoughts about caratweight. Of course, I liked talking to the stranger about it because I couldn’t talk to you.” KC threaded her fingers through Yardley’s hair. “Come here.”
Yardley lifted her face to KC’s, her eyes huge in the low light.
“I think I would like to be married, yes.” KC said it solemnly, because Yardley was right, this was a sacred thing. And because she couldn’t say that she would like to be marriedto Yardleyuntil they got to a different “later” than this one.
Yardley’s mouth was velvet. KC held on to the back of her neck like the anchor that would keep her here, in this moment, her tongue sliding between Yardley’s parted lips, their bodies pressed together on top of a feather bed in a safe room, hidden away from the world.
It was a whispering kiss, an asking kiss. KC moved her lips over Yardley’s, rubbed her thumb over her mouth as if to ask,Did you like that?And Yardley sighed over KC’s thumb, her tongue just touching the pad, and smiled before kissing KC back, deeper.Yes, I liked it so much.
It wasn’t like any kiss they’d ever had, but it was one they should have had, if their ignorance and self-protection hadn’t kept them from it. If Yardley hadn’t always been on her way out the door with her suitcase wheel squeaking and KC hadn’t hunkered down and hid behind a computer monitor every time she felt the slightest bit intimidated. If they’d just told each other what they felt. Who they were. What they needed.
Every day they hadn’t made it to this kiss had pushed them farther apart, but they were lucky, because this was a kiss with the kind of magic in it that could pull them back together.
Best kiss ever. Best kiss so far.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Greenwich, London
Yardley took a coupe glass of a pale pink cocktail with a breath of foam floating on top from Julia Ketchner, the MI6 agent assigned to the Greenwich Palace Club. She and Julia had been fast friends since they met on a Mediterranean yacht in the midst of a tricky negotiation to convert a Greek shipping magnate into an asset seven years ago.
“If you can believe it”—Julia leaned forward while pulling the bodice of her red evening gown up over the curves that were threatening to escape it—“this is tonight’s signature cocktail. These gents are calling it ‘The English Robin.’ There’s no one more sentimental about a Britain that never existed than landed club lads.” Julia grabbed her own English Robin, which she’d set down on one of the high tables, and knocked it back in one go. “Fuck, but she’s tasty, though.”
They were on a patio whose classical colonnade overlooked the Thames. Yardley breathed in the gray, with its cold, oily mist of rain, relishing the brisk air on her bare chest. She wore her tuxedo shirt unbuttoned to the navel. Her short, severely cut salt-and-pepper wig was hot, as were her drapey wool trousers. “How’s our girl doing?”
Yardley’s London cover, Max Konstantopoulos, was one she’dused for years. It had been easy for Julia to secure an invite to tonight’s banquet, thrown by Miller’s club, for Max, an intimidating lesbian black-market intermediary. It didn’t hurt that Julia had been embedded in the club as its receptionist for the last nine months. Three-quarters of the members were half in love with her kittenish-blonde persona, which gave her access to some of the biggest secrets in the world.
“Do I want to steal her from you, or do I want tobeher?” Julia asked. “That’s the real question.”
Yardley raised an eyebrow. “She’s not mine yet.”
Julia made a move to grab another cocktail from a passing tray, then thought better of it when she noticed Yardley’s still-full glass. “Everyone thought you were just making her up. Like a girlfriend you met at camp and lives far away so you don’t look like a big knob.”
“No one thought that,” Yardley said primly.
“But you didn’t know she was Tabasco!Yousaid she only knew your cover! And here she’s one of us. Some spy you are!”
Yardley wondered how many more times she was going to hear that particular dig. Certainly for the rest of her life. Depending on what kind of business the agency was up to in its less conventional units, possibly into the afterlife.
“To answer your question”—Julia took Yardley’s drink from her and drank it down between breaths—“Daphne Sullivan is the belle of the ball.”
