13
they are extremely professional— hand-holding practice pays off— occupational health and safety— daniel is messed up (mentally and literally)— echoes—alarm!
Nothing in Nature stands still; everything strives and moves forward—with the exception of Daniel Bixby. Alice waited, and waited, while he looked down at her so heatedly her nerves began to sizzle. Was he actually going to kiss her? Perhaps he did not know how to do it after all and was trying to recollect the procedure?
She had been wishing for this from the first moment she saw him in the dress shop, his posture so impeccable she would have defied anyone not to lust after the man. Since learning he was Agent B, she’d struggled to reconcile their professional rivalry with attraction. But she expected now to solve that dilemma, for surely nothing simplified things more than a kiss. If only Daniel would make haste. She restrained herself from glancing at the nearby clock.
Finally, he bent, and Alice caught her breath.
He gently pressed his mouth against her forehead.
Alice was bewildered—did he not know the correct zone for kissing?—and annoyed! And oh, melting warm and slow all through her body until she found herself swaying helplessly against him. He kissed next the edge of one eye, her eyelashes sweeping against his lips.
No one had mentioned this variation of the activity. They had talked about mouths and knuckles and not doing it unless you were prepared to get married. But now Daniel was kissing her cheek, and not at all like he had the night before; this time, it was slower, softer, his breath fanning her skin and intensifying the warmth inside her. Alice felt sure this must be highly inappropriate even for the most married of couples.
A sound shuddered from her unkissed mouth. It said nothing, but it meant please. At this point, she would have levitated a dozen tigers and assassinated Queen Victoria herself if only he would make haste. Please, she wished again.
At last, taking her chin between thumb and forefinger, he tilted it up, lowering his mouth to hers.
And she combusted into flames.
It was not like this in books, she thought in the fleeting moment before all thoughts burned away. Not even Primula Tewkes’s penny-dreadful novels had described the sense of intimacy. After a lifetime of seldom being touched, she now had a man touching her in a way that, although confined to their lips, felt like caresses all over her skin. Daniel kissed her gently, yet with authority, and it was clear he knew exactly what he was doing after all. Alice found herself clutching at him as her knees began to tremble. Her heart was already at ten on the Richter scale.
She had no idea how to kiss him back. Overcome with sensation, she could not even evaluate his tactics and attempt to replicate them. But Daniel did not seem deterred by this. He did not slow to let her catch up, nor offer instruction, nor expect anything from her but surrender. And so she let go completely, requiring him to set an arm across her back so as to prevent her collapsing.
She remembered tumbling through the storm the other day. This was a dizzyingly similar experience, although with the defect of her skirt still being on.
Gradually the kiss eased, providing her with the opportunity to breathe and to analyze the event. (1) She had not expected so much involvement of the tongue. (2) Cardiac side effects may present some concern. (3) —
But it had not been an ending after all, only a trap to lure her further in. Suddenly he kissed her even more deeply, stroking against secrets she never knew she had. He pulled her close, cupping a hand against the back of her head, wrapping his arm more securely around her waist so their bodies were pressed hard together. Everything began to pulse—lips, heart, loins. Alice felt an echo of it in him too, through her clothes, behind his bones.
Good heavens, no wonder people married!
At last—too soon—Daniel pulled back with an effort. He seemed dazed. His eyes behind their slightly crooked spectacles blinked past her at some vision that darkened his expression.
“Perhaps this should not go in the mission report,” he said.
“I agree,” Alice replied through throbbing lips. She resisted the urge to rub them, for Daniel was not rubbing his, and she possessed no other guide to correct post-kissing behavior. “Nonetheless, I do feel. Um.” What did she feel? Where had her brain gone? Groping incoherently through her overheated inner darkness, she found it at last surrounded by metaphors and rose petals. Sighing, it came to attention. “I feel that my portrayal of a happily married wife will be improved from here on. And I must say, already you look more like my—um, like a husband. So. There we have it. Excellent work. I suppose we should go search some rooms—?”
“Uh huh.”
Neither of them moved.
“It would behoove us check in with Agent V-2 also.” Her voice shook a little. Daniel was staring at her mouth now as if he wanted to lick the words coming out of it. “There may be an update from the servants’ quarters, and—”
“Your stance was incorrect,” he interrupted abruptly.
Alice frowned in perplexment. “My what?”
“A married woman would never stance—um, stand in that manner while she was being kissed.” He made a vague gesture.
“Oh.” Alice felt a blush warm her face. “What manner?”
“Er—angled too much to the left. Yes. And I got the—er, the middle bit wrong.”
“You did?”
“I think we need to practice a little longer,” Daniel said. “For the sake of the mission.”
A thrill shot through Alice’s blood. “That is an admirably professional attitude.”
“Diligence is key to being a good secret agent.” Taking her hand in his, just like they had rehearsed, he tugged her across the room in a manner that felt less marital than salaciously premarital.
“Where—?” Alice began to ask, but before she could further the query, they arrived at the bed and Daniel arranged her so she was sitting at its edge. He sat beside her and, removing his spectacles, laid them neatly on the bedside table.
“Occupational safety measures are important,” he explained. “By continuing to stand, we risked falling and wrenching a knee or ankle.”
“Ah, good point,” Alice said. “I shall write in my report that you were assiduous in maintaining the welfare of all mission operatives.”
He brushed the words from her lips with the pad of his thumb, and Alice gasped as sensation rampaged through her. Immediately he took advantage, sliding the thumb along the inside of her lower lip in an action so scandalous Alice would have gasped again were not her tongue, operating under its own instruction, busy swirling around that thumb, trying to draw it farther in. He tasted like salt and unsweetened tea. Alice swallowed as he shifted his hand away to cradle her cheek.
“And now I am going to kiss you until you see stars, Mrs. Blakeney.”
“For the sake of the mission,” she added.
He smiled. “Exactly.”
“Very well then, Mr. Blakeney. You may proceed.”
Daniel had spent his entire life devoted to duty. Literally. Raised in one of A.U.N.T.’s feeder orphanages, he had been selected for Elite Force training after he corrected the headmistress’s caning technique in the middle of her punishing him. Slowly, inexorably, the nurses and instructors had drawn him out of his all-consuming desire for exactitude until he learned to find it again through obeying orders. Whenever the world seemed an impossible mess clattering against his senses, they taught him to clean it by sweeping, folding, assassinating. Whenever his own internal world threatened to explode, they taught him to become a precision bomb.
He had never viewed himself through any other lens than that of secret agent for the downstairs government. And he excelled at his work. To do less would chip away at his identity, threatening him with disorder, uncertainty, fear.
Daniel could not abide fear.
Alice Dearlove frightened him more than anything else had in all the years of violence, piracy, and dirty kitchens. Just looking at her stirred emotions and sensations that would shatter his carefully wrought control if he dared to allow them. Touching her felt like skimming his hands across a live electrical wire. Even were she not the most alluring thing he’d ever encountered, he’d fall for the charm of her stern disapprobation and the incredibly sexy way she talked about rules. He could not seem to chide himself out of wanting her, despite knowing it was hopeless. He longed to incinerate himself against her naked skin—to let the whole universe storm with the force of her breath on his tongue—and to sit cuddled up with her on a rainy night, reading aloud from Pushkin.
But that would be terrifying, agonizing, and inappropriate under the circumstances. So he just kissed her with such cool mastery, she swooned back onto the bed.
It went exactly how he intended. He could have written the process down on paper and ticked it off as he went along. After all, kissing a woman was no different from putting a gun together. If one fit the pieces properly, in the right order, it resulted in an effective bang. Daniel had done enough research to know this—textbooks, novels, and a few ladies who had volunteered as willing subjects for experimentation. In addition, living with a pirate for three years had provided a wealth of data. Before marrying, Captain O’Riley had been a notorious rake whose mere smile was worth several volumes on the art of seduction. Daniel applied the most interesting details of his research directly to Miss Dearlove’s lips.
And then he struck a problem.
He had her right where he wanted her: soft and warm beneath him, in an appropriate disarray of lace and silk.
And she had him in chaos.
She tasted like hunger in his mouth. She felt like loneliness against his body as they lay on the pirates’ bed, practicing how to be piratic. His precise list of tactics began to burn away as if written on Snodgrass’s self-destructive parchment. His heart pounded so hard, he was the one seeing stars. And it is best not to mention what was happening inside his underwear.
Stop, he told himself.
Hm, his hand replied, sliding up under her skirts.
Alice gasped, and Daniel found himself shaken abruptly out of derangement by the sound. Lifting his head, he looked down at her carefully. Bloody hell, but she was beautiful. And almost unbearably valuable to him. He should never have started this.
With an effort, he forced his hand to stillness against her knee.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
Her eyes, hazy and dark, tried without much success to focus. “No, I am sorry. It tickled, that is all. I assume—I suppose—touching the leg is a marital maneuver?”
He shifted back a little, wary. “You do understand about, er, marital maneuvers, don’t you?”
“Of course. I read a postdoctoral thesis on the subject.”
The vision of her sitting in a hushed and solemn library, reading about sex while all around her students and librarians sat oblivious, so aroused him he fell to kissing her again without another thought. She drew him in, tiny wordless sounds emerging from her throat to tremble against their tongues, fingers tapping without rhythm against his back. Daniel forgot every rule of proper conduct as he lost himself in the desire that had been lying like dust in his heart, begging for a good sweeping up this past year. His hand continued sliding closer to the hot, dark euphemism that lay so secretly between her thighs. Every finger ached to be the first to enter her.
His self-control began to plummet once again.
With a great force of nobility, he pulled his hand back—but immediately it propelled itself to her bodice instead. Ripping was too messy to be indulged, but his fingers fumbled with the pearl buttons, shoving them through buttonholes, reaching through to tug at the embroidered trim of her chemise—
Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
They flung away from each other in shock. Tumbling off the bed, Daniel was on his feet again in a matter of seconds, gun in hand, blood flaring through his veins as he ricocheted from sexual arousal to homicidal arousal. But the only hazard he saw was Miss Dearlove sitting rumpled on the bed, clutching her open bodice. His breath trembled as he stared at her. She was so flushed, he wanted to cool her down by licking her all over. She had lost her hairpins, and long, fine brown hair cascaded over her shoulders in a sultry mess that gleamed red where the lamplight stroked it, making her look like a portrait of some alluring heathen goddess. (Albeit not painted. Nor on a canvas. Nor even framed. Daniel’s grasp on metaphors tended to have all the strength of a slippery thing trying to hold another slippery thing.) He struggled to recollect that she was a colleague, a highly trained agent of the secret government.
And then she straightened, her mouth tightening and her eyes becoming narrow—and memory snapped back into place. With it came an image of what she’d done to the men in the alleyway outside A.U.N.T. headquarters—and although Daniel briefly wondered if he could convince her to do the same to him, he sensed she no longer was in an amorous mood.
The scowl provided something of a clue.
“Kindly stop pointing that weapon at me,” she said.
For one wild, blushing moment, Daniel looked down at his trousers—but then realized she meant his pistol, and sheepishly holstered it. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “But what on earth was that appalling noise?”
“I have the incantation’s collision prevention phrase sewn into my chemise,” she explained. “It is a special precaution for female agents, especially those working in the households of rich men. I forgot it was there.”
“I see.” He ran a hand through his hair, unsure whether to be more appalled about the necessity of such a precaution or the fact that his own behavior had tripped it. Snatching his spectacles from the bedside table, he shoved them on and turned to stare at the wall.
Twenty white bouquets decorated the pale blue wallpaper in each vertical row.
Nineteen and a half in the third row from the door, someone having misaligned the paper.
Daniel’s jaw twitched. He wanted to rip the wallpaper away to be rid of that one small error. He wanted to burn it, and beat the ashes, and absolutely stop envisioning himself teaching Alice Dearlove his own thesis on sex. Tightening his hands into fists, then stretching out the fingers, he breathed.
One, two, three.
Four, exhaling.
Behind him, Alice exhaled at the same moment. Daniel was unsurprised. As she inhaled again, he could practically hear the numbers being recited in her mind. No doubt they would sound just as they did in his, echoing the stentorious voice of Academy headmistress Mrs. Aberfinch—which was not exactly something he liked hearing so soon after kissing a woman. He wished he could take Alice in his arms once more and hold her, just hold her, drawing warmth from her body to dispel the endless chill of that voice. But he did not dare.
“Fiddlesticks,” she muttered.
Daniel looked sidelong at her again. She was frowning as she searched for her hairpins across the crumpled bedspread.
“Sorry,” he said on general principle.
“Why?”
He opened his mouth to explain before realizing doing so would probably lead to further kissing in order to prove his point. “Never mind.”
“Have we reached the conclusion of our practice?”
“Yes. No.” He shook his head. “Yes, but no, I—”
“Yes?” she prompted when he fell abruptly silent.
No, he thought, I want to keep going. I want to kiss more than your mouth. I want to fit myself against your lovely, flawless being until all the fractures and jagged places in the world are eased. And I want to hold you, breathe you, as we move together into a moment of transcendent perfection.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s been a long day. I do believe I will retire.” And giving her a pleasantly bland smile, he turned away, thereby missing the wishful expression in her eyes as he went to hide in the washroom and recover his good senses piece by piece.