Historical Mystery as Agatha Crowley Teams Up Part Three

Agatha Crowley had sworn after her last scandal that she would behave at the Duchess of Wexley's winter ball, yet within an hour of arriving she had spilled claret across the gown of a countess and hidden herself in the library to escape the gossip. The room smelled of leather and candle smoke, and she was alone until the door opened and Captain Edmund Hale stepped inside, tall and weathered from years at sea, his dark coat dusted with snow.

He recognized her at once and laughed, a low warm sound that made her cheeks burn. He told her that every drawing room in London whispered about the woman who had fallen into the Serpentine chasing a runaway bonnet. Agatha lifted her chin and replied that at least her misadventures were never dull, which only made him step closer, studying her as though she were a coastline he meant to chart.

The fire crackled as they talked of distant ports and stifling ballrooms, and somewhere between his tales of storms and her confessions of disaster, the space between them vanished. When he brushed a stray curl from her temple, Agatha forgot entirely about propriety. His kiss was slow and certain, and she answered it with a hunger that surprised them both, her fingers tangling in his cravat until the knot came loose.

He asked her quietly if she wished him to stop, and she told him plainly that she did not. Laces and buttons yielded one by one beneath patient hands, and the heavy curtains hid two mature lovers who had grown weary of rules written for other people. By firelight they discovered each other without hurry, and for once in her life Agatha did nothing clumsy at all.

Later, wrapped in his coat on the library settee, she heard footsteps in the hall and realized her shoe was missing. Edmund found it perched on a marble bust of Cicero, and they laughed until they ached. Agatha decided that some misadventures were well worth repeating.