The Secret Service of Tea and Treason (Dangerous Damsels #3)

by India Holton

The look she gave him was such that Daniel immediately wanted to find a chalkboard and write I will not ask stupid questions one hundred times upon it.

seriously disturbed her inner tranquility. Also her outer tranquility. And several tranquil layers in between.

“That doesn’t seem like a very safe way to swim,” Alice remarked.

Autism???

“Seen here in conversation with her old chum, Lady Armitage, whose recent fall from grace made quite the splash.” Alice frowned again. “Lady Armitage toppled out of her house into the harbor and drowned.” “Yes, dear, that’s what I said. With Armitage out of the picture—” “She is right there,” Alice pointed out. “In the picture.”

She felt all-peopled-out after the morning and wanted to go home, close the curtains, and hug a book until her nerves settled.

“Not even reading?” he asked, easily matching her stride. “Reading is not a hobby,” she said. “It is a way of life.”

“I do beg your pardon,” she said. “I am averse to being lightly touched.”

not only had Daniel recognized her sensory crisis, he’d known the exact Tennyson poem guaranteed to settle her—the

“He in turn calls me his jockstrap.”

I love her

“You argued with me. It was inappropriate. Married couples never argue.” “Are you sure about that?” “Of course I am sure,” Alice retorted. “The wife is always right.” She marched ahead of him down the corridor, and suddenly Daniel began to feel very married indeed.

She’d not spoken anything more than echoes of other people’s words since being taken from the orphanage, and still screamed and flailed when anyone touched her without warning—so

The roasted mushrooms looked delicious but were rendered inedible by their proximity to the honey-glazed carrots.

How do you find England these days?” “Oh, I have an excellent map.”

Lmao

but Alice had heard the phrase used before and suspected it was a lesser subclause of Normal Conversation that had been taught at the Academy one day when she’d been off sick.)

she caught hold of a large porcelain lamp and threw it as far as she could across the room. In other words, three feet.

Their eyes met accidentally, and intensity tightened the space between them, as if each was the other’s moon, subject to a private gravity.

much ado about nothing.”

Love that play

“By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart,”

She felt disguise after disguise slide away until she was no more than a shy, unamiable woman who, even long out of childhood, still hugged books and dreamed of having a family.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire,” he said emphatically. “Doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I—”

DOUBT YOU WHAT

Oh God, another conversation. Was there no end to the misery of this mission?

And the walls have ears.” He paused, seeing Alice look around the room in startlement. “Idiom, Mrs. Blakeney.

He gave her a look so expressionless, so impeccably bland, Alice very nearly swooned.

She threw Daniel such a knowing look it could have been awarded a master’s degree from Oxford University.

“The weapon does not exist!” she declared. Another gasp. “Queen Victoria is safe after all!” Silence; a few shrugs.

“You know when you open a new book and realize it’s going to be perfect?” he whispered. “Yes,” Alice said. “That’s how I feel when I look at you.”

“I’m so ruinously in love with you, Alice.”

The stickiness on her fingers would incite her to murder if she could not wash it off soon.

“She would never do that.” “Loves you too much?” Ned said. “It would break Regulation 11,”

Daniel waited until Alice had opened the flight window, then he smiled. “Sorry I’m late.”

Even five minutes was going to be too long away from this woman.

“To be fair,” Cecilia said, “Miss Dearlove should dress for herself, not for her husband.” “Precisely!” Pleasance agreed. “It will be for herself when he kisses her because the dress is so pretty.”

Put yourself first but in a sexy way

While I agree that women suffer and we should rage about it—” “Suffrage,” Cecilia corrected her gently.

he was being forced to smile and nod to a man who seemed to think that amiable conversation was perfectly reasonable behavior. “Such nice weather,” Ned remarked, and Daniel wondered if stabbing him just a little would shut him up.

The deadly expression softened into concern. Damn it, Daniel thought. Don’t look concerned. I have no desire to stand on your doorstep weeping.

Nobody stole her books (and her Mr. Bixby) and got away with it.

It would be illogical for me to stay away from the woman I value above all things in the world. You are my prime number, Alice. My eyes are for you only.”

“And I don’t get paid enough to kill awesome people. Oh dear, look at you running too fast for me to catch you. And now you’ve disappeared into a maze of alleyways where you’ll never be found. What a terrible shame.”

They had ghosts too: the children they once were, still haunting them faintly in the background of their selves.

But she did care, and he knew the right poems to whisper when she needed them, and every day the ghosts grew a little fainter.

They lived frightened—enchanted—in love. But oh, how they lived.

“It scares me sometimes,” she said, gazing out at the darkness, “when I think how long I spent alone, trapped in a life other people made for me to suit themselves. The fear I might go back there still grips me every now and again, you know?”

Alice wished she could reach back to little Alice, hunched alone and hurting on a dormitory bed in the Academy, and assure the girl that time would see her happy and loved just the way she was.

Three wicked women who had run away from who they were supposed to be and found themselves, found each other; three wild women holding hands, sharing laughter, as they danced together in the midnight sky, beneath a yellow moon.

Alice walking into the room. She’s here, his heart sang, hugging itself. She lives here, replied his brain with exasperation for such mawkishness—then sent a smile out along every nerve.

“All right?” she asked. “Perfect,” he said, looking at their reflection in the dark window, falling in love with the whole of them. And then falling in love again. And again. Counting his breath now not by numbers but by each beautiful moment he got to exist with his family.