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KC started imagining all the plausible lies she could tell him that would explain the presence of his daughter’s childhood pal in a London banquet hall full of bad actors and spies while also preserving her cover, but before she could come up with anything, she felt the presence of someone directly behind her.

Yardley looped her arm around her waist as KC started to hiss in warning, “He’s—”

Then her back was pinned to one of the plinths, roses draped in her hair, and Yardley’s mouth was over hers.

One hand cupped her face. The other splayed over her throat, holding her in place.

KC’s mind went black. Hot-black. Was that a thing?

Hot, silky darkness that sluiced into her vessels, turned her breath to vapor and her pulse to a slow throb from the spot where Yardley’s fingertips rested against the hollow of her throat to the wool of Yardley’s trousers pressed against her bare inner thighs.

Her palms rested on the cool bronze of the plinth, and she curled her fingers into the grooves in the metal while Yardley’s mouth worked over hers.

It was for show. She knew this kiss was to keep Miller from knowing Daphne’s identity before he was secured. She knew this kiss was technically necessary to the mission.

But god. KC slid her leg around Yardley’s and moaned into her mouth as she bit her bottom lip.

This was worlds different from the near kiss at Langley, full of hurt and their mistakes, or the frantic search for connection in the safe house, or the desperate eroticism of the linen closet, or even the endless kisses they used to share between everything they never said.

This was the kind of kiss that a person could recall into great old age and laugh with joy that it had happened. A kiss that kept nothing in reserve and spent everything on heat and sensuality.

Yardley’s lavender fragrance bloomed in the air around them, mixing with the apricot-tea smell of the roses. KC felt naked already, her skin overwarm and soft, moments from glazing over with sweat to slicken every involuntary jerk of her hips toward Yardley’s.

“Fuck,” Yardley breathed into KC’s mouth, and she never swore, so KC felt that helpless fuck in the arches of her feet.

But it broke the spell. KC chased Yardley’s bottom lip as it pulled away, and the centimeter of distance that opened between their bodies was the vacuum reality sucked into, yanking KC uncomfortably into the present moment. “Is he gone?”

“Extremely. Jack diverted him.” Yardley pulled back and smiled ruefully. “I guess we owe him one.”

“Before we owe him more, let’s get out of here.” Most of the crowd had started collecting around the twenty-foot carved wooden doors that opened into the dining room as the dinner hour approached. “You trail me this time.”

KC moved completely behind the row of plinths and followed an electric cord taped to the floor where it seemed to disappear behind a wall.

“It’s an old servants’ passageway,” Yardley said. “Often they’re filled with junk, but this one is clear. There will be a door at the end.”

They ran down the passage to a service door. A sign warned it was armed with an alarm.

“Let’s hope Julia took care of this, too.” KC pushed open the door—mercifully silent—and when it closed behind them, the relative quiet and dark soothed her frazzled nerves.

Yardley reached up to tap her comm link, activating her connection to Julia as they made their way across a smaller, empty hall.

“CCTV?” This room was more Regency and less lush than the one they’d just left.

Lights from the river came through a skylight and lit up the duck’s egg blue walls and polished wood floors.

“Disabled.” Julia’s voice was crisp in KC’s ear. “No heat signatures at all in the Tudor Rose Museum on the second floor after the mezzanine. I’d wait there.”

They left the hall as Yardley disconnected, then arrived at a public entry where the main staircase to the museum was. Hearing the footsteps of a security guard in the distance, they pulled off their shoes and raced silently up the marble steps.

The glass entry doors were locked.

KC squatted down to inspect the mechanism set into the steel frame of the doors. “It’s just a regular bolt.”

“Can you pick it? I can hear security on the mezzanine.” Yardley’s head was close to hers, and it spun KC’s brain, still soaked with horny chemicals from their kiss.

“Do you have hair pins holding your hair down under your wig?”

Yardley rubbed along the lace edge of the wig, easing it off the crown of her braids. “How many do you need?”

“Two.”

She handed them over. KC bent them straight and bit off the plastic tips, listening for the guard. She eased the two hairpin wires into the lock and explored the tumbler in her mind until she found a likely spot, pressed the tumblers open, and heard the lock click.

“Now if ASMR was like watching that, I’d fill my feed with it.” Yardley’s dimples were deep as they slipped into the foyer of the museum and immediately made their way to one of the hallways leading to an exhibit so the guard wouldn’t see them through the glass doors.

“What is the Tudor Rose Museum, anyway?” KC crept down the passage with Yardley, the floor cold on her feet. It was lined with oversized panels printed with interpretations of small exhibits in glass cases. KC peeked into one that held what looked like a leather slipper.

“A child’s shoe from the seventeenth century, found in the mud on the banks of the Thames and restored,” Yardley read over her shoulder. “Riveting.”

KC laughed.

“No, look! It is riveting! You can still see the wear marks from the child’s foot.

” She spoke into KC’s ear, her voice honeyed with simple pleasure.

“Isn’t it amazing to think that a real little kid wore this shoe all over London four hundred years ago, and you can still see how their big toe rubbed through? ”

KC turned around.

She loved this woman so much, she felt her bones turn to sun-bright light, all at once.

She had never felt this way, she was certain.

She had loved Yardley, she had lost her, but she hadn’t felt like this.

Like everything was connected to everything else.

Like she wanted to imagine that this little kid walking through London lost a shoe that sank into the Thames to be gently excavated by a reverent archaeologist and then restored by someone wearing a magnifying glass on a headlamp so that a docent could rest it on this pillow and they could find it in the dark, the whole world looking for them but safe for the moment, and KC could tumble down the exhilarating cliff of love.

“Oh,” Yardley said. “Please keep looking at me like that.”

KC took both of Yardley’s hands between hers.

She was trembling. “You’re not too much,” she said.

“Don’t ever believe it, even if your mama keeps telling those stories that make it sound like she was a saint for putting up with you.

” She reached up to wipe away the wetness from her cheeks.

“You’ve always been exactly right, Yardley Whitmer, and I love you. I love you.”

Yardley’s eyes were wide and soft. “Does this mean you’ll help me with my dioramas in the basement?”

“It does not. But it means I will admire every single diorama you make, take pictures of them, ask you a million questions, and send the pictures to any group chat we’re a part of.”

Yardley smiled. “In your fantasy, we’re in a group chat together?”

“In my fantasies, we’re in everything together. We’re not alone anymore, remember?” KC looked around the empty hall. “Can we find a… chaise? A bench? Or a very sturdy wall?”

The question made Yardley’s shoulders pull back into perfect posture.

She tipped her chin up. “King Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth were both born almost right on this spot. If I have learned anything at all about English people, I can promise you there is a reproduction Tudor four-poster bed somewhere on the premises.”

They followed the shadowy halls, laughing as quietly as they could. KC had gotten briefly distracted by a gleaming executioner’s ax painted with fake blood (she hoped it was fake) when she heard Yardley call out in a stage whisper, “Huzzah!”

Snorting with laughter, KC followed the direction of her whisper-shout and found Yardley standing behind velvet ropes in a life-size, well, diorama .

“Whoa.” KC took in the pale blue velvet drapes hanging from an ornately embroidered frame attached to the ceiling, sheltering a carved wooden bed covered in a stack of embroidered quilts. “That’s very…”

“Imperial? Indeed. Antique? No. It’s a reproduction.

Including the rather imaginative tapestries on the walls with their very juicy and naked subjects.

” Yardley sat on the end of the bed, then bounced up and down.

“I don’t think there was such a thing as Serta in the early modern era, but I’m glad it’s not horsehair. ”

KC stepped over the ropes. “Or a wooden box shaped like a mattress.”

Yardley reached out for KC’s hands. “Are you going to cash all those checks you wrote in the banquet hall?”

“You.” KC held her finger up to Yardley. “Shush.”

It was important not to let her get sassy. In twelve hundred and one days, KC had learned some things.

She put her knee up on the bed beside Yardley’s thigh. The wig was gone, sacrificed to the need for hairpins, and Yardley’s dark braids had gotten mussed when she’d dragged it off. KC spied the end loop of a pin slid halfway from a braid and pulled it out, slow, not wanting to tug any hair.