Free Accompanying Alice by Terese Ramin Page A

stopped working. She wanted him to kiss her.
    Shocked, she dropped her eyes quickly, stabbing the needle through the lace rose between her fingers. His gaze on her forced her to look up at him again. She’d never felt in quite so much danger before — not from him, but from herself. Her nerves, her emotions were coated in excesses, jangled to the point of explosion. The passion and desire she remembered feeling for Matthew at sixteen and seventeen had never seemed more juvenile, more irrelevant. The way she felt now was different from that. Her longing was deeper, more mature.
    More adult.
    A stray orange strand of sunset crowded into the room.
    The slant of light made intimacy exist where it didn’t seem to belong, made closeness imperative, made them translucent to one another. Bonded them with a knowledge that didn’t come from knowing.
    No move, no sound jarred the atmosphere. With both ears wide, Alice listened to the roar on the other side of silence. Goose bumps shivered up her arms, and she shook a little in the cool intangible breeze of decision. She wanted to kiss him and she wasn’t going to.
    Without caring how, Gabriel knew what she thought, what she wanted. What he wanted. It was printed plainly in the air between them, as readable as words.
    I can’t, he thought and moved anyway, slowly, lazily, toward her.
    Undercover means different rules from the ones you grew up with, he imagined Markum saying over dinner one evening. At the same time that you can’t afford to forget who you are, or what you’re doing, you can also never afford the truth, never forge ties with anyone. Compartmentalize everything. Your personal life can’t bleed into your professional life. Your undercover life can’t touch anything outside of it. Use your experiences, but never leave a frame of reference. In the long run what you’ll learn to be is less than an echo in an empty room. Remember that.
    He stopped and swallowed, aware of the truth, aware of Alice, uncertain of whether he wanted to be aware of either.
    As though pulled by some invisible connection, Alice dropped Grace’s veil and took the last two steps across the room to meet him. And stopped.
    She didn’t want to do this. She couldn’t trust herself.
    She’d been here before; she knew what came next. She’d fall in love, lose her mind and go to hell on good intentions. Think about it, she told herself. When it came right down to it, couldn’t she trace every pickle she’d been in during the past eighteen or so years directly back to the first time she’d kissed Matthew, had sex with him?
    Her breath caught on her own slipshod imitation of The Truth as her mother saw it. Not as she herself saw it. Not as she herself wanted to see it. As her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother envisioned The Truth and passed it on to her. As she’d passed it onto the girls.
    She blinked in the deepening stillness, at the unquiet shadows, listening to the no-no’s of generations echo around the room. Blinked at the disturbing buzz of her thoughts as her awareness of Gabriel increased with the beat of her pulse.
    His tongue moved nervously between his teeth as he looked her up and down, found her eyes.
    Her lungs constricted and her skin tingled, but she was cold.
    Wasn’t she?
    She dropped her gaze, acutely conscious of her body and the war it waged against her. Chastity versus lust versus set a good example versus... Something else, something stronger, something terrifying and hopeful... And real.
    Her breath became a painful weight in her lungs.
    The air hung heavy, seductive between them. With great care, Gabriel fitted a palm to her throat and tilted her chin up with his thumb. He held her with his eyes; his mouth descended deliberately until every breath he exhaled she breathed in. Anticipation fluttered in her stomach, raced through her veins. She wanted to pull away but didn’t.
    Silence drew them together. They were a hair’s breadth from one another when he