Silence is Golden

28. Coming from Behind

The muscles under my fingers jerked and petrified.

'Mr Linton!'

'What?' My lips teased the corner of his mouth. 'Is something the matter, Sir?'

'What is your hand doing down there?'

Catching one of the buttons of his shirt between two fingers, I started to twirl it around. 'Try to guess.'

'Mr Linton–!'

His voice broke off abruptly when I undid the button and slipped my hand inside.

'Mr Linton!'

'No, no,' I corrected him courteously. 'Miss, remember? I'm a Miss. But you...' My eyes widened as my fingers explored farther down. 'You are "Mister" all right! Oh, yes, quite definitely Mister!'

'You little...!'

Suddenly, I was airborne, my hand ripped from his shirt, my feet off the ground. It took a moment for me to realise that Mr Ambrose had swept me up in his arms and was carrying me towards a giant of a tree, some of its gnarled old roots reaching as high as my knees. With the eye of a man who knew exactly what he wanted, he headed straight for the right root and set me down so my face was level with his. Grasping my face with both hands, he claimed my mouth with hungry ferocity.

'God!' he breathed against my lips. 'I have no idea why I am doing this. It is madness! It is waste and risk and irresponsibility – but I can't stop! I–cannot–stop!'

'Then don't!' I whispered. I didn't want to think about him stopping to kiss me now. I didn't want to think about him ever stopping.

Then something he had said earlier suddenly drifted back into my mind:

When we get back to London, should I do some comparative research?

When we get back to London...

I stiffened in his arms, averting my face when his lips tried to find mine again. Good God! Was I stupid enough for this to occur to me only now? Of course we couldn't keep doing this forever! Of course we would return to London, eventually! And of course we would be back in the office, where I would have to pretend to be a man. This thing...Whatever it was we had between us – would it have to stop when we returned to London? Could it stop? Could I?

Somehow, I doubted that jumping on Mr Ambrose and chewing on his lips would be compatible with my male disguise. If people found out – My aunt, my uncle, Ella...Oh God! Ella! She would die of guilt! She would think I had been seduced by a ruthless rake (never mind that it had actually been the other way around) and would torture herself for all eternity for not noticing earlier and putting a stop to it! And as for my friends, Flora, Eve and Patsy...

I swallowed, hard.

Patsy.

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear.

I remembered all too clearly the day when Patsy had attempted to hold a suffragist rally in Hyde Park, and had been steamrollered by Mr Rikkard Ambrose's icy eyes and masterful rhetoric. If Patsy found out that I had succumbed to Mr Ambrose's dubious charms...

Well, let's just put it this way: I had better quickly discover a way to survive a stab wound through the heart from a sharpened parasol.

And then, of course, even worse than Patsy, there was the one person who would probably be most horrified if the truth about me and Mr Rikkard Ambrose came to light: Mr Rikkard Ambrose. He had made no secret of his disdain for women, no secret of the fact that if I wanted to work for him, I had to do so disguised as a man. If I were revealed as a woman, and, moreover, a woman with whom he was having an illicit affair, the scandal would be so enormous it would fill the newspapers from London to Kuala Lumpur. My heart picked up the pace. The mere thought of his reaction...!