“—and get a **DEGREE IN ORNLITHOLOGY!**”
Beth and Devon looked at each other. “Huh,” they said in unison.
“What will you do with the bird now?” Laz Brady asked eagerly.
“Transport it to the departmental aviary,” Beth said. Pausing with her hands on her hips, she contemplated the umbrella, beneath which the whopper swan was chittering pathetically. “It might be difficult, however, without a cage or even a blackout bag.”
“You mean one of these?” Laz asked, whipping out from beneath his jacket a sack of black canvas.
“Gosh,” Beth said. “You just happened to have that on you?”
“Of course! When a man DREAMS of—”
“Never mind,” Devon interrupted, snatching the sack. He cast an impatient frown at the young man. “Just stand there. Quietly.”
Laz nodded, bouncing on his heels and positively radiating mute excitement.
Together, Beth and Devon worked with swift efficiency to bag the swan, subduing its magic within quiet, heavy darkness. They had just completed this task when a small crowd began to approach them, pale and tremulous.
“You saved us!” exclaimed a woman, blinking eyes that were streaked with red from ruptured blood vessels. “I thought that noise would shatter me!”
“You’re heroes!” enthused an elderly man, and everyone nodded in agreement.
“Can I have your autograph?” asked a girl, holding out a handkerchief and pen.
“Um,” Beth said trepidatiously. This was the part of bird catching that Hippolyta managed, and quite frankly she’d rather face another dozen whopper swans than talk to these people.
“We were just doing our job,” Devon said with the precise degree of humility required to make it clear they profoundly excelled in that job.
“Hey, you’re the otholigists from the newspaper!” the woman said, pointing at them. “The ones having a romance.”
“Ooooh,” chorused the crowd.
“Are you betrothed?” asked the elderly man.
“Are you going to catch the caladrius together?” asked another. “It’s in Cardiff, you know!”
“Kiss for us!” urged the girl, flapping her handkerchief.
Immediately Laz took up the cry. “Kiss! Kiss!”
“Kiss! Kiss!” The crowd began to applaud, whistle, and stamp their feet.
“Goodness me,” Beth murmured. Inside her brain, etiquette squared up to a sudden rush of aroused nerves. She felt assured of its victory…then Devon grinned at her, and etiquette collapsed beneath a rappelling squad of desires, all bedecked in hot-pink armor.
“Ma’am?” he asked, sounding so American, the desires whipped out star-spangled flags and began fanning her into a high heat.
“Fine,” she said, brittle and haughty despite how shaky she actually was. She shook back her hair and tilted her face, lips stiff with anxiety as they awaited his kiss.
But instead, Devon took her hand gently in his, tugging on the glove finger by finger until he could slide it off.
The crowd went wild.
Beth’s nervous system did the same. A kiss would have been somehow safe in its familiarity, but this introduced a whole new kind of eroticism. Devon slipped the glove into his trouser pocket, and suddenly Beth apprehended she was in danger—beautiful, luscious, very real danger that she did not particularly want to escape. His thumb stroked her naked fingers, and just like that she was conquered by desire, colonized, and had an embassy of lust erected beneath her heart. She gazed into Devon’s eyes, bespelled by the coppery glints amid the darkness. He did not look away from her, even as he bent his head slowly, wickedly, holding her and the crowd in a moment of awed anticipation…
Then he kissed her hand.
“Aaaahhh,” gasped the crowd in unison with Beth’s heart.
It was the lightest of kisses, but it reached deep inside her to stroke some exquisitely sensitive nerve and illuminate her inner darkness like the magical flash of some bird whose name she could not even begin to remember in that moment. She could barely remember her own.
All around them, the crowd cheered, but might as well have been birds chirping in the trees. Devon closed his eyes, and Beth felt his breath sighing over her knuckles as he kissed her again, slower, heavier, as if he was sinking into a dream.
“Uh…” the crowd murmured awkwardly.
Beth’s stomach fluttered, and her brain released a thought it did not know it was thinking.
I want him so much.
She would have pulled away then, citing proper etiquette as a defense against getting hurt, but Devon seemed to sense it and straightened, his mouth sliding into a complacent smile that Beth suddenly realized was his own form of defense. As their eyes met, the wary, fragile truth leaped between them.
Devon laid her hand to his heart, holding it there with his own. A silent thunder beat against her palm, and Beth swallowed heavily. He’d caught her. He’d pulled her from the aching, empty summer and offered a sanctuary for her in his midnight. Etiquette, wounded and bleeding out, urged her to move back from him. But she could no more do that than she could believe in a conclusion based on uncontrolled experiments.
People forgotten, swan forgotten, they gazed at each other across a private, quiet sky.
The crowd began clearing their throats and shuffling impatiently.
This was not fun anymore, Beth thought. This was falling in love.
