The Librarian Spy(48)
But he wasn’t studying her as she was him. His head was tilted, tense as he strained to listen.
Footsteps echoed in the distance. Whoever chased them knew Alfama as well as James.
“It’s the PVDE,” he whispered.
His attention shifted and suddenly he was noticing her, his eyes sweeping over her face like a caress. He lifted his hand and let his fingertips whisper over the edge of her chin.
Ava’s pulse quickened and left her head spinning.
The footsteps grew louder.
“Kiss me,” James said.
She gazed up at him in surprise. She hadn’t kissed a man before. Her studies had occupied her life, and then the library and the war effort. Men’s advances had always come on too strongly, their eagerness so plain, it left a wariness in her veins and a refusal on her tongue.
This was not how she wanted her first kiss, in an alley, evading someone chasing them down, like some ridiculous spy film.
“You’ve been to too many cinemas,” she replied.
The clip of stiff-soled shoes came from the top of the street now.
James turned his gaze to the right, where the sound came from. “Haven’t you at least read enough books to be tempted?”
She had. And he was no Darcy.
No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than he leaned closer, his eyes holding hers.
“‘And the sunlight clasps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea. What is all this sweet work worth if thou kiss not me?’” His fingertips brushed her face. “You aren’t the only reader,” he murmured.
As the footsteps neared and Ava tilted her head, her heart pounded like a drum as her eyes fell shut. She wasn’t yielding her first kiss to a coworker trying to escape a bit of trouble in a foreign country. No, she was being wooed beneath a starlit sky, in the most romantic city in the world with a man who recited poetry.
He had won and she was happy to reward the victor.
His mouth lightly touched hers, just enough to hint at its warmth, the smoothness of his lips. The footsteps stopped near them, and the man grumbled about foolish youth or something along those lines before departing.
James pressed his mouth to hers once more even as the echoing click of hard soles departed from them. The taste of tart cherry liquor and excitement lingered on her tongue.
Only when silence blanketed them once more did James lean back with a lopsided grin. “I dare say you have saved us.”
“Byron?” she asked in a bid to guess the author of the poem he’d delivered so beautifully.
“Percy Bysshe Shelley,” he gently corrected her. “From ‘Love’s Philosophy.’ However, if you’re partial to Byron, I have somewhere I must take you one of these days.”
She ought to decline but found herself intrigued. “I think I’d like that.”
His grin grew a little wider. “As would I.” He offered her his arm. This time, she slid her hand into the warm crook of his elbow, allowing him to lead her from Alfama and hopefully away from the watchful glare of the PVDE.
Though why the police suddenly followed them that night made no sense, not when they left her alone since that first week after her arrival. But she couldn’t cast off her suspicion that it had something to do with Lukas.
TWELVE
Elaine
The task of learning to operate the printing press proved to be far more complicated than merely rolling the great flywheel of the Minerva and pumping the foot treadle.
The ink needed to be dribbled just so over the flat, circular disk that fed the rollers. Then the placement of the paper on the platen had to be perfectly aligned where it would be stamped with the plate. Once completed, the paper would then be shifted to the delivery board and replaced with a fresh page. It was all a careful dance to coordinate at once.
Elaine’s movements were clumsy and slow at first, the shift awkward with paper slightly askew, the print either splotchy and dark or barely visible. But she was stubborn in her efforts, and over the course of the next several months, her body found a rhythm to the smaller of the two presses. Her feet and hands did their own sort of waltz, moving with alacrity and freeing her mind from being so diligently focused on the task.
Once she’d mastered the art of creating newsprint on the manual press, Marcel trained her on the operation of the automatic machine to tend to in his absence. The larger of the two machines, however, possessed a cold distance that never appealed to Elaine—not like the intimacy and skill of the Minerva.
It wasn’t uncommon for the light of day to dim into night, long past the curfew, rendering her unable to make her way to Manon’s. While arduous and taxed with work that followed her into her dreams, Elaine never begrudged the effort. She relished it, craving the need to put to paper the power of effective words and being part of something larger than herself.
Even sleeping in the small makeshift bedroom from a converted office on those long nights didn’t bother her. What she found disconcerting, however, was the quiet once the machines went still and one’s imagination was left to spin terrifying explanations for every pop and creak.
One night, as the cold seeped up through the concrete floors and the banging and whirring of the mountainous machine faded to a hum, indicating the final pages had been printed, silence sifted over the warehouse like freshly fallen snow. Elaine breathed a sigh of relief.
The agony of a pulsing headache lingered since that morning and still had not abated. While the sounds usually blended into the background, that day each slam of the printing plate seemed to strike against her tender skull.