Page 34 of The Wallflower Manifesto
If it goes well, perhaps this will give me the clout necessary to be hired for similar gatherings as my investigation continues.
It may well be presumptuous to assume, but I expect I will see you there? I have much and more to tell you the next time I see you. And so, I am willing your attendance to this soiree.
Your servant and friend,
Abraham Murphy
“Your servant and friend,”Millie repeated softly to herself. She did not suppress the sigh that rose in her chest, though she thought it was a measured response.
If she had truly done exactly as she wished, she would have thrown herself into bed with the letter clutched to her chest, kicking her feet like an excitable child.
Her eyes scanned the other envelopes in front of her. Indeed there was a letter from Dot, likely inviting Lady Bentley and Millie herself to the event Abe had mentioned. She opened the letter and scanned its contents hurriedly, just to be certain.
There was a spark of excitement igniting in her chest, crackling and bright as the lightning that had been tearing down from the heavens for the last several days. She would, of course, have to convince Lady Bentley to accept this invitation. She must.
It should have been an easy goal, but of course, there was the complication of the guest of honor.
She could see in her mind’s eye the way Lady Bentley had paled at his very mention that night in St. James. She heard Mrs. Smith’s voice, echoing in her memory like a warning as her eyes fell on Dom Raul’s name in her friend’s handwriting.
He was the one she didn’t marry.
CHAPTER 14
“It’s not that I take issue with the event itself,” Freddy was saying, watching Abe shuffle around the room in search of his cufflinks with narrowed eyes, “or that he invited you. It’s that my brother is having an event and invited you andnot me.”
“That sounds like much the same thing, Bentley,” Abe mumbled, checking for the third time in the top of his chest of drawers.
“It’s not as though I’ve ever snubbedhimin a public way like this,” Freddy continued to whine, his eyes narrowing as he watched his housemate. “Perhaps if you put your things where they go, Murphy, you would not have to scavenge for them when the time arose that they were needed.”
“I beg your pardon? How do you know where my particulars go?”
“I don’t,” Freddy snapped, turning on his heel and snatching open the compartment on Abe’s nightstand, which, somehow, was exactly where the cufflinks had gotten to. “But I know where thingsdo notgo, and your belongings seem to always find theirway to those places. Waistcoats on stair railings, shoes askew in the sitting room, and one baffling time, your bedroom pillow in a dining room chair.”
“My back was bothering me,” Abe replied, unable to stop amusement from creeping into his tone at the absolute state of the Earl of Bentley. “Are you browbeating me over tidiness, my lord?”
“It’s not only the clutter,” Freddy continued, tossing the cufflinks over the bed and into Abe’s outstretched hand. “You tracked mud in for every single day of the storm last week. It wasn’t a simple matter of footprints; it was like you had filled a bucket with the stuff and set about anointing all of our wooden surfaces with it when my back was turned.”
Abe scoffed. “I assure you that I don’t wait until your back is turned to do a damned thing. Can you help me with this?”
Freddy stomped over to the other side of the room, his hair falling petulantly over his eyes. “You are hopeless,” he muttered, handling the cufflinks altogether rougher than was absolutely necessary. “Do you even know how to conduct yourself at a Society gathering?”
“Oh, probably not,” Abe replied cheerfully, shaking out the finished sleeve and then proffering the other one. “I’ll figure it out as I go.”
“I’m just asking you to be considerate,” he said primly, avoiding Abe’s eye as he latched the cufflink. “There are people in this house other than you.”
Abe froze for a moment before a loud burst of laughter escaped from him. “Oh ho!” he laughed, following as Freddy spun and made to storm out of the room. “Physician, heal thyself! Alert thepresses. Announce it from the pulpit. Come all to the miracle: Freddy Hightower teaches compassion!”
“Oh, stuff it, Murphy.”
“I cannot,” Abe answered with another burst of laughter, taking the stairs behind the other man. “I truly cannot. Are you forgetting how we met, Bentley? How I bailed you out of a foreign prison and while I was bringing you home, youdrugged meand disappeared. You took my ring!”
“I returned that,” Freddy grumbled, though it was clear from the color on the back of his neck that the point had been made.
“You did,” Abe agreed, biting back the urge to antagonize him further. “And I’ve forgiven you, but be reasonable, man.”
Freddy paused in the doorway, taking a deep breath and pushing his flop of blonde hair back from his forehead. “You’re right. Enjoy the evening, Murphy. Send Silas my regards.”
“No regards for Dot?” Abe asked before he could stop himself.
