Page 29 of Hazard a Guest
“Please,” said Freddy for the thousandth time. “Please call me Freddy.”
And for the first time, Joe did.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he amended, “Freddy.”
He was,sadly, unable to speak to Ember Donnelly before dinner, despite casual promises previously made.
They were all seated apart, for some sadistic reason. Freddy was with the Lazaruses, apparently charming them to pieces for the duration of endless courses. Ember was at the foot of the table, flanked on either side by white-haired gentlemen who apparently did not have a healthy respect for her personal space. And Joe himself? Stuck near the front with two widows who were both treating him like the dessert course.
“Oh, buthowis it we don’t know you?” they pressed, giggling like they were thirty years younger than they actually were. “Bow Street, you say? My, but am I going to have to find a reason to need a barrister?”
It was interminable.
At least the food was very good, although one of the widows had gasped at one of the dishes, a little pocket of beef stew stuffed into crispy dough, and exclaimed, “Pasties?! Really?!” as though it were a scandal.
Pasties, Joe thought. It sounded a little bit like piskies.
By his estimation, there were at least half a dozen in this very room, perched over the diners in gleeful, possibly malevolent, observation.
He wondered what the piskies would make of Freddy’s dice, currently buttoned into his waistcoat. They seemed, strangely, perhaps, of the same ilk to Joe.
It was almost difficult to believe his own relief when the whole affair had ended. It was even more difficult not to make a beeline for Ember Donnelly like an overly attached puppy.
He did catch her eye, though. He caught it long enough to see a flicker of surprise and a quick accounting of his tails and “tamed” hair.
She smiled, seemingly to herself rather than at him, and for some stupid reason it had turned his insides to molten liquid, even after she looked away again.
She’d been making him nervous and embarrassed and redon purpose! She’d confessed to it. She’d said she enjoyed doing it.
He wondered how long that had been true for. Surely not the entire time he’d known her.
They’d met first via post, when she’d sent multiple threats to the Cain law office directed at Freddy himself, by way of his towering debts at the Forge. In those letters, she’d deliberately signed her nameE. Donnelly. Genderless.
When Cresson had physically gone to the Forge, she’d sent that giant barman out to pretend to be her for matters of courier exchange, and he had believed it.
It wasn’t until the day she’d physically come to the office to confront Silas in person that she’d revealed herself, humiliating Joe in the process. She’d blown in that afternoon like a curly-haired force of nature and had smiled at him like they were sharing a fine joke.
That was the day his heart had cleaved in two.
No woman had ever shattered him like that. It wasn’t just that she had outsmarted him, though that certainly had played a part. And it wasn’t only that she was beautiful, though she was. So beautiful, it made him ache.
He couldn’t quite name it. He couldn’t explain it with rational thought.
Something about her just shattered him and made him love all the cracks from the shattering besides.
He had thought, during that year in Portugal, that he was somehow evolving past the Joseph Cresson who had burned from the inside out every time she drew near, every time her name was said, every time he thought of her. He had becomesomeone else there, someone deferred to in a crisis, someone helpful and certain and important.
And of course, therehadbeen girls who liked him very well. Portuguese girls whose hips were just lovely, thank you very much.
They hadn’t been Ember Donnelly, though. They hadn’t left scars in his soul and poured gold in the rivulets to make them precious.
He hadn’t even had time to properly sleep upon returning to London before every idle curiosity he’d had about whether he’d gotten past his fascination with her had been overturned, toppled, stomped on, and then—miraculously—enabled.
He didn’t know if he’d ever actually have her, and worse, he didn’t know if that fact was unacceptable. It was very possible he’d spend the rest of his life remembering that moment in the conservatory today as the moment God had granted him a realization of his dreams.
And perhaps also the moment it had turned from fascination to love.
Was that mad? Yes, probably. It was likely both mad and delusional, but no one could tell his soul that. No one could correct his secret memory.
