Page 3 of Hazard a Guest
This was an attempted gambling establishment, though it has been boarded for some years. Please allow us to assist you with its sale or conversion to something more suited to a young widow’s business ventures. Playing tables, bars, crystal, and more may be sold to assist your new needs.
She stopped reading, a hot little stone growing in her heart.
“You bastard,” she said again to her dead husband. “You clever bastard.”
She stood there frozen in body while her mind hurtled a thousand miles and back, her fingers going numb from the force of it. She stood there for half the night. She stood there instead of sleeping.
When she descended the stairs the next morning, a small valise in her hand, the butler tried to stop her with a concerned and alarmed, “Mrs. Withers!”
And she’d smiled at the man, feeling freer than she thought she’d ever feel again. “That’s not my name anymore,” she told him. “My name is Donnelly.”
CHAPTER 1
TEN YEARS LATER
“He’s outside again, Miss Donnelly,” came the nervous announcement of her barkeep, a hulking battleship of a man with a voice as soft as the head on a duckling. “Should I …?”
Ember laughed. She ought to have done something else, but it was hard not to simply laugh. She looked up from her ledger, a stack of bills held aloft in her freckled hand, and said with a teasing fondness, “Should you what, Jones? Eject him halfway to Camden?”
“I could,” said Jones. “But he’d just come back again.”
“Amadán,” she muttered under her breath, dropping the stack of money and shaking her head.
The barman looked scandalized, but he always did when she spoke Irish.
It made her laugh again. “It’s nothing naughty, Jones. Just meansfool.”
“Ah,” said Jones. “Well, that he is.”
“Let him in,” she said, winning a full-scale gasp from her barman. “Just keep him quiet, near the bar. I’ll be down in a tick. Maybe if I acknowledge him, he’ll finally bugger off, hm?”
“Maybe,” said Jones with open skepticism, turning on his heel to obey.
She stood and stretched her legs, the heavy wool of her skirt easing down on her lower back with a helpful bit of pressure. Outside, partially frozen rain was starting to skitter against the windows, the poorly wrapped gifts of early winter.
She’d been expecting this, she reminded herself. She’d expected it as soon as she’d seen that headline in the papers: CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE EXPOSED, WITHERS PATRIARCH JAILED!
Patriarch, she thought with a scoff. As though that little weasel could ever be half the man his father had been.
That paper had arrived a month past, dropping on her doorstep on All Hallow’s like a gift from her late husband, disgusted with his own progeny. She hadheardhim when she read it, grumbling in her ear from the ether.
What a damned disgrace,he’d said. And she’d nodded in agreement to the empty room.
Of course it was the younger son who’d come to Brigid’s Forge, ranting about fraud and theft and scheming women rather than just knocking at the door like one would think a grown man might default to.
The older one was enjoying the hospitality of Bow Street.
She descended the stairs into the main floor of her gambling hell, the esteemed and well-loved heart of Brigid’s Forge. No longer were these halls of hanging dust clouds and dull wooden tables; instead, they glowed with the care and success of nearly a decade of a house that, indeed, always won.
She’d just had the carpets redone, in fact, a lush burgundy with gold tufts. It glowed, she thought with pride, like the molten center of a forge ought to.
There, in their one and only broken barstool (a detail she would have to tip Jones for later) sat the younger Mr. Withers, looking for all the world like the impotent slushy rain had become a man.
His head cracked up at her approach, narrowing in outrage at the fineness of her gown, the fox-fur trim, the glittering comb sparkling in her coiled cherry-brown hair. “You!” he cried, perhaps attempting to fly to his feet but thinking better of it as the stool teetered precariously under him.
“Me,” she agreed, then, because she was petty, she added, “come now, is that how you speak to your own dear stepmother?”
“Now you listen here!” he started, with a bit less bluster than before. “You conned us out of this place. You left us out to dry with failing businesses while you cleverly stole the golden pot!”
