Page 42 of Hazard a Guest
She braced herself all the way down the hall, gripping the neck of the wine bottle so tightly, she thought it might shatter against her fingers. It didn’t, of course. Things were never so easy.
She knocked. She waited. She almost ran.
But he answered in the end, looking disheveled and right in the midst of something, surprised at first and then openly, unabashedly delighted.
“Ember!” he said with a flash of those perfect teeth. “Is it time for my lessons?”
“It is,” she said, allowing herself to be ushered into his room, allowing herself to inhale him as she passed. “If it’s a good time.”
“It is,” he assured her, closing the door carefully behind her silently and leaning back against the wood to admire the effect she made standing in the private space where he’d been laying his head. “What’s the wine for?”
“Drinking?” she said, choking a little on the word, her face feeling oddly hot. “Do Quakers drink?”
“No,” he said, holding out his hand for the bottle, “but I do.”
“Oh,” was all she managed to conjure in response.
“Please, sit,” he said, gesturing to a small breakfasting table next to his window. “I think there are some glasses in our washroom.”
“Oh,” she said again, like a damned fool, and shunted herself over to the table, blinking down at the view of the winter gardens that he had from here, situated over the trembling tips of the naked branches. She noted with a strange tendril of comfort that some of the leaves were still clinging on, stubbornly green in their centers.
She fished the dice out of her pocket and put them neatly in the center of the table, feeling oddly compelled to arrange them in some way that might please the eye. Two fours, she noted. Two ones.
“Here we are,” he said, smiling widely at her as he crossed the room with two empty glasses, stout little crystal vessels with patterns chipped into their sides. “Not proper, but serviceable.”
“Like me,” Ember said, and then winced.
“I certainly hope so,” he replied easily, setting down the glasses and taking the chair across from hers.
She stared as he worked the cork loose, the muscles under his exposed forearms moving under his tanned, golden skin.
She’d caught him in his shirtsleeves. There was an open folio on the bed, a few sheets stacked neatly above it, and a magnifying glass neatly positioned at the very top of the ensemble.
“I’ve interrupted you,” she realized, only to have a glass of warm, red liquid pressed into her hand, accompanied by a soothing shush.
“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “Old case work. This estate made me think of something I could apply to Dom Raul’s properties via international ownership liens, being that he is a citizen of two countries.”
He cut himself off, giving a little chuckle and a shrug. “My passions run a bit dry sometimes.”
She pressed the rim of the glass to her lip, stifling her urge to balk at the worddryin the context of this room and him in it. The obvious and bawdy joke rose immediately to her throat, but she wrangled it back into its cage, not willing to sully this moment with cheap deflection.
“I like that you care about something,” she said instead, her own cadence sounding awkward versus the easy flirtatious jest she might have used instead. “I find it enchanting.”
“Oh,” he said, pausing at his own sipping and raising his dark brows. “Oh, well, that’s nice to hear. I’m always so terribly convinced I’ll bore you. Bore everyone, really.”
“Is that what you think?” She pressed her fingers into the etchings in her glass, knowing how absurd it was to feel angry at that, oddly defensive, like he’d insulted her instead of himself. “That you bore us?”
“I think that people have me figured out in fairly short order, yes,” he said with a smile, like it wasn’t horribly insulting to himself. “There’s Cresson, always in a corner with his ledger.”
“Absolutely not,” she corrected firmly, “so terribly competent that when crisis came to her door last year, Dot Fletcher dismissed the idea of calling upon her husband or Abe Murphy or anyone else and said ‘we need Joseph Cresson. He is the only one who can help us.’”
He laughed at that, like she was teasing him again, like she just wanted a rise. “I think Mrs. Cain called upon me because she knows I am discreet.”
“Anyone can manage discretion!” she argued, tapping her fingernails on the dice. “Don’t reduce yourself so!”
He cleared his throat, looking a bit put upon by this spotlight of attention, and lowered his eyes to the dice instead of continuing to watch the uncomfortable topic of his very self. He reached out and carefully picked two of the dice up in his hand, one of the fours and one of the ones, and without much thinking about it, jostled them in his hand and released them onto the table.
There was no finesse to it, but they clattered to a standstill anyhow.
