Page 55 of Hazard a Guest
“Brigid’s,” he said carefully. “Like your Forge.”
She nodded, curling her fingers around her warm mug. “Like my Forge.”
He had brought her a plate almost identical to what she would have chosen for herself: a spray of apples, grapes, and orange slices arranged opposite a crisp pile of bacon, as though he had pulled the architecture of her desires from the air around her sleeping body.
“I’m not …” She paused, tilting her head to the side. “I’m not religious as such, Joe. I joke about my papist upbringing because that is what people see and pass judgement upon, but I do not often go to mass, if ever. I am not like you.”
“Like me?” He looked startled by the comparison. “What do you mean, like me? Do you think me staunchly devout?”
“I suppose I must have,” she confessed, realizing it as she spoke. “What with the commune and all.”
“Not a commune,” he replied with a tiny chuckle, reaching out a hand to steal a slice of fruit from her plate and pop it into his mouth. While he chewed, he thought it through. “I suppose you’d call me lapsed? I honor the doctrine by habit—I do find it more correct than the others I’ve seen—but I drink wine with you, I practice law in London, I don’t seek out Meetings. I was always just a little on the outside. My parents knew that when they sent me to study.”
“Quakers don’t often become barristers, then?”
He shook his head. “No, it isn’t that. It’s … it’s the moving to London after. It didn’t shock them. They acted like they’d prepared for it for a long time. They worried, of course. They warned. But Silas found me very soon after that, and as soon as he hired me, I knew I’d landed in the right place.”
“And the other bits?” Ember pressed, nudging closer, their knees grazing. “When did that start? Your first drink?”
“My first …” He trailed off, his face searching for the moment and then lighting with the realization. “Was because ofyou.”
“It wasn’t,” she protested, her eyes widening. “Just the other night?”
“No.” He shook his head, laughter bubbling up in that warm, golden chest of his. “Years ago. You sent those debt-collection documents to the firm, threatening to use them against the Bentley estate, and I was the one who opened them.”
“Oh, that,” she said, her voice a bit thin.
He laughed outright. “I ran halfway across town, nearly clawing down Cain’s door at his home. His staff was trying to chase me down the hall while my heart was in my throat. I’d been gripping your letter so hard, I smeared the ink.”
“I …” She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly. “I did word that letter a bit harshly.”
He reached out and took her hand, pulling it into his lap, shaking his head as he continued to chuckle. “It was like being intercepted by a field medic. I explained. I proffered the letter. I tried to breathe. Abe Murphy was there, and both he and Cain were acting like I’d been shot on the sidewalk on the way over. I must have been acting like I was. So they gave me whiskey, like it was tonic.”
“Ah,” she said, recognizing the instinct, nodding in familiarity. “And was it?”
“After I got past the taste?” he asked, eyes sparkling. “Yes, it truly was. No wonder such an immediate solution was forbidden, I thought. No wonder it was feared. And then I asked for a little more when Abe walked me back to my flat. He took me to a pub for the first time.”
“Of course he did,” she replied with a roll of her eyes. “Naturally.”
“Naturally,” agreed Joe with a wry little tint in his tone as he lifted his coffee back to his lips, and then, “don’t tell my mother, please.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said, perhaps a little offended that the possibility even occurred to him. “I can’t believe I was corrupting your snow-white soul even then.”
“Improving it,” he corrected, snatching her hand from midair and lifting her knuckles to his lips. “Refining it.”
She gave him a look, sidelong and deadpan, that only made him smile at her.
“Never stop,” he instructed her, and then returned to his breakfast, like such a request was the most natural thing in the world, then, with a little quirk of his lips, he echoed what she’d said earlier. “Not ever.”
CHAPTER 19
They came very close to making use of the bed again.
Breakfast had been exhausted, the trays carefully tucked away on a stool by the door, and Ember thought that very little appealed to her more than revisiting the lines and angles of Joe’s mouth and body. She’d asked him to come assist her with something vague, and when he’d drawn close enough to the bed to be pulled atop it (and her), she’d taken the opportunity presented.
He hadn’t resisted.
Things were progressing very nicely and with steadily increasing temperature when the knock to the washroom door interrupted them. They ignored it once, but it did not stop. Of course it didn’t stop.
