Page 57 of Hazard a Guest
She could ring for a bath and be set back to rights before anyone was the wiser. Joe had laced her things very loosely, the lamb.He clearly didn’t think she needed to be any narrower than nature had made her.
She glanced again at the card as she undressed, waiting for the hot water to be brought up, and told her late husband quietly, “We still need to talk about Beck.”
She had been carefully cultivating her winnings in the game rooms. What she really wanted was to observe Beck himself at play, his tells and patterns, his lines in the sand. The problem was that the spalpeen knew what she was up to and kept interrupting her observations.
He definitely preferredvingt-et-un, but he seemed unbothered by moving to faro or whatever was adjacent if Ember grew too near.
She supposed it didn’t entirely matter. If she could make eight thousand while she was here from the three that she’d brought in credit, then she could buy him out if the occasion arose and never confront him directly at all.
But that was hardly satisfying, was it?
This man had been plotting her very own downfall. Polite disengagement had never been Ember’s preferred reaction tothat, with the exception of her stepchildren, and only then because it antagonized them the most keenly.
Satisfying, she thought as the maids began to pour the steaming water into her tub. There was much more to be found in the way of satisfaction here at Blackcove than she’d anticipated.
But, she reasoned, part of the appeal of Joe Cresson was the font of surprise he hid under his steady exterior. She couldn’t have predicted that hunger or those hands or that mouth.
She sighed, helping Merryn remove her things, eager to be back in the embrace of something warm, even if it was only mere water, boiling as it did in pale imitation of true heat.
She shivered, despite the water on all sides, at the memory of his hands slipping under that pajama shirt. She’d have to kill Freddy later, she thought, for interrupting.
And speaking of Freddy, she’d forgotten the damn cross.
Ah, well. There was nowhere safer in all of Blackcove than in the custody of Joe Cresson. Perhaps nowhere safer in all the world.
“Are we washing it this morning, ma’am?” Merryn asked her, puncturing Ember’s little reverie. “I’ve got the good soap for it. No lye in it, I promise.”
“I’d never accuse you of lying, Merryn,” Ember replied mildly, if only to fluster the other woman. She grinned immediately to allow her into the joke, and won a giggle in response.
“My mammy says puns are beneath us,” Merryn tutted, a bold thing to say but without any insolence. “But she likes ’em, really, especially when they come from my pa.”
Ember turned her neck, watching the other woman bustle around for the good soaps. “Merryn, have you ever been to London?”
“Me?” Merryn stopped, staring at her. “Never! I’ve barely left Cornwall, and only then for my sister’s wedding. Can you imagine? Me in London!”
“I can imagine it,” Ember told her, unblinking. “I can imagine it very easily. Think about it, Merryn. I’d have work for you, should you want it.”
“Work?” Merryn pulled the soap from its little box, her brow wrinkling. “As a lady’s maid, you mean? As yours?”
“Maybe,” Ember replied, pausing to scoot forward and lower her mop of tangled curls into the hot water, letting it bubble into her scalp. “Or something else, should you want it. I own a business. We could find out what suits you best.”
“What suits me?” Merryn balked, nearly fumbling the soap. “What sort of employer cares what suitsme?”
“I do,” said Ember, leaving the thought to float in the air with the soap bubbles for now, only adding once more, “if you want it.”
She glanced at the card in the vanity once more and thought to herself that someone had to do the work of recognizing potential now, in a world without her late husband. She should have been doing it all along.
Besides, she reasoned, Merryn was exactly the type of lass that sent Jones into a panicked stammer, and it would be a damned shame to let him escape the ambush. She delighted in imagining that as Merryn worked a lather into her curls, not catching a single knot on her fingers in the process.
She’d almost entirely forgotten about Hannah when the door flung open and a comet of red hair flung itself inside, slamming the poor door behind her with enough force to empty the damned bathtub.
“Hannah?” Ember managed, her voice gone groggy as she sat up in the tub, water sloshing down her shoulders. “Good God, girl, what’s wrong?”
Hannah stared at her with the same wild-eyed panic she’d just seen on Freddy’s face.
“Was it the mail?” Ember asked quietly.
“Mail?” Hannah repeated, her pixie-like features screwing up in confusion. “What mail?”
