Page 66 of Hazard a Guest
Damned bastard, she thought. It almost made her like him.
“What if we sneak out for another reason?” she suggested, winning a peek up through the mane of loose red hair, a glimmer of that bright blue eye. “Would that take the sting out of my interception?”
“Sneak out?” Hannah repeated, unconvinced. “You don’t have to sneak. You can go wherever you want.”
“Ah, that’s true,” Ember replied with a widening grin, “but I’ll have to sneak if I want to do some light thieving. And I do.”
Hannah watched her for a moment, then slowly rolled onto her side. “What are you going to steal?” she asked breathlessly.
Ember shrugged. “You’ll have to come with me if you want to know.”
Hannah covered her mouth, trying to hide the urge to giggle. “So it’s all right to sneak out to steal, but not to tryst with beautiful men?”
“I didn’t say that’s not all right,” Ember corrected as she found her feet and paced back over to her shoes, “I said it’s not somethingyoushould do at this point in your life, right now.”
Hannah followed, tilting her head to the side. “Is that what you meant?” she asked thoughtfully. “That’s … intriguing.”
“Don’t think about it too much,” Ember instructed, putting her hand back on the doorknob. “Now hush, we’ll need to be silent if we’re going to rob Lord Penrose.”
Hannah giggled outright this time, color coming back to her cheeks. Then she gave a curt nod and put a conspiratorial finger over her lips, just like a good accomplice.
Hannah fellasleep at the last possible hour before sunrise, her fingers still tangled in half-braided iris leaves.
Ember watched her for a time, an odd feeling in her center, her own crafting long since finished and tucked into the corner of the vanity table, starkly green against the polished wood.
It had been a good distraction, she decided, carefully releasing the half-crafted Brigid’s cross from Hannah’s grip and setting it on the nightstand to be finished later. The sneaking, the finding, even the careful cutting of the long, pliable leaves from the corner of the conservatory had all been exactly the right kind of subversive, the right kind of fun, to soothe the ache of all the things colliding in a girl like Hannah on a night like this one.
It had been harmless, too. Unless, of course, there was a particularly vigilant winter gardener taking inventory of the conservatory in the coming days, no one would ever notice what they’d done. The flowers were still intact, just a little more naked than they had been this morning.
Still, it had meant she couldn’t be with Joe tonight. It had meant she had to wait a little longer to be back in his bed again.
He would understand. That was never in question. He would always understand.
And besides, he’d had a wounded Freddy to manage tonight. The management, of course, being in the victorious gloating, not the actual wounds.
She smiled to herself, gazing out their window at the way the rich tapestry of deep night had started to fade, started to pale as the sun drew nearer the horizon, and she sighed. She didn’t feel at all like sleeping. She didn’t think she could, even if she tried her very best.
Besides, she’d had to tolerate quite a lot of poetry about the likes of Thaddeus Beck tonight. If a single stanza about his height or his breadth or his voice or his smolder made its way into her dreams, she might very well wake up and immediately throw herself from that same window.
How anyone could look at Beck when Joe was in the same house was beyond Ember. It seemed nonsensical. But, of course, she’d hate to find out how her affection could be compromised were Hannah to start penning prose about her man rather than her enemy.
She chuckled to herself, turning to look into the mirror, sparing only one flicking glance toward the Ace of Hearts in its corner. Her packet of mail was still sitting there, tied together with yellow twine, and there was no time like the present, she reckoned, dragging the lantern a little closer.
She snipped the knot with the little pair of scissors they’d used to trim the leaves and pulled the thread loose, piling it to the side.
The first letter, predictably, was from Jones. He had never been very verbose, so it did not surprise her that it read more like a page from a ledger than any sort of missive. Numbers, games,guests, and one small note in the margin that “Withers the Lesser” had stopped by again and had been summarily removed.
Good, she thought. Jones had a way with removals.
The next letter was from Claire, who was visiting her family in London over the holidays. It rambled for a while, recommending a long and salacious array of novels she’d read on the journey from the Cotswolds, and announcing Lady Bentley’s engagement with the hushed giddiness of a woman who lived for romantic stories.
The last letter was from Millie and, in true Millie fashion, it was very long and well-written. Ember took that one with her to the bed, leaning back against the pillows to take it in before attempting to close her eyes.
She couldn’t have known, of course, that the contents of that letter would steal any last hopes she’d had of sleeping that night.
Millie Murphy, sainted busybody and professional snoop, may well have solved all of Ember’s problems in just a couple of strokes of her pen.
CHAPTER 23
