Page 67 of Hazard a Guest
It had occurred to Joe in the third or fourth round of circular arguments with Freddy that he deserved this, after how he had played the other fiddle this morning.
“But why was she there?”
“She followed him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why were you there?”
“I followed her.”
“Why?”
“Because she followed him.”
“But why did she do that?”
“I don’t know!”
And so on.
Freddy’s face really didn’t look half as bad as he’d anticipated it looking when they’d spilled into his room the night before. Once the swelling had gone down, the bruise was already dappled and yellow at the edges.
Freddy, of course, was treating it like a fatal battle wound, and insisted on being brought breakfast the following morning.
It was just as well, Joe thought, because Ember hadn’t been at breakfast. She hadn’t been at tea. She missed dinner too.
He considered trying to talk to Beck directly, but without knowing exactly what had happened or why, he thought it ill advised. This was Ember’s battle, and as much as Joe wished to be her faithful lieutenant, he could not act without her blessing and expect her to enjoy the fact.
So he waited.
And the waiting had never been so difficult in all his life.
At the gaming tables, which he only attended for an hour, Miss Lazarus told him that Ember had spent most of the day asleep.
“I don’t think she slept much last night,” the girl said, blinking innocently. “But of course, I slept the usual amount, so I can’t know for certain.”
What Joe knew for certain was that the angelic-looking little thing was a practiced liar, if not yet a good one. In another life, he would have taken note of her as someone he should avoid in the years to come, should she pursue a career in the courtroom.
“Have you seen Mr. Beck at all?” she’d asked him back.
Joe blinked just as innocently right back at her, refusing to share what he’d overheard at breakfast and how it knitted into his ownsuspicions—that Beck was making himself scarce in concern for having assaulted a peer.
The peer, of course, being Freddy.
It was easy to forget Freddy was an earl, Joe thought, but only because such a fact was patently ridiculous.
He went to bed in a huff all his own and still managed to sleep somehow, because deep down he knew Ember would eventually appear. She simply danced to her own tick of the clock.
It was why he loved her, wasn’t it? Even if it made him want to shake her a little.
And then, like a prophecy fulfilled, she appeared at his door at the break of the sun, a stack of letters in her hands, ink-stained at the fingertips, and her wide golden eyes fringed with the stiff, spiky lashes of a woman who had refused to close them for quite some time.
“Ember?” he managed to say, only to be kissed very hard and shoved out of the way as she blew into the room like a summer gale.
“Get Freddy,” she said, practically vibrating with whatever had kept her sequestered for so long. “Grab the fool.”
