Page 42 of Miss Devoted
“Come,” Michael said, extending a hand. “Let’s eat. The last thing I want to do is trouble you or my family, and good food should not go to waste. I have no money to steal when I’m rambling around the stews, and the populace leaves me alone. I’m perfectly safe.”
“You are perfectly daft,” Psyche said, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Perfectly, gloriously daft, and I am in awe of you.”
Michael did not want anybody to be in awe of him, but he very much enjoyed Psyche’s embrace. She offered him not a friendly hug, but rather, womanhood in the warm and lovely flesh, pressed close and showing no signs of recovering her senses.
Michael’s arms came around her slowly, allowing her every chance to step back. She mashed her nose against his chest and sighed.
“Psyche, you can’t tell anybody what I get up to in the middle of a Saturday night.”
She muttered something. “As if,” perhaps.
That Michael’s family knew was a suspicion confirmed, but how had they learned the truth? An East End pastor letting something slip into Vicar Tom’s ear? Goddard’s urchins? MacKay’s streetwalkers? Powell and Tremont’s veterans?
“I brought one of the other clerks with me this week,” Michael said, resting his cheek against the soft warmth of Psyche’s hair. “I shouldn’t have, but he was put in a difficult position, and I could not tell him what to do.”
“So you showed him whatyoudo.” Psyche patted Michael’s backside and moved away, taking hold of his hand. “Time to eat. I say let this other fellow bear tales straight to your bishops. My lord Right Reverend can explain to the world why what you do is wrong.”
“I’m doing any number of things wrong,” Michael said, letting himself be led to the table. “But I can’t see any other course at present.”
Psyche studied him, and not as an artist studied a model, but as a woman studied a man about whom she was coming to some arcane feminine conclusion.
“Trusting me is right, Michael. Soldiering on alone, one frigid hike through the slums after another, is wrong. I can persist with my art because I have the inspiration of many women on the Continent, famous women, successful women. Women taken seriously and paid handsomely for what they can do with brushes and canvas. Who or what sustains you when your hip aches from tramping around in worn heels all night?”
“How did you know?”
“I see the ache in your walk, in the way you shift around on the sofa. Tell me more about your baby-stealing.”
He held her chair and took the opportunity to whisper in her ear, “I wish you would not call it that.”
“Rescuing, then. How long have you been about it?”
Michael settled into his seat at her right hand and considered how much to tell her. Papa and Dorcas apparently knew, as did Goddard, MacKay, Powell, and probably—this did give Michael pause—Dorning, and their respective ladies. Ignatius Ingram knew, and now Psyche did as well.
None of them had the whole picture, thank heavens, and Michael did not want Psyche to know the whole picture either, but he wanted her to knowhim.
That realization came to him as he tucked into a bowl of steaming potato, asparagus, and cheddar soup. He wanted more gentle pats to his backside, more fierce arguments, more spontaneous embraces.
He wanted kisses with Psyche Fremont that put the blush to a chaste buss to the cheek.
He wanted—this insight came to him as he dabbed butter on a hunk of fresh bread—her.
“You are supposed to eat the bread, Michael. Not stare it into submission.” Psyche dipped her own piece of baguette into the soup and peered at him. “Mine is wonderfully hot. Does yours need warming?”
His mind, usually a place of order and discipline, heard innuendo in the question that had nothing to do with soup. Some part of him did indeed need—crave—warming.
Maybe a lot of parts. “The soup is delicious,” he said, “and plenty hot enough. You asked about my forays around London. They started in autumn. When I first came to London, I made myself tour all the old haunts that got me into such trouble years ago.”
“Was that difficult?”
“Not nearly as difficult as I’d feared. Maybe I grew up in Yorkshire. Maybe repaying debts of stupidity improved my perspective. I no longer have any desire whatsoever to risk coin I cannot afford for the sake of impressing fools and dandies who don’t even know my name.”
“You sought to rebel against your impending clerical fate,” Psyche said, tearing off more bread. “I was bent on rebellion, too, but insurrection is a chancy business. Running off with my drawing master did not advance the cause of my artistic victory half so much as it hastened my vows with Jacob.”
Another unlooked-for confidence, and she passed it along with no more ceremony than she would have offered Michael the butter dish.
“I take it Hazel knows?” Michael said, setting aside his empty soup bowl. “Knows and subtly alludes to your lack of sense and your impetuousness and reckless nature?”
“Is that how your pastor cowed you in York? Shaming that never ended over a few predictable gambling markers?”
