Page 36 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

London

Freddy was running late.

He had planned it out perfectly well, of course, but sometimes the whims of the universe just refused to cooperate.

And so instead of arriving with a triumphant stack of freshly printed, beautifully bound storybooks at the Fletcher-Cain doorstep just now, he was still trudging across Bloomsbury, on foot, with two very harried shop boys trailing behind him, each of them carrying three boxes in precarious, teetering stacks.

The sun was setting quickly, making the entire business even more treacherous as they dodged a bunch of slick little puddles that had gathered on the cobbles after the afternoon’s rain.

“Sir!” one of the lads called. “My lord? How much farther?”

“A block and a half!” Freddy called back. “Chin up! We’re almost there!”

“My chin’s as far up as it’ll go,” the other one muttered, clearly thinking that Freddy couldn’t hear him.

He laughed anyway.

“Here we go, just ’round the side!” he called, knowing that if his own arms were aching, even with all his investment in seeing this thing done, the shop boys must be in absolute agony. “I’m buying you both dinner!”

Dot Cain prised the door open personally, her face a thundercloud of impatience.

“Dot!” Freddy grinned, peeking around his stack of boxes.

“You’re late, Freddy!” she grumbled in response, stepping aside and motioning into the house’s kitchen. “Past there, please. Yes, you’ll see the table set up in the foyer.”

“Then why didn’t we go in through the foyer?” the chin-focused lad moaned.

Dot followed behind, shaking her head and glowering. “Do you know how hard it is to keep your wife in one room?” she continued. “It is very hard!”

“Yes, I know,” Freddy replied apologetically. “But she is contained? For now?”

“For now,” Dot replied with a sigh. “Millie has her occupied with the baby. Why isn’t Mr. Cresson with you?”

“Because he’s waiting for the final box,” Freddy replied, heaving a relieved sigh as he divested himself of his trio of boxes and stepped back to stretch his arms. “They were still rolling off the press when we arrived. That’s the last time I trust him to choose a publisher! He’s had close to a year!”

“Oh, Freddy, it doesn’t work like that,” Dot tutted, though she did not look truly reproachful. “You know that.”

“I know no such thing,” he said with a grin, then turned from her to continue conducting his little symphony of activity. “Lads, start unpacking them in pretty little stacks, would you? I promise you’ll be well compensated.”

Dot was still making faces and heaving sighs, but she rushed forward to assist, wielding a letter opener like a stiletto.

“What time is everyone arriving?” Freddy asked, noting that he was actually breaking a sweat now, after all the heaving and hauling. In response, the doorbell rang.

“Oh, Freddy Hightower, I am going to kill you,” Dot groaned, pressing her fingers into her brow. “You had better pray that it’s someone ringing the wrong bell.”

“Praying presently!” he called after her, still in very good spirits despite his imminent murder. “Maybe it’s Joe.”

It wasn’t.

It was a gaggle of females consisting of several he’d known were coming and a quartet of his mother’s spinster friends that he hadn’t anticipated. He did intend, later, to ask who had included the most terrifying people he knew, but right now it was not his priority.

“Ah, the cake,” he said with a little gasp of pleasure as it emerged from the kitchen, alongside several platters full of vol-au-vents and tiny sandwiches. “Look at the cake!”

He tipped the boys double what they were likely paid in the first place and recommended a little cafe to them that he knew for a fact was only a short walk from the front door.

The other copies would have to be held in the kitchens for later, he decided, stepping back to consider the presentation of the room now that guests were already milling about, touching things and having opinions and so on.

“Lord Bentley?” came a soft, feminine voice at his elbow. “Freddy!”

He turned, brows raised at this unfamiliar lilt, much sweeter and less canny than his typical female company.

He broke into a smile immediately upon spotting its source in the exuberant ginger visage of Hannah Lazarus, a young ingénue he’d met under the wing of Ember and Joe years ago, during a particularly risky caper in a gothic mansion.

“Hannah!” he said, immediately stepping forward to kiss her on either cheek. “Look at you! I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I have not seen you since Blackcove!” she replied. “I sent my congratulations to your mother last year, however. I trust she is very happy in her new marriage?”

“Distressingly happy, yes,” he replied. “I’m so pleased you came. We must catch up when there is time. How have you fared since we last spoke?”

“Much the same,” she replied with a shrug. “I still haven’t touched the dice.”

“Good girl,” he said with a nod of approval. “How goes your pursuit of the evasive and gigantic Mr. Beck? Any joy?”

“Oh, that,” said Hannah Lazarus, coloring until her cheeks blended into her hair. “No, nothing has happened with that.”

“Well, there’s still time,” he assured her. “There is always quite a lot of time in matters of love, my girl. I can promise you that.”

She seemed to consider it, shifting her eyes to the side for a moment as if considering a great deal of mischief.

Freddy cleared his throat, wondering if he had just lit a fuse he shouldn’t have. He touched her shoulder to bring her attention back around, flashing her what he hoped was a distracting array of teeth. “Still, I am so very pleased to see you here and well. Did Ember bring you?”

“Well, you must not be cross with them, but Ember and Joe let me read the book before it went to press.” She blinked her big blue eyes at him, grinning widely.

“They were so marvelous that I made quite a fuss about being included in their debut. You might not believe me, but I can be very persistent when I want something.”

“I believe you,” he assured her, patting her shoulder, then immediately choosing to feign crossness anyway as he looked over her head at her accomplice. “Ember! Come here! I’m suing you.”

“Already?” Ember replied in a very bored tone, not bothering to do more than glance at him over her glass of punch. “Don’t be tedious.”

“Me?” Freddy replied. “Tedious? I beg your absolute pardon.”

He waited for Dot to return and grant her permission to move things along. She announced that Joe had arrived with the additional boxes and that her husband was here now too. She waved her hands at everyone and shushed them and sighed and wrung her hands.

It was perfect.

“I’ll just go and fetch her, then?” she suggested, looking anxious at the prospect. “I fear she might have caught on with all the clamor down here.”

Freddy followed her to the staircase, hesitating at the bottom and shifting from foot to foot. “It looks well?” he asked, just one last time. “She will be pleased?”

“Yes, you fool,” Dot answered with a pause and, quite fleetingly, a gentle little smile. “Now be quiet.”

He was quiet.

Silas’s one-eared cat darted between his legs, heading very clearly toward the foyer as though summoned there by the cry of her favorite adversary. She paused to look up at Freddy, waiting to be acknowledged.

“Evening, Queen Mab,” Freddy whispered, giving her a formal little bow. “I suppose you’re off to torment Mr. Murphy.”

The cat twitched her one ear, blinked her big yellow eyes, and continued about her business.

Within seconds there was a very distinct and alarmed “ Och! ” from the vestibule.

It chipped away at any nerves Freddy had managed to amass in his shoulders, making him chuckle under his breath as Abe launched into a bombastic scree against the damned cat without his wife there to silence him.

He couldn’t quite make out the words, but the brogue was distinct. In the year he’d lived with Abe, he’d heard quite a few paranoid theories about the malevolence of that cat. He’d had that tone turned on him a few times too.

It had been a good era of his life, he thought. It had been a productive one.

“It is too early for dinner,” came his wife’s voice from the top of the stairs, silencing his thoughts of anything else and drawing his eyes all the way up the bannister. “I am not hungry yet.”

“There are sweets,” Dot assured her. “You do not have to eat.”

“She can’t resist a pastry,” Millie answered, and then chuckled like she’d been rapidly rebuked. “Go on, Claire. We’re right behind you.”

She appeared then, floating two steps down from the top before she paused, clearly surprised to see him waiting there at the bottom.

It struck him right in the chest.

He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t even considered it.

And yet without meaning to, he had recreated the occasion of their first meeting. He had staged it. He had put them into position as though they were players in an opera, recounting the occasion of the bolt of lightning in all its historical glory.

Their eyes met. The lights seemed to dim. His heart gave a single great ring against his chest.

The only difference was … well, everything. Everything was different now. Every solitary thing except for how she looked at the top of those stairs and how she made him feel as she descended them.

He did not have to hold his dignity this time. He did not have to fear the violence with which love ripped through him every time he saw her. Every single time.

So he grinned and held out his hand and waited for her to return the smile, flashing those pretty teeth at him as she picked up her pace, hopping down the stairs like a girl skipping through a park.

“Freddy!” she exclaimed with pleasure, once she had come close enough to accept the warmth of his hand into her own. “I thought you had business tonight.”

“I do, my love,” he told her, pulling her close and dropping a kiss on her mouth, despite her flustered gasp and the observation of Dot and Millie behind her on the stairs. “I have very important business. The most important. Yours.”

“Mine?” she repeated, uncertain whether she should be more confounded or delighted as she was led toward her surprise. “What business is that?”

“Remember when I said I would find a publisher in London for your fairy stories?” he said, as casually as he could manage. He said it as though he’d just recalled the notion and perhaps a bespectacled printer was sitting in the dining room, waiting to consider the project for the first time.

“Vaguely,” she lied, attempting to disguise her excitement.

He laughed, lacing his fingers through hers and squeezing her hand. “Good. Because I did and I have and … well …”

They rounded the corner, revealing the gathered crowd, split into two little groups on either side of the central table he’d piled the books upon. They gleamed in the candlelight, the gold embossing on the letters stamped into the leather.

“Oh!” she managed, her upheld hand coming up to cover her mouth. “Oh, gracious!”

They were swarmed almost instantly by those wishing to impart their congratulations, several of whom were already holding copies they’d staked claims to.

“Freddy,” she whispered, as though some part of her wanted rescue, before she gave herself over to it entirely and let herself be taken by the melee.

He stepped back, crossing his arms and watching her as he glowed from within.

He watched Joe and Ember embrace her. He watched little Hannah Lazarus make her introduction, flipping the book open and pointing to her favorite bits.

He watched Abe lick his finger and defile a copy, his sandy brows rising as he took in something from the middle.

If Freddy were a betting man, he’d put a shilling on the odds that Abe had just found The Pirate King .

And of course he was not a betting man.

Not anymore.

Dot came to stand beside him, finally letting herself heave a sigh of relief. She threw him a little smile, a little shared token from the trenches of book stacks and late cake delivery and early guests.

“You did well,” she told him. “Look how happy she is.”

He looked. He felt it. It warmed in his soul like it was his own happiness rather than hers, like he could feel it through her.

He gave a happy little sigh, glancing back at Dot, who was watching him with a bemused sort of fondness.

“You know,” she said. “I am glad it happened. All of it.”

He hesitated, shocked by the sentiment. “Surely not all of it,” he protested.

“All of it,” she answered firmly. “Every second. Every single one. Look what it has brought us, in the end. Look at all it wrought.”

He nodded, glancing back at the scene, catching Claire’s eye and smiling as she tossed him a tiny little wiggle of her fingers, as though to say Do you see this?!

“All of it,” he said after a moment, looking down at the woman he’d almost married. “I was blessed the day I found you.”

“You were,” she agreed. “And so was I. We just didn’t know why yet.”

“So,” he asked, stepping slightly to the side so that Queen Mab could exit mixed company, a little piece of something frosted glinting between her teeth. “Does that mean you forgive me, Dot? At last?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Worse, I think I enjoy your company now. More than I did to begin with.”

“Ah,” he sighed, nudging her slightly. “Don’t fret. We’ve a lifetime ahead for you to change your mind.”

“A lifetime,” she agreed, laughing a little at the absurdity.

Later, when things had begun to cool to a mere simmer, he found Claire standing over a copy of her book, stroking the imprint inside.

He slid an arm around her, pulling her close, and peeked down at what had gotten her so rapt.

“Is it the typeset?” he guessed. “Too looping?”

“No, it’s just … it’s this annotation right here,” she said, tracing her fingernail over it. “I think it is my favorite part. Volume One.”

“Volume One of many,” he agreed, soft ’round the edges with pride. “I know you’ve already got three in the cannon for a second.”

“Oh, Freddy, stop poking around in my dower box,” she chided, turning those big brown eyes up at him. “Did you read them?”

“Of course I did,” he replied with a laugh.

She gently closed the cover on the book she’d been examining, twisting around to face him, something glinting in her eye that made him entirely sure that she knew exactly which one he’d been reading over and over and over again.

“Good,” she said softly, fluttering those pretty lashes. “Perhaps we ought to go home so you can tell me your thoughts.”

Freddy Hightower had never left a party faster.

It had taken many years of doing, but at last, he could go home again.

Home. It was his favorite place in all the world.