Page 17 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

S he hid in her room for an entire day.

No one noticed, so it was all right.

The only interruption had been trays of food and once, quite late at night, an exhausted-looking physician with flecks of something unspeakable on his cuffs, asking in a raggedly hopeful voice if she and Hannah were quite all right in there?

If it was the pasties that had saved them, Ember privately swore to eat them every day for the rest of her life. Hannah, however, did a lot of groaning and grousing about wanting to go back to the tables.

“Why do you want to go back?” Ember asked. “You don’t play, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Hannah clipped. “I watch.”

And Ember had frowned because the girl sounded uncomfortably familiar. She did not say “I watch too.”

Mustn’t encourage such things, no matter how relatable they were.

Once the sun had set, once she knew the earth had done a full, leisurely stroll all the way ’round it, Ember decided she ought to grow up again and stop hiding from the world. Or from herself, perhaps? It was really hard to do that second one.

She still had the dice she’d pilfered from the gaming tables, and Freddy, in all his helpful buffoonery, had given her explicit directions to Joe’s bedroom when he’d been in here tormenting her the day before.

She’d stared at him, considering where one might hit him to cause the maximum effect of pain, and he’d only laughed at her and skipped away like a demented fae.

She hated Freddy Hightower. And she loved him. That was the tragedy of that man. It was why it had hurt so damned badly when he’d done what he did, and it was why it was so confoundingly reassuring to see him as he was since they’d arrived here: part restored, part … something else.

Something better.

She sighed, shaking the thought away, and let herself focus on the now, on the bottle of wine Merryn had pilfered for her from the kitchens and the quartet of dice she’d pilfered for herself.

And for him. For Joe.

She braced herself all the way down the hall, gripping the neck of the wine bottle so tightly, she thought it might shatter against her fingers. It didn’t, of course. Things were never so easy.

She knocked. She waited. She almost ran.

But he answered in the end, looking disheveled and right in the midst of something, surprised at first and then openly, unabashedly delighted.

“Ember!” he said with a flash of those perfect teeth. “Is it time for my lessons?”

“It is,” she said, allowing herself to be ushered into his room, allowing herself to inhale him as she passed. “If it’s a good time.”

“It is,” he assured her, closing the door carefully behind her silently and leaning back against the wood to admire the effect she made standing in the private space where he’d been laying his head. “What’s the wine for?”

“Drinking?” she said, choking a little on the word, her face feeling oddly hot. “Do Quakers drink?”

“No,” he said, holding out his hand for the bottle, “but I do.”

“Oh,” was all she managed to conjure in response.

“Please, sit,” he said, gesturing to a small breakfasting table next to his window. “I think there are some glasses in our washroom.”

“Oh,” she said again, like a damned fool, and shunted herself over to the table, blinking down at the view of the winter gardens that he had from here, situated over the trembling tips of the naked branches.

She noted with a strange tendril of comfort that some of the leaves were still clinging on, stubbornly green in their centers.

She fished the dice out of her pocket and put them neatly in the center of the table, feeling oddly compelled to arrange them in some way that might please the eye. Two fours, she noted. Two ones.

“Here we are,” he said, smiling widely at her as he crossed the room with two empty glasses, stout little crystal vessels with patterns chipped into their sides. “Not proper, but serviceable.”

“Like me,” Ember said, and then winced.

“I certainly hope so,” he replied easily, setting down the glasses and taking the chair across from hers.

She stared as he worked the cork loose, the muscles under his exposed forearms moving under his tanned, golden skin.

She’d caught him in his shirtsleeves. There was an open folio on the bed, a few sheets stacked neatly above it, and a magnifying glass neatly positioned at the very top of the ensemble.

“I’ve interrupted you,” she realized, only to have a glass of warm, red liquid pressed into her hand, accompanied by a soothing shush.

“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “Old case work. This estate made me think of something I could apply to Dom Raul’s properties via international ownership liens, being that he is a citizen of two countries.”

He cut himself off, giving a little chuckle and a shrug. “My passions run a bit dry sometimes.”

She pressed the rim of the glass to her lip, stifling her urge to balk at the word dry in the context of this room and him in it. The obvious and bawdy joke rose immediately to her throat, but she wrangled it back into its cage, not willing to sully this moment with cheap deflection.

“I like that you care about something,” she said instead, her own cadence sounding awkward versus the easy flirtatious jest she might have used instead. “I find it enchanting.”

“Oh,” he said, pausing at his own sipping and raising his dark brows. “Oh, well, that’s nice to hear. I’m always so terribly convinced I’ll bore you. Bore everyone, really.”

“Is that what you think?” She pressed her fingers into the etchings in her glass, knowing how absurd it was to feel angry at that, oddly defensive, like he’d insulted her instead of himself. “That you bore us?”

“I think that people have me figured out in fairly short order, yes,” he said with a smile, like it wasn’t horribly insulting to himself. “There’s Cresson, always in a corner with his ledger.”

“Absolutely not,” she corrected firmly, “so terribly competent that when crisis came to her door last year, Dot Fletcher dismissed the idea of calling upon her husband or Abe Murphy or anyone else and said ‘we need Joseph Cresson. He is the only one who can help us.’”

He laughed at that, like she was teasing him again, like she just wanted a rise. “I think Mrs. Cain called upon me because she knows I am discreet.”

“Anyone can manage discretion!” she argued, tapping her fingernails on the dice. “Don’t reduce yourself so!”

He cleared his throat, looking a bit put upon by this spotlight of attention, and lowered his eyes to the dice instead of continuing to watch the uncomfortable topic of his very self.

He reached out and carefully picked two of the dice up in his hand, one of the fours and one of the ones, and without much thinking about it, jostled them in his hand and released them onto the table.

There was no finesse to it, but they clattered to a standstill anyhow.

Eleven.

She stared, the hairs on her neck standing up, while he simply lifted the glass and took another sip.

“So,” he said casually, “how badly did I just lose the game?”

“Joe,” she replied with no small impatience, “you just won it outright, and we haven’t even started yet.”

He grinned, that full-toothed dimpled grin that made her want to slap him and kiss him and run out of the room all at once. “Well! Maybe I’m lucky enough that I don’t need any training.”

“No one is that lucky,” she responded, sipping at the wine to try to restore the moisture to her throat. “Besides, you won’t be rolling for most of the night. You’ll do it enough to satisfy Penrose and the others, but the only way to win is by betting on others. How are you with statistics, Joe?”

“I’m a barrister,” he said with a raise of his brows, “so not very skilled, but I am an excellent student.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said weakly. “Take them up again. You can’t jostle them around like you did, or you’ll be accused of trying to weigh them. Just a little flick in your hands and then put them between your fingers before you cast.”

“Between my fingers? Like knucklebones?”

She laughed. “Yes, but let’s not tell Freddy that you’re talking about dice and knucklebones again, lest he weep.”

He laughed, a rich, comfortable laugh, and attempted to do what she was describing. The roll was less than ideal, but the dice jumping between his fingers were plenty graceful. He really had played knucklebones with dice as a child, she wagered.

“Good!” she said, finally able to smile a little, an ease creeping into her shoulders at the familiarity of this, a domain in which she was certain.

“When you throw them, it should be gentle. You’re tossing them onto the felt like an offering to the gods, not casting them off like rubbish.

Release away from you, but don’t throw . ”

He made a face, doing his jostle and knucklebones move a few more times. “Like this?” he said, miming the motion.

She giggled. “No. Snap or flick your wrist. It’s dice, not a rowboat.”

He frowned at her, but it carried no weight, and attempted the roll.

Seven.

She shook her head in wonder. “I hesitate to use up any more of your good fortune here tonight,” she said. “Trust me, such things are finite.”

“Seven is good?” he asked, raising those silver-gray eyes to meet hers.

“It’s safe,” she answered, tilting her head to weigh the answer. “It’s only good if you bet on it first, which most people do.”

“Safe,” he repeated, taking up the dice again and nodding. “And we like safe?”

“We do,” she confirmed, watching him test out the physicality of the roll again.

It was making her think. Safe. Yes.

It was what he’d said, wasn’t it? That people always thought they’d got the whole of who Joe Cresson was minutes into meeting him. They saw someone steady, quiet, and safe. Unthreatening.

“Maybe,” she said carefully, her mind buzzing, “maybe I shouldn’t teach you much in the way of finesse. Not if we’re trying to swindle people.”

“I’m swindling people?” he asked, looking a little alarmed.