Page 22 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

E mber listened to his breathing for a long time. A very long time.

She watched his face, the shadows of his long lashes, the calm set of his lips. She watched the way the flicker of the lantern fire made shadows from his tousled curls and the exposed planes of his chest.

She wanted more. She wanted to wake him up and continue the consummation of their connection, to drive herself past the borders of chaos and pleasure again and again. She also wanted him to sleep. She wanted him to rest. She wanted him to never leave this state of ease and comfort.

It was the strangest pull of desires she had ever contended with.

She had invited him to take her the way she had always known taking to occur, and he’d done something completely different.

It hadn’t been selfless, not exactly. He’d found his own pleasure in the strength of providing hers.

It felt impossible. It felt like a fire that managed to keep burning in a lake of cool water.

How had the same world that had carried Ember from her first day to this one also produced the likes of Joe Cresson? How was that possible?

She turned carefully onto her side, toward him. She pulled the coverlet up gently to cradle him in it. And she drank in the beautiful stillness of him, the steady breathing, the gentle curve of his lips, the absolute comfort of sleep.

Was this the same man she’d watched dozing in a carriage not two weeks ago?

Could all of this have been there, written on his face even then, and she’d just not seen it?

Or maybe she had seen it, she thought. Maybe she’d seen it and known on that day too, but could not bring herself to quite believe it.

Even when she’d been married, she never spent the whole of the night next to a man after making love. She wanted to do that tonight. She wanted to sleep next to him and find him still there beside her when the sun rose.

Sometimes her lover left, sometimes she told him to leave, sometimes Ember herself slipped out as quietly and carefully as possible. She could do that tonight. She could do it right now. But she did not want to.

What would he think, if she did that? What would he think if she stayed?

She knew that if she went, he would never mention it. He likely wouldn’t hold it against her. He would be the same Joe he had been before this, before tonight. He didn’t make demands. He didn’t chastise.

But if she stayed? That could mean so many things. It could go so many ways.

She wanted to stay.

She had been naked many times in her life, but she had never felt naked until just this moment, right now.

That was silly, wasn’t it? She was practically alone in this moment, not observed, not seen.

Why feel naked right now, after her lover had already closed his eyes, after he’d already fallen away into his own rest?

Even on her wedding night, trembling and frightened, she hadn’t felt exposed this way. She’d still kept some part of her tucked safely under her ribs, under the thrumming of her heart, in reserve, lest she need it.

She didn’t think that reserve had survived Joe Cresson. She thought that even if it still lived within her, it was ripped open now, empty.

She almost smiled about it, though she wouldn’t call the emotion at the realization happiness. Not quite.

She couldn’t name it.

And she couldn’t resist reaching out and winding her fingers through his, though his hand was heavy in repose. She might have imagined it. She probably had imagined it. But it seemed to her that he returned the pressure of the gesture, even deep in the mire of his own dreams.

She exhaled. She closed her eyes. And she slept.

She must have moved in the night, because when the sun finally did peek its way through the seams and rungs of the curtained windows, Ember found herself fully held against Joe’s body, wrapped in the embrace of his arms.

Her eyelids were heavy, too heavy to raise, her breath coming soft and dense from the weight of sleep that had settled atop her.

She tried to listen to him, tried to determine if he had yet awakened himself, and twice in the attempting, she found herself dozing again, losing the threads before her fingers could ever fully grasp them.

The third time, she felt his mouth curve against her, nuzzled as it was just above her ear.

“Will you stop that?” he whispered, clearly amused through his own grogginess. “No one is awake. No one is coming. Stop worrying.”

She stilled, tilting her chin up just a touch to acknowledge him. “Who says I’m worried?”

“You do,” he answered with a chuckle, running his fingers down the length of her arm.

She tried and failed to stifle a yawn, her tangled limbs preventing any interception of the thing, and immediately he yawned too, catching the indulgence of it like he was sharing her very breath.

She pressed her face into the pillow, willing herself to be brave, and then rolled onto her back. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t want to pull away. She just wanted to see him.

And there he was, still naked, still rumpled, but awake and smiling lazily at her through the errant curls on his forehead.

“Good morning,” he said softly, and she felt her heart break.

“Morning,” she managed to say back, feeling an absurd little spark of bashfulness rising in her cheeks. “Hello.”

“Hello,” he answered immediately and grinned, dimples popping into his cheeks.

It made her grin too, an absurd, face-aching grin that she immediately buried into his shoulder. “Put those dimples away,” she begged. “It’s too early.”

He caught her and ran his fingers over her tangled curls with a contented little sigh, shaking his head against the crown of her hair. “If I go get us breakfast,” he said softly, “do you promise not to move from this spot?”

“Of course not,” she answered without leaving her nook, her voice muffled by the warmth of his skin. “I’m going to poke through all your things while you’re gone.”

“Ah,” he said with a shake of his head. “Two dockets in, you’ll flee and I’ll never find you again.”

She laughed, her sleep-heavy limbs protesting amusement at this early hour. “Tea, please,” she said as he regretfully began to pull away, “with—”

“With cold milk,” he finished, as though it were long-ago-memorized scripture. “I know.”

She fell back against the pillows to watch him, her heart giving long, languid thumps against her breast.

He had hung up his tails with the careful precision of a washwoman, each piece carefully folded at the creases over the hangers. He pulled soft buckskin trousers from his wardrobe and a loose shirt, each thing partitioned carefully and neatly into exactly the place he expected it to be.

Privately, she imagined he might stop wanting her if he ever saw the state of her own wardrobe.

“What?” he asked, noticing her expression.

“Nothing,” she said happily. “You’re perfect.”

He kissed her once more before vanishing through the door, in search of their repast.

She considered being well-behaved and staying right in this bed like a good girl, but she had warned him that she wanted to pry, and so after counting to ten, she threw her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed herself to stand, her bare feet sinking into the plush rug with a little cushion of luxury.

She snatched up the silken pajama shirt he’d discarded the night before and tugged it over her head. The buttons were still undone at the top, sagging down past her heart, but it did stop the shivering.

She padded across the room, rolling the cuffs up over her hands, and took it upon herself to stoke up the warming coals in the little heating furnace in the corner. She smiled at their still half-full cups of wine facing off against one another on top of the chest of drawers.

She knew that if she opened any of those drawers, she’d find nothing but military precision, smallclothes folded into perfect rectangles, likely organized by color and size.

The heat flared a little and she withdrew the poker, sighing in gratitude as she soaked it up.

She turned toward the little table where she’d taught him to roll dice and went there next, wanting to throw the windows open, wanting to see if those high branches still had a few stubborn leaves on them, trying to cling through the whole of winter.

She got to the curtains, she filled her palms with them, but she froze, her eyes falling on the table at her waist. At what sat on the table, right in the center, where the dice had been.

For a long moment, she did not breathe. Her heart did not beat. Her body did not move.

Surely, it couldn’t be. Surely not.

She blinked first because blinking was easiest. She forced herself to pull on the curtains and invite the light in. The light would clarify things, she told herself. The light would prove that she had imagined it.

But no. Here was the light and here was the rushwork cross, the very same one her mother had given her that Imbolc, the one that had been lost forever. The one she’d accepted was gone, frayed at the northern point, like that direction had asked the most of it.

How?

With a hand far steadier than she felt, she touched it. She lifted it. She flipped it over.

On the back was a tarnished pin, meant to go through the collar. This cross was not for hanging in doorways; it was for wearing. It had always been a brooch. It had been her brooch.

The one Freddy had taken.

When the door opened again and Joe returned, slipping back through the threshold of their private sanctuary with a tray of food and drink, Ember realized that she had, at some point, come to sit, and that the cross, at some point, had come to be cradled in her hands.

She didn’t know how either thing had happened. She didn’t know how she felt, other than stunned. She couldn’t stop touching it, couldn’t stop running her thumbnails through the space between the rushes, like if she didn’t memorize the sensation, she’d regret it until she died.