Page 23 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

Joe paused. He nodded. He crossed the room anyway, placing the tray carefully on the foot of the bed and taking the chair across from her. “You found it,” he said.

“I found it,” she answered, in a tone that wasn’t quite sure that was true. “Is it … is this mine?”

He nodded, careful as he ever was. “Yes.”

“You took it?” she asked, searching his face. “From Freddy?”

“He gave it to me,” he corrected, inclining his head, “to give to you.”

She tried to speak but only managed to release the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “When?” she finally managed, after a few more tries.

“Yesterday,” said Joe. “Last night.”

“Last night,” she repeated, awed. “Did he tell you …?”

Joe nodded again.

She felt the surprise of that register on her face, felt all the muscles tense and release. “Did he really?” she said, more to herself than to Joe.

She set it back on the table, looking at it in the soft morning light.

She had imagined getting it back one day, of course. She had fantasized about it the way someone fantasizes about being a child again and making different decisions, never actually hoping that such a thing could come to pass.

Freddy had kept it all this time? That seemed impossible. It seemed absurd.

It seemed … like hope.

“That idiot man,” she marveled, softly and without bite. “That absolute fool.”

“I should have given it to you the minute you came into my room,” Joe said, guilt flashing across his beautiful face. “I had been obsessing over it when you knocked, but as soon as I saw you, it might as well have been half a world away. I forgot. I am sorry.”

“You’re …” She shook her head, the word clanging around in her mind, trying to find purchase. “You’re sorry?! Joe!”

She stood, rounded the table, and gripped his face, pushing her lips hard into his. She pulled back and studied him and then did it again. “You are not to be sorry,” she said, her voice at a fever pitch. “Not ever.”

He stared at her, trying to understand what she was saying, and the more confused he appeared, the more she crumbled in his light. She released him, backing away with a kind of hysterical awe.

She twisted in the morning light, catching it deep in her lungs, and she laughed, brushing her hands over her face.

“It’s really here!” she said, marveling at it. “You found it.”

She crawled back into the bed, ready for breakfast, leaving the cross where it sat for now, on the table, where it had blessed the passage of the previous night.

She took up her tea and gazed at her man and felt the wonder of all of it muddling together in a froth, even if it took him a moment to gain his bearings again and return to her.

He looked so careful, settling into the bed beside her, reaching for his coffee. He looked so trepid.

“It’s a novelty,” she told him, nodding toward the cross.

“Not a relic. It’s a thing we do once a year for tradition and fun and to sell to pilgrims who want a piece of Kildare to come home with them.

My mam gave me that one, right before I got married.

It’s … it’s one of the only things I took with me at the end, when I wasn’t married anymore. ”

“Brigid’s,” he said carefully. “Like your Forge.”

She nodded, curling her fingers around her warm mug. “Like my Forge.”

He had brought her a plate almost identical to what she would have chosen for herself: a spray of apples, grapes, and orange slices arranged opposite a crisp pile of bacon, as though he had pulled the architecture of her desires from the air around her sleeping body.

“I’m not …” She paused, tilting her head to the side. “I’m not religious as such, Joe. I joke about my papist upbringing because that is what people see and pass judgement upon, but I do not often go to mass, if ever. I am not like you.”

“Like me?” He looked startled by the comparison. “What do you mean, like me? Do you think me staunchly devout?”

“I suppose I must have,” she confessed, realizing it as she spoke. “What with the commune and all.”

“Not a commune,” he replied with a tiny chuckle, reaching out a hand to steal a slice of fruit from her plate and pop it into his mouth.

While he chewed, he thought it through. “I suppose you’d call me lapsed?

I honor the doctrine by habit—I do find it more correct than the others I’ve seen—but I drink wine with you, I practice law in London, I don’t seek out Meetings.

I was always just a little on the outside.

My parents knew that when they sent me to study. ”

“Quakers don’t often become barristers, then?”

He shook his head. “No, it isn’t that. It’s …

it’s the moving to London after. It didn’t shock them.

They acted like they’d prepared for it for a long time.

They worried, of course. They warned. But Silas found me very soon after that, and as soon as he hired me, I knew I’d landed in the right place. ”

“And the other bits?” Ember pressed, nudging closer, their knees grazing. “When did that start? Your first drink?”

“My first …” He trailed off, his face searching for the moment and then lighting with the realization. “Was because of you .”

“It wasn’t,” she protested, her eyes widening. “Just the other night?”

“No.” He shook his head, laughter bubbling up in that warm, golden chest of his. “Years ago. You sent those debt-collection documents to the firm, threatening to use them against the Bentley estate, and I was the one who opened them.”

“Oh, that,” she said, her voice a bit thin.

He laughed outright. “I ran halfway across town, nearly clawing down Cain’s door at his home. His staff was trying to chase me down the hall while my heart was in my throat. I’d been gripping your letter so hard, I smeared the ink.”

“I …” She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly. “I did word that letter a bit harshly.”

He reached out and took her hand, pulling it into his lap, shaking his head as he continued to chuckle.

“It was like being intercepted by a field medic. I explained. I proffered the letter. I tried to breathe. Abe Murphy was there, and both he and Cain were acting like I’d been shot on the sidewalk on the way over.

I must have been acting like I was. So they gave me whiskey, like it was tonic. ”

“Ah,” she said, recognizing the instinct, nodding in familiarity. “And was it?”

“After I got past the taste?” he asked, eyes sparkling. “Yes, it truly was. No wonder such an immediate solution was forbidden, I thought. No wonder it was feared. And then I asked for a little more when Abe walked me back to my flat. He took me to a pub for the first time.”

“Of course he did,” she replied with a roll of her eyes. “Naturally.”

“Naturally,” agreed Joe with a wry little tint in his tone as he lifted his coffee back to his lips, and then, “don’t tell my mother, please.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, perhaps a little offended that the possibility even occurred to him. “I can’t believe I was corrupting your snow-white soul even then.”

“Improving it,” he corrected, snatching her hand from midair and lifting her knuckles to his lips. “Refining it.”

She gave him a look, sidelong and deadpan, that only made him smile at her.

“Never stop,” he instructed her, and then returned to his breakfast, like such a request was the most natural thing in the world, then, with a little quirk of his lips, he echoed what she’d said earlier. “Not ever.”