Page 24 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

T hey came very close to making use of the bed again.

Breakfast had been exhausted, the trays carefully tucked away on a stool by the door, and Ember thought that very little appealed to her more than revisiting the lines and angles of Joe’s mouth and body.

She’d asked him to come assist her with something vague, and when he’d drawn close enough to the bed to be pulled atop it (and her), she’d taken the opportunity presented.

He hadn’t resisted.

Things were progressing very nicely and with steadily increasing temperature when the knock to the washroom door interrupted them. They ignored it once, but it did not stop. Of course it didn’t stop.

“Joe!” came Freddy’s voice, frantic and shrill. “I need to speak to you.”

Joe sighed, dropping his head onto Ember’s, his hands already thoroughly lost under the pajama top she was wearing.

“Come in, then!” Ember shouted back, clearly shocking both men. “But I won’t be held accountable for what you see!”

There was a very long silence behind the door. Then, after a beat, “I’ll give you both a moment.”

Joe muttered something unintelligible into the crook of her neck before rolling off her. She hoped, silently, that it had been a particularly naughty curse word, even if she couldn’t make it out.

It made Ember laugh, despite a healthy amount of good-natured resentment toward Freddy in that particular moment. She slid off the bed with a sigh and looked around for her dress, which was immediately proffered, along with her stays, by Joe’s hands.

When he’d had the time to fold and sort the clothing away, she did not know, but she also didn’t feel surprised that he’d managed it.

She was perfectly capable of lacing up her own stays and pulling on her own dress, especially this one that she’d chosen last night, but it was so tempting to walk him through it that she couldn’t help but feign helplessness.

It was maybe the only time in her life she’d pretended to be less capable than she actually was.

“How many colors …?” he had started to ask, before shaking his head with a press of his lips, deciding that such a thing would be better discovered later.

She pulled the dress over her head just as Freddy finally lost his patience and burst in, looking more harried than absolutely anything other than a fire or a loose bear in the halls could possibly merit.

He didn’t even seem to notice Ember’s unlaced dress or the state of her hair, launching instead into his announcement like it was causing him physical pain to keep it in, even opposite Joe’s strangled sound of protest.

“The mail’s come!” he shouted. “From London!”

“Well,” said Ember. “I suppose that’s it for us, then. The mail’s come, Joe. We’re all going to die.”

“Alas,” he replied mildly.

Freddy looked fit to combust, his pale blue eyes flying from one of them to the other and back again and finding not a whit of the reaction he’d hoped for.

“It’s your damned Portuguese patron, Cresson,” he burst out, clearly reaching fever pitch. “He’s … he’s gone and … and!”

“And?” Ember pressed, leaning forward.

Freddy turned to her, wild-eyed and apparently grateful. “And proposed to my mother!”

There was a beat of baffled silence.

“Had he not already done that?” Ember managed to say. “I thought that happened over a year ago.”

“It did not ,” Freddy snapped, the air clearly falling out of his sails at alarming speed now that he’d gotten it out. He stumbled forward and found a stool to sit on, dragging it out from its place by the adjoining washroom door. “Not officially, anyhow.”

Ember blinked at him. “Right,” she said. “Well, I’ve got to start my day.” And to Joe, she said with a final press of her hand, “Godspeed with that,” before she made her exit.

She felt herself grinning all the way down the hall and wishing, passively, that she’d thought to steal that pajama shirt on her way out. She’d have liked to add that to her collection.

If anyone she passed, servant or lord, noticed her state of disarray, they did not show it. It was, as Ember often suspected at events like these, simply not as interesting as whatever mischief the passersby had gotten into themselves.

She was going to have to come up with an explanation for Hannah, though. That little spark of a girl was going to demand all manner of sordid details for why Ember did not come to bed last night, and she was not entirely sure she had a convincing falsehood to deliver to her.

She had met Lady Bentley a handful of times and liked her very well. She also thought Dom Raul was damn good-looking and quite the charmer besides. So good for both of them, she decided. She’d send a gift!

Marriage need not always be a shackle.

She should send a gift to Raul anyway, she reasoned, for all he’d done for Joe, whether intentional or not. Maybe he’d like his own set of silk pajamas?

She chuckled to herself, arriving at her room and pushing the door open. The room was, mercifully, empty. Only Ember herself and that Ace of Hearts she’d tucked into the vanity mirror were present to observe her state of disarray.

“Well,” she said defensively to the card Mr. Withers had chosen for her, “you’re dead, aren’t you? I couldn’t wait around forever.”

She could ring for a bath and be set back to rights before anyone was the wiser. Joe had laced her things very loosely, the lamb. He clearly didn’t think she needed to be any narrower than nature had made her.

She glanced again at the card as she undressed, waiting for the hot water to be brought up, and told her late husband quietly, “We still need to talk about Beck.”

She had been carefully cultivating her winnings in the game rooms. What she really wanted was to observe Beck himself at play, his tells and patterns, his lines in the sand. The problem was that the spalpeen knew what she was up to and kept interrupting her observations.

He definitely preferred vingt-et-un , but he seemed unbothered by moving to faro or whatever was adjacent if Ember grew too near.

She supposed it didn’t entirely matter. If she could make eight thousand while she was here from the three that she’d brought in credit, then she could buy him out if the occasion arose and never confront him directly at all.

But that was hardly satisfying, was it?

This man had been plotting her very own downfall. Polite disengagement had never been Ember’s preferred reaction to that , with the exception of her stepchildren, and only then because it antagonized them the most keenly.

Satisfying, she thought as the maids began to pour the steaming water into her tub. There was much more to be found in the way of satisfaction here at Blackcove than she’d anticipated.

But, she reasoned, part of the appeal of Joe Cresson was the font of surprise he hid under his steady exterior. She couldn’t have predicted that hunger or those hands or that mouth.

She sighed, helping Merryn remove her things, eager to be back in the embrace of something warm, even if it was only mere water, boiling as it did in pale imitation of true heat.

She shivered, despite the water on all sides, at the memory of his hands slipping under that pajama shirt. She’d have to kill Freddy later, she thought, for interrupting.

And speaking of Freddy, she’d forgotten the damn cross.

Ah, well. There was nowhere safer in all of Blackcove than in the custody of Joe Cresson. Perhaps nowhere safer in all the world.

“Are we washing it this morning, ma’am?” Merryn asked her, puncturing Ember’s little reverie. “I’ve got the good soap for it. No lye in it, I promise.”

“I’d never accuse you of lying, Merryn,” Ember replied mildly, if only to fluster the other woman. She grinned immediately to allow her into the joke, and won a giggle in response.

“My mammy says puns are beneath us,” Merryn tutted, a bold thing to say but without any insolence. “But she likes ’em, really, especially when they come from my pa.”

Ember turned her neck, watching the other woman bustle around for the good soaps. “Merryn, have you ever been to London?”

“Me?” Merryn stopped, staring at her. “Never! I’ve barely left Cornwall, and only then for my sister’s wedding. Can you imagine? Me in London!”

“I can imagine it,” Ember told her, unblinking. “I can imagine it very easily. Think about it, Merryn. I’d have work for you, should you want it.”

“Work?” Merryn pulled the soap from its little box, her brow wrinkling. “As a lady’s maid, you mean? As yours?”

“Maybe,” Ember replied, pausing to scoot forward and lower her mop of tangled curls into the hot water, letting it bubble into her scalp. “Or something else, should you want it. I own a business. We could find out what suits you best.”

“What suits me?” Merryn balked, nearly fumbling the soap. “What sort of employer cares what suits me ?”

“I do,” said Ember, leaving the thought to float in the air with the soap bubbles for now, only adding once more, “if you want it.”

She glanced at the card in the vanity once more and thought to herself that someone had to do the work of recognizing potential now, in a world without her late husband. She should have been doing it all along.

Besides, she reasoned, Merryn was exactly the type of lass that sent Jones into a panicked stammer, and it would be a damned shame to let him escape the ambush. She delighted in imagining that as Merryn worked a lather into her curls, not catching a single knot on her fingers in the process.

She’d almost entirely forgotten about Hannah when the door flung open and a comet of red hair flung itself inside, slamming the poor door behind her with enough force to empty the damned bathtub.

“Hannah?” Ember managed, her voice gone groggy as she sat up in the tub, water sloshing down her shoulders. “Good God, girl, what’s wrong?”

Hannah stared at her with the same wild-eyed panic she’d just seen on Freddy’s face.

“Was it the mail?” Ember asked quietly.

“Mail?” Hannah repeated, her pixie-like features screwing up in confusion. “What mail?”

“Oh, good,” said Ember, leaning back in the tub and allowing Merryn to start her oils. “What is it, then?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to bed last night,” said Hannah, flopping onto the vanity stool in a huff, her skirt billowing up around her like a dust cloud. “You must have been worried sick.”

Ember blinked at her, allowing only a single second to pass by before she agreed. “I certainly was! Where the devil were you?”

“The tables ran late, but then my father was approached by a gentleman.” Hannah hesitated, flashing her teeth. “About me.”

“Oh!” said Merryn. “A suitor?”

“Of a sort,” said Hannah with a queasy droop of her lips. “Not the respectable sort, I’m afraid. He wanted to contract me to … to …” She trailed off, her eyes flicking back to Ember with a realization. “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t, that you shouldn’t …”

Ember flung a hand out of the water, flapping away the unnecessary concern. “Who approached your father?” she demanded, a furious heat rising into her throat that had nothing to do with the bath. “What was his name? What did he look like?”

Hannah’s eyes widened. “Oh, I don’t think you should—”

“I just want to speak with him,” Ember snapped, unwilling to hear the protest.

“Miss Donnelly,” breathed Merryn with what sounded like approval.

“I don’t know who it was, just who it wasn’t ,” Hannah exclaimed, gripping either side of the tufted cushion under her like she might shoot into the open air if she didn’t hold herself down.

“Who it … who it wasn’t?” Ember repeated, raising a brow.

Hannah reddened. “I just mean it wasn’t anyone we know. Anyone we … or I … I just mean it wasn’t anyone specific. Papa wouldn’t say!”

Ember narrowed her eyes. “You mean it wasn’t Mr. Beck?”

“Or anyone else we know!” Hannah insisted, gone shrill.

“I could inquire …” Merryn whispered low enough to not be overheard as she worked a knot loose in Ember’s hair.

Ember opened her mouth, though she wasn’t sure which girl she wanted to answer or how, and was blessed with yet another interruption, a brisk knock at the door, drawing the eyes of all three women toward the threshold.

“Yes?!” Ember demanded. “Who is it?”

“Royal mail,” the voice called. “Care of Miss Ember Donnelly?”

“Leave it outside the door,” she snapped. “I’m naked.”

“Oh,” came the muffled voice of the mail carrier, and then again, softer, “oh!”

And then, perhaps as a relief, a medley of giggles from Ember herself and her two comrades-in-arms on this side of the door.