Page 27 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)
I t was with great reluctance and absolute certainty in its necessity that Ember returned to her own room for the night.
She arrived just in time, catching Hannah right at the doorknob, evidently a breath away from crossing a threshold from which she could not ever return.
“Hannah,” said Ember, raising her brows as she walked in, every step she took sending the younger woman back an equal amount. “Going somewhere?”
“No,” Hannah lied. “No, I …”
“Don’t,” said Ember, reaching out, taking the other girl’s hand and gripping it. “He isn’t worth your future.”
Hannah reddened, averting her eyes for the space of a breath and sucking in two sharp gulps of air before looking back at Ember. She sighed and nodded, squeezing the hand back, and once she was released, she kicked her slippers back off with a notable slump in her shoulders.
It gave Ember permission to do the same.
“How do you know?” Hannah asked softly. “He might be. He defended me. He didn’t have to do that.”
“He didn’t have to,” Ember agreed, “and he didn’t need to.
Your father had already said no. Violence was only for Mr. Beck’s personal satisfaction, his own misplaced outrage for your perceived value.
Hannah, I know it feels romantic to have someone treat you like a precious jewel, but that’s the thing about jewels: they’re not alive.
They have no sovereignty. You don’t want to be a jewel, a stóirín, cut and wired and put on display. You are more than that.”
“Jewels are precious too,” Hannah returned, her little jaw jutting out, “precious to most.”
“Precious like the money you’ve watched the people here toss about, hm?” Ember replied, softer than she’d ever felt. “Cold, like gold coins. Interchangeable. You are more than that, Hannah Lazarus.”
Hannah sagged a little, pressing her lips together, breathing in the message, trying to make sense of it. “So you …” She cut herself off, a strain of hurt in her voice. “You don’t think he actually cares for me?”
“I didn’t say that,” Ember told her, fast and true.
“I think he might, actually, in his way. But that is no reason for you to sneak out like this, to risk all the variables that might harm you, and only you, if perhaps his care is not enough. I know why you want to, love. I just also know you shouldn’t. ”
“Why shouldn’t I, though?” Hannah protested, a touch of desperation in an argument she already knew she’d lost. “Because someone else might come along? Maybe? Perhaps? What if no one ever does?”
Ember felt the little gust of amusement at that idea escape her. “Hannah,” she said seriously, “there will always be interested men.”
“When? There haven’t been any others so far. Not like that.” She flung herself onto the bed, her back crashing into the mattress. “Not that I wanted too.”
“I thought you liked them all,” Ember teased gently, crossing the room to sit by this silly, beautiful, achingly familiar girl.
“I … not like him,” Hannah said, her voice muffled in the blankets she’d turned her face into. “I’ve never seen anyone like him before. It would have been stunning even if he’d never noticed me there, but Ember, he did .”
“He did,” Ember agreed with a sigh, dropping her hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “So now comes the part where he has to prove himself, where he has to win more than just the spark of your body noticing his. Let him.”
“I thought he had,” Hannah muttered, “when he punched the lecher.”
“I suppose it could be a start,” Ember granted with a little squeeze, “maybe even a good one, but only a start, nonetheless.”
What she didn’t say, but suspected with something nearing certainty, was that if Hannah had managed to sneak out and had managed to find Beck’s room, that he would have turned her away.
He’d made it clear in all his sickening righteous fury, hadn’t he?
He’d made it clear that Hannah was above such things and that he wouldn’t allow her to fall victim to them, even if he was the recipient.
Damned bastard, she thought. It almost made her like him.
“What if we sneak out for another reason?” she suggested, winning a peek up through the mane of loose red hair, a glimmer of that bright blue eye. “Would that take the sting out of my interception?”
“Sneak out?” Hannah repeated, unconvinced. “You don’t have to sneak. You can go wherever you want.”
“Ah, that’s true,” Ember replied with a widening grin, “but I’ll have to sneak if I want to do some light thieving. And I do.”
Hannah watched her for a moment, then slowly rolled onto her side. “What are you going to steal?” she asked breathlessly.
Ember shrugged. “You’ll have to come with me if you want to know.”
Hannah covered her mouth, trying to hide the urge to giggle. “So it’s all right to sneak out to steal, but not to tryst with beautiful men?”
“I didn’t say that’s not all right,” Ember corrected as she found her feet and paced back over to her shoes, “I said it’s not something you should do at this point in your life, right now.”
Hannah followed, tilting her head to the side. “Is that what you meant?” she asked thoughtfully. “That’s … intriguing.”
“Don’t think about it too much,” Ember instructed, putting her hand back on the doorknob. “Now hush, we’ll need to be silent if we’re going to rob Lord Penrose.”
Hannah giggled outright this time, color coming back to her cheeks. Then she gave a curt nod and put a conspiratorial finger over her lips, just like a good accomplice.
Hannah fell asleep at the last possible hour before sunrise, her fingers still tangled in half-braided iris leaves.
Ember watched her for a time, an odd feeling in her center, her own crafting long since finished and tucked into the corner of the vanity table, starkly green against the polished wood.
It had been a good distraction, she decided, carefully releasing the half-crafted Brigid’s cross from Hannah’s grip and setting it on the nightstand to be finished later.
The sneaking, the finding, even the careful cutting of the long, pliable leaves from the corner of the conservatory had all been exactly the right kind of subversive, the right kind of fun, to soothe the ache of all the things colliding in a girl like Hannah on a night like this one.
It had been harmless, too. Unless, of course, there was a particularly vigilant winter gardener taking inventory of the conservatory in the coming days, no one would ever notice what they’d done. The flowers were still intact, just a little more naked than they had been this morning.
Still, it had meant she couldn’t be with Joe tonight. It had meant she had to wait a little longer to be back in his bed again.
He would understand. That was never in question. He would always understand.
And besides, he’d had a wounded Freddy to manage tonight. The management, of course, being in the victorious gloating, not the actual wounds.
She smiled to herself, gazing out their window at the way the rich tapestry of deep night had started to fade, started to pale as the sun drew nearer the horizon, and she sighed. She didn’t feel at all like sleeping. She didn’t think she could, even if she tried her very best.
Besides, she’d had to tolerate quite a lot of poetry about the likes of Thaddeus Beck tonight. If a single stanza about his height or his breadth or his voice or his smolder made its way into her dreams, she might very well wake up and immediately throw herself from that same window.
How anyone could look at Beck when Joe was in the same house was beyond Ember. It seemed nonsensical. But, of course, she’d hate to find out how her affection could be compromised were Hannah to start penning prose about her man rather than her enemy.
She chuckled to herself, turning to look into the mirror, sparing only one flicking glance toward the Ace of Hearts in its corner. Her packet of mail was still sitting there, tied together with yellow twine, and there was no time like the present, she reckoned, dragging the lantern a little closer.
She snipped the knot with the little pair of scissors they’d used to trim the leaves and pulled the thread loose, piling it to the side.
The first letter, predictably, was from Jones.
He had never been very verbose, so it did not surprise her that it read more like a page from a ledger than any sort of missive.
Numbers, games, guests, and one small note in the margin that “Withers the Lesser” had stopped by again and had been summarily removed.
Good, she thought. Jones had a way with removals.
The next letter was from Claire, who was visiting her family in London over the holidays.
It rambled for a while, recommending a long and salacious array of novels she’d read on the journey from the Cotswolds, and announcing Lady Bentley’s engagement with the hushed giddiness of a woman who lived for romantic stories.
The last letter was from Millie and, in true Millie fashion, it was very long and well-written. Ember took that one with her to the bed, leaning back against the pillows to take it in before attempting to close her eyes.
She couldn’t have known, of course, that the contents of that letter would steal any last hopes she’d had of sleeping that night.
Millie Murphy, sainted busybody and professional snoop, may well have solved all of Ember’s problems in just a couple of strokes of her pen.