Page 33 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)
MANY MONTHS LATER
E mber sneezed.
Once. Twice. Three times.
She used her hands to cover her face for the duration, each dry spasm lifting her almost off the ground. The sawdust, of course, could still get through the seams between her fingers, but it felt like a bit of a shield, even so.
“Here,” said Joe Cresson, his warm hand finding the back of her neck and his handkerchief finding purchase in her grip. “We could crack a window, you know.”
“That would just let in more torture,” she muttered, accepting it with gratitude and dabbing at the tears in her eyes. “I hate the summer. Thank the Saints it’s almost over. My gratitude for the kerchief, my own.”
He only chuckled in response, shaking his head but leaving the windows sealed for now.
The new construction was coming together very well.
The space had been a café before, and as such had very little in the way of practical amenities for a new gambling hell.
Still, it had come at a good price, and Ember thought there was something appealing about assembling it all herself, with not a single element inherited from what came before.
Even the windows were new, she thought with pride. The firmly closed windows.
Joe had asked her this morning if they had named the place yet.
Beck, of course, had pitched calling it the Ace of Hearts, but Ember thought that both trite and a little ominous.
She had suggested something irreverent like The Fool’s Folly , but Freddy had taken issue with that, assuming such a name would be a reference to him.
Joe had not suggested anything. “I’m a barrister,” he reminded her, “we just name our businesses after ourselves.”
It was true, of course. The man knew his strengths.
Her man, she reminded herself, thumbing the wedding ring on her third finger. Her husband.
So she had been ruminating on it, thinking about it when she ought to be asleep, testing names on her tongue the way an expectant mother might when her womb was near to bursting.
How to marry the Tod and Vixen with Brigid’s Forge? How to honor this bridge they were building?
She would tell them today, once the paint had dried on the sign, once the Flaming Fox had settled into her wooden home. She would unveil her and be proud in the doing.
So what if no one had actually agreed to it yet? Ember knew it was right. They would, too, once they saw it.
She turned to find Joe, his sleeves rolled up, tapping a nail into the space over the new fireplace, flagstones still oiled and gleaming from the installation.
He had chosen this piece, had taken a lot of time with artisans and the architect, and now that it was done, she saw the echo of the one in Blackcove in its frame.
It didn’t have large grotesque faces to taunt and tease the guests, no. Not large ones. You’d have to really look to find them, and if you cared enough to do so, Joe had reasoned, you’d have already won their approval.
When she’d asked why he liked the little imps so much, he had shrugged and said, “I just do. I like them very well.”
She believed him. After all, he had married one.
The others had reacted with a sedate kind of unsurprise when Joe and Ember had returned from the coast engaged.
“Oh?” Millie Murphy had said. “Already?”
“Why wait?” Dot Cain had answered, nodding in approval.
“Goodness, he looks very different,” Claire Hightower had said, craning her neck to observe as dear Joe had been none the wiser.
“He isn’t, though,” Ember had told them. “He isn’t different at all.”
Merryn and Jones arrived some moments later, the former carrying mail and the latter carrying a set of crates. Both looked pink-cheeked and flustered, avoiding one another’s eye as often as they caught it.
“You’ve letters from afield,” Merryn said happily, waving the stack. “One from the Cotswolds and one from Cornwall too.”
“Cornwall?” Ember said, reaching out in surprise. “Who the devil is writing me from Cornwall?”
“Lord Penrose, of course,” Merryn told her with a tut. “It’s your invitation to this year’s party.”
“My …?” Ember cut herself off, skepticism curling the corners of her lips. “Surely it is addressed to Beck, not me.”
“No, ma’am, this one’s yours,” said Merryn, blinking guilelessly. “He invites all the London owners, doesn’t he?”
Ember took the letter and reviewed it, her eyes scanning the words with no small amount of disbelief. “Well, how about that,” she managed to say. “It seems he finally does.”
Joe was trying not to frown. “Are we … are we going this year?”
“Don’t be daft,” she said with a chuckle, dropping the letter onto a table with the other documents she needed to sort or burn. “Of course not. I never wanted to go in the first place. I just wanted to be invited.”
“Ah,” said Joe, looking beautifully puzzled in his way as she cupped his cheeks and rose on her toes to kiss him. “All right, then.”
“Mr. Beck isn’t going either,” Jones told her from the bar, where he was prying the crates open, inspecting each new glass against the early-evening light like a jeweler before setting them into neat rows. “Said he didn’t care for it.”
“Didn’t he?” Ember replied with a raise of her brows.
“Maybe he only enjoyed the guests,” Joe said quietly. “A guest. She won’t be there this year.”
“No,” said Ember, “no she won’t. And speaking of the Lazarus family, we ought to get home and wash before dinner. They said they eat right at sundown, and I won’t be a tardy guest.”
Joe didn’t argue with that. It seemed to Ember that since they’d both relinquished their London flats, buying a new and larger one for married life, that he wished to be home more than he wished to be anywhere else in the world. More, even, than the Law Offices of Cain & Cresson.
Well, maybe only a little more. Joe had treated the painting of that sign with damned near the same amount of reverence as securing their marriage license.
She had teased him about that, of course. And he had scoffed, his growing tendency to tease her right back surfacing at that moment with a quip about her new lot and her own new business partnership.
Thaddeus Beck had observed this exchange, having occurred over dinner on a night in early spring, just before they had all had to depart for a time for Lady Bentley’s wedding.
He had colored, clearly unaccustomed to such domestic ease, and Ember had let it sit because she thought the lad still had quite a lot to learn about enjoying the life he’d built, rather than just embodying it.
At home, they washed and dressed, lacing and buttoning and folding one another into respectability, quiet and fond and full of warmth.
“Did you read Freddy’s letter?” she thought to ask as she filled her reticule with the necessities for the evening. “I got distracted by the invitation from Penrose.”
“Oh,” said Joe, dimpling at her. “It was a long one. More of a parcel than a letter. We can do that after dinner.”
“I can’t believe Claire hasn’t murdered him yet,” Ember marveled, meeting his eye. “Her last letter only said one thing: He refuses to leave .”
“So that’s going well, then?” Joe replied, amusement in his voice.
“Seems to be,” she answered with a grin. “He’ll be fine, as long as he didn’t take the dice.”
“Oh,” Joe said, holding the door for her, scanning their little domicile once more before closing it. “He didn’t. I bought them.”
“You did what?” She balked. “Why in heaven would you do that?”
He shrugged. “He didn’t want to sell them to Penrose. He didn’t want to throw them in the ocean. And I thought maybe I was the only one who’d ever held the damn things and not experienced a spate of bad luck.”
“Bad luck?!” Ember said, her voice going to squeaking pitch. “What did you do with them?”
“They’re with Jones,” said Joe, catching her chin and dropping a kiss onto her lips. “We’re thinking of having them embedded into something, maybe the bar or the fireplace. Permanently rolled to eleven.”
“Eleven,” she repeated, awed. “Your lucky number.”
“Ours,” he said, and offered her his arm. “Our winning roll, set in stone.”
She nodded, considering it as their heels clicked down the cobbles of London, en route to a family dinner, en route to a future.
Set in stone?
Yes, she liked that. She liked the certainty.
Ember Donnelly squeezed her husband’s arm. She nudged him and whispered something ribald, just to make him blush. She let her heart flutter at the sight.
She never gambled.