Page 35

“ S leeping in the middle of the day, Mr. Murphy?” she had teased, shrugging off the loose-knit shawl she wore and draping it familiarly over the back of his sofa. “Was it a good nap?”

“The best naps,” he had replied, pushing off the door to walk to where she stood, “are always taken when you’re avoiding doing something else. So this one was exceptionally good. Yes.”

She smiled at him, a fondness on her face that made his bones ache. “What were you avoiding?”

“Can I show you?” he asked, the last of his fatigue cracking off his skin like ice at her interest. “You’ll want to take a nap too when you see it.”

“What would the gossips say?” she teased, taking the lead toward the staircase. “Innocent spinster tempted to nap.”

“You’ve never been a spinster, my love,” he countered, enjoying the way her step faltered, if only for a quick moment, at that word. He mentally noted to himself to say it again. And again. Until it only made her steps more certain in the end.

“Oh, for God's sake,” she sighed upon pushing his bedroom door open.

She took a ginger step into the chaos and frowned at the cacophony of case notes spread out over the bed and the floor, clinging to the sides of his mattress, escaping under his chest of drawers, folding and stacking and staring longingly out the window as inanimate objects were sometimes wont to do.

“Abe, why do you treat your writing this way?”

He laughed, leaning against the doorframe. “It’s not writing, really. Just notes. This is the jewel thief case, two Seasons in the making.”

She frowned at him over her shoulder before bending down to pick up a few loose sheets of paper, scanning them with her lovely brown eyes.

“Of course it’s writing, you fool man. And it is yours.

You ought to treat it with more resp— Oh!

” She stopped herself, blinking as a little smile began to blossom over her face. “Look at that! You’ve mentioned me.”

“Well, yes,” he said with a laugh. “They’re case notes, aren’t they? And credit where it’s due. You’re the one who made every major breakthrough in the damn case. You’re the one who eventually solved it.”

“I solved it because the thief burst into a room I was standing in and confessed,” she reminded him, flushing like she couldn’t stand the praise as she hurriedly flipped through more pages without really looking at them. “It was hardly the work of deductive genius.”

“Perhaps not,” he replied softly. “But everything else was.”

She was too distracted by the nest of case notes to reply to that, or at least she was pretending to be. “The ink is all smeared on so many of these,” she tutted. “How do you read it?”

“Quickly, as a rule.” He knocked some of the sheets off the bed to give himself a place to sit. “I try to transcribe them as soon as I get back home. It’s hard to take notes when you’re hiding in hedgerows and prowling the opera, you know. Ink is terribly messy.”

“Abe.” She sighed with a roll of her eyes. “Why not use a bit of charcoal or graphite?”

He paused, narrowing his eyes. Why didn’t he do that? Why hadn’t it ever occurred to him? Was he an idiot?

Yes, he decided. He was an idiot both for her and without her.

Mercifully, she had already moved on to her next observation, so he didn’t have to come up with an answer.

“Oh, and here are your notes on Mr. Aiden. Is he out of jail yet?”

“As of this morning,” Abe replied, a delicate cough covering his amusement. “It took some doing.”

She released a breath, stacking the pages in her hands as neatly as she could manage and turning back to look at him. “What were you doing with all of this?”

“Figuring out how best to destroy it,” he answered with a grimace.

“I can’t solve it officially. I can’t write down who did it lest anyone ever find my notes.

I can’t bring myself to just draw a black line through an entry in my ledger and say oh well, Murphy, better luck next time .

I don’t know what to do with it. I was pondering destruction by fire. ”

“What!”

“Aye, a full viking funeral. There’s a canal out back. We could make a little dinghy.”

Millie rolled her eyes. “Abe.”

He grinned at her, framed in the low afternoon sunlight, holding his chicken scratch and ink-smeared parchment. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he told her, drawing one ankle up to rest on the opposite knee. “You think we ought to tuck it into a file in case we ever need it again.”

“Obviously!” she exclaimed, exasperated.

“I hate that,” he said simply. “But I’ll do it. For you.”

She made a noise like a scoff, shaking her head. “I dread seeing what your files look like as of right now.”

“If you’re dreading it,” he returned, “that means you’re intending to look anyway.”

And at that he got a little ghost of a smile. “If you’ll allow me,” she demurred.

“Allow you? I insist upon it. If we’re going to run this business together, you’re going to have to be the brains of the thing.”

She stopped moving, her eyes fixed on him as the words he’d said threaded their way through the beautiful maze that was her mind. “Business?” she managed to say. “Together?”

“Of course! You didn’t think you could just be my wife and not my partner in crime, did you?” he replied as though he were offended by the prospect. “Or anti-crime, I suppose, as it were.”

“I’m a woman,” she reminded him.

“Aye, you are.” He sighed wistfully. “I don’t deserve my luck.”

She was turning pink, a pretty little blush as delicate as a carnation winding its way up her throat. “Are you teasing me?” she asked, her voice sounding somewhat strained.

“Yes,” he said immediately, “usually. But not about this.”

He pushed himself off the bed and onto the ground, scrambling through the smaller papers piled there, the ones from his pocket notepad, while she watched him without moving. “Ah!” he said after a few seconds of digging, retrieving what he was looking for.

“Millie Yardley,” he said, turning from his knelt position on the carpet.

He shuffled toward her on his knees, and once he was close enough, he reached out to take her hand, which she offered with a bit of a tremble and an uncertain wariness in her eyes.

“Would you do me the honor of being my partner?”

And here he presented his prize, a crumpled old sketch, something he’d made after that day in Russell Square, after she’d cracked the first major clue of the jewel-theft case. He pressed it into her hand, a nervous lurch hitting his stomach at the messy and amateur state of it.

She hesitated for only a moment before she took it, closing her fingers over his to pull it from his grasp. She backed away two steps, smoothing out the paper and staring at it, reading the words over and over and over.

At least, he hoped her focus was on the words, because if anything was worse than his handwriting, it was that attempt he’d made to draw flowers—the flowers that she’d chosen that day to have stamped into the leather of her new journal.

He had drafted out a new sign for the door on that paper. He had done it thinking he’d have a better one to show her later.

It was a silly, simple thing. A wooden sign with a vine weaving along the bottom and two trumpet-shaped blooms punctuating either side of the words.

The sign itself was scrawled in his crowded, unpolished hand.

It read: Morning Glory Investigations. Post ℅ Abraham let us reclaim the title and refuse to apologize for it. It doesn’t change my intent one whit. ”

“I think,” he told her, “that you ought to write more. Publish more.”

“I can’t do that,” she said at once. “I can never claim the manifesto as my own, Abe. It would not end well, especially if you wed me and put my name on your business.”

“If?” he repeated with a mock clutch of invisible pearls. “What do you mean, if? I am wedding you. That discussion is closed.”

“Yes,” she agreed happily, looking around the kitchen again as though she were realizing that it would soon belong to her, “I suppose it is.” Then, after a moment and a giggle, she added, “Tell Freddy that he must double his hollandaise from now on.”

“Ah,” said Abe, “about that …”

And so they wasted another few hours, until they were forced to have dinner together, forced to linger with tea on the sofa afterward, and then, ultimately, forced to acknowledge that this was exactly what they both wanted.

Forever.