Page 32 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

“Still. I wouldn’t dream of taking the satisfaction of reunion from you,” Warren said, clapping him on the back. “It’s your beloved object.”

Looking over his shoulder to make sure the Buttersnipes did not catch him bothering their precious baby, Matty leaned down to grab the chain, pulling the treasure out from under her. He put the lost ribbon in its place.

“Thank you,” Matty said as they returned to their stations. They were in full company, but he went ahead and risked a flutter of lashes and a meaningful half-smile that nearly made Warren shiver. “How can I ever repay your kindness?”

An answer to that question came to Warren faster than he would have believed possible, his whole mind lighting up with something so illicitly exciting that he could hardly believe it even lived within him. “Seriously?”

Matty seemed intrigued by the response. “Fifty percent serious, I suppose,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because if you’re really offering…” Warren cleared his throat, the turpentine and Matty’s cologne near to swooning level in the cramped room. “Then I’d like to draw you again. Properly.”

To be in public right now was a special sort of torture, and Matty was clearly feeling it too.

He focused his attention back onto his work, adding lines that didn’t matter to keep his hands busy and his exterior innocent, as if he didn’t trust himself not to give them away if he didn’t create a little distance.

“Meet up after class again today?” he said. “My place?”

“No,” Warren said. “We can’t make a habit of that. Your landlady will notice if we overdo it.”

“You’re a top-notch criminal, aren’t you, Mr. Bakshi?”

“Me and Miss Martha. Best around.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

Warren did not answer. It didn’t seem wise to get too detailed, even if they’d long since found the position and register that made their conversations sound like vague muttering to the rest of the class. He had another medium, though. He picked up his pencil and drew his response instead.

Three little triangles and three little dots, making up the crudest of fox faces. The shape was etched into the knob of The Curious Fox’s front door.

“I thought I was barred?” Matty asked.

“You are,” Warren said, mouth drying at the thought of what came next. “But I might be able to change that. This Friday, I’ll talk Mr. Forester into letting you in. Go relax at a pub nearby—the Gull is decent—and when I’ve got the go-ahead, I’ll send one of the serving lads round to fetch you.”

“What if you can’t talk him into it? How will I know?”

“If you don’t hear from me by midnight,” he said, “then come in the morning.”

“The morning?”

“He lets me stay the nights I work since my commute’s a bit inconvenient.

He used to do the same, but now he’s…well, he’s married now, you know.

” Warren glanced around. They were probably still unheard, but it was a wise turn of phrase just in case.

No one needed to know that Forester was “married” to a tailor named Noah Clarke.

“Saturdays, he heads home around two or three in the morning, and doesn’t come back until five in the evening. ”

“You’d go behind his back like that? Just to see me?”

Warren considered the notion more seriously.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to. But if he did?

If Forester really held his ground and refused, even after his “right-hand man” proved willing to give the chap a full reference and take responsibility for the outcome, as club members did for their own friends and lovers every week?

“Yes, Mr. Shaw,” he said. “Yes, I think I would.”

* * *

Quite a day, overall. It was…well, he didn’t really have another word for it: inspiring.

He’d done up little doodles all his life, but that kiss and those smiles and those dry little jokes…

Matty’s unflinching Mattiness had him for once feeling like he had something he really wanted to depict, as the impulsive idea of drawing him properly went from fun notion to true want.

His father had not been the sort of artist who would go on at length about muses and inspiration and abstract ideas of creativity.

Not with Warren, anyway. Still, even from a young age, Warren had known there was some difference between the little animals he sketched out with his son and the paintings he worked on alone in his study, the pieces sometimes waiting months at a time under a cloth for him to return from a voyage to finish them.

Warren was definitely not supposed to, but he used to peek at those unfinished works in his father’s absence: the Thames done up in the bright, clanging colors of his homeland’s markets, or women in saris as gray as London soot.

He was saying something with them, and though he never spoke those things, they left a strong impression of his experience in life, one Warren had once hoped to emulate.

Back then, he figured he would learn how to speak with his art when Father’s message was finally appreciated enough that he did not have to work the trade ships anymore. When that never happened, Warren convinced himself that it had never mattered to begin with.

But his conversation with Matty in the hall today…

it had shifted something. The contrasts and contradictions of Warren’s life were not the same as his father’s had been, but he had his own.

And there was something about Matty that spoke to them, something in the way he could feel such emotion over a gift from a man who—far as Warren could tell from what little he’d heard—had tempered his “kindness” with more than a little exploitation.

It all said something. Something Warren recognized in himself, but lacked the words for.

He didn’t know yet if he would ever be good enough to capture whatever it was, but for the first time since he’d learned his father was not coming home, he had an idea that he wanted to try.

He got home feeling dazed by these thoughts, particularly when Anjali all but assaulted him on his way inside before he was remotely ready to be wrenched out of his own head.

He’d hardly gotten over the threshold when she was right there, grabbing him by the arms and practically dragging him to the kitchen.

It might have been alarming if not for the huge smile on her face.

“I did it!” she declared in a stage-whispered scream.

“What’d you do?” Warren whispered back.

The family’s kitchen was still hung with the vaguely burnt-butter smell that had arrived when Anjali did, and had not fled since.

She busied herself with a bundle on the table, and when she turned back, she was clutching a single piece of roti in her hands with an enormous grin on her face.

With an impressively dramatic sense of timing, she let go of the top half so he could see how it flopped over properly, rather than standing upright, tough and burnt like her last few attempts.

“A few of them even puffed up!” She pointed happily to a second, smaller bundle. “Just help me make sure your mum gets first pick of those ones, eh?”

She ripped a piece of the one she was holding for him to try.

“Not bad,” he said, chuckling. “Just in time for Harry to hire that cook for you and put an end to this debacle once and for all. It’s been a valiant attempt on your part, but I know you’re as sick of it as the rest of us are.”

“Not until I figure this out, he won’t,” she said, pure determination. “I’m too bloody close. If a cook comes into my house, it will be because I want them here, not because I’m incapable.”

Over dinner that night, they all celebrated over Anjali’s success, debating the benefits and downsides of hiring a cook to join the housekeeper they’d already brought on.

The most salient thing in that conversation, though, was that no matter how it resolved, the possibility of turning that work back over to Warren was not addressed, as if they’d all forgotten he’d ever even done it.

And for the first time since he could remember, the fact of that only stung a bit, rather than flaring into full-blown resentment. Those big things he’d been doing…they were not the only way to prove his worth. Or show his love.

* * *

That said, even though it didn’t seem he’d be picking the cooking back up anytime soon, he was still well aware that a layer of good food went a long way if you wanted to get someone to stomach something they might otherwise have difficulty digesting.

“I’ll show you how to get all the rotis to puff,” he whispered to Anjali later that evening, while Mother and Harry were deep in discussion about some suspiciously-noble exploit of his from his time at sea. “If you’ll do me a favor.”

David Forester was as “partial to a good curry” as any lifelong Londoner.

Though the improvement in Anjali’s cooking was pretty marginal compared with what Warren and the widows had been putting together back at the house, it had still been made at home, and was therefore a good step better than what one could get from shops that cooked with customers like Forester in mind from the start.

After a stolen moment teaching her how to use the stove’s flame to her best advantage in the bread-puffing department, she agreed to pack him up some of the leftovers to bring along to the club.

“What for, exactly?” she asked.

“I’ve got to butter up my boss,” he said with a grin. “And since you didn’t burn the butter quite so badly this time—”

A flick of flour in his face cut him off. “Oh hush.” They both laughed. “Butter him up for what?”

“I’m trying to help a friend get admission to the club,” he said vaguely. “It’s sort of exclusive, you know.”