Page 38 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

They lazed in the bed for a slow, stretched-out hour that felt like the perfectly tranquil lifetime neither of them had been granted this time around, talking and touching and laughing—always laughing, the two of them, Matty’s dry and occasionally twisted humor tickling Warren like no stage performer had in ages.

When practical needs forced them out of the nest and back into clothes, Matty buttoned his jacket for him and playfully wrapped the scarf around Warren’s neck, then accompanied him to the alley for a piss and a wander-off in search of something hot to eat—they were too ravenous from their morning for the little pantry lunches Warren usually fixed himself from the Fox’s cupboards.

When they got back, Warren expected Matty to start making his excuses.

He’d stayed a long time already, longer than anyone had for Warren in ages.

Instead, he helped Warren put the bedroom back together without being asked, moving contentedly along to the parlor and the bar to join in the club setup.

He followed instructions easily and took to the work very naturally.

Every second of it was so bloody easy that Warren considered taking Matty up on his offer.

He’d stay all day, he’d said. Stay until Forester had to drag him out.

Oh, anyone might say something silly like that after a thorough bedding, but as the clock ticked forward and Matty went on dusting picture frames and fluffing pillows, showing not the slightest eagerness to leave, it started to seem like a real possibility.

As Matty uncomplainingly cleaned out the grate with well-trained precision, Warren wondered whether Forester could actually look Matty in the eye and still turn him out.

Forester’s little hero complex could get annoying, but it came from a good place.

Maybe they could work things out, if Matty was here as a human being and not an abstract concept…

He didn’t have the guts, though. Not because he couldn’t take the heat, nor even because he feared how Forester might drag admissions out of Warren that he wasn’t ready to put words to yet.

All those things were unpleasant enough.

But he mostly hated the thought of ending this wonderful day on a piss-poor note.

So, since Matty did not even mention leaving once—not once, all day—Warren started the farewells himself late in the afternoon.

“I’ll see you in class, won’t I?” Warren said, warmed from the horrid scarf still around his neck and a most thorough goodbye kiss. “Or…oh shit.” His heart sank. “You’re not on the case anymore. You won’t be there, will you?”

“I shouldn’t be,” said Matty slowly. “Though…you know, I’ve already paid the pup for the whole session, haven’t I? And it’s not in the way of my work—they won’t put me in charge of anything for a while, I don’t think. I’m just helping out where I can at the moment. Maybe it’s time for—”

“A new hobby?” Warren supplied, tickled that the lie he’d told Forester earlier might wind up true after all.

“Why not?” There were probably a lot of reasons why not, which Matty seemed to wince over as he considered, but eventually shrugged off. “I’ll see you in class.”

“Then your place,” Warren whispered.

“Thought we couldn’t make a habit of that.”

“We can’t. It will be sporadic,” Warren explained. He’d been thinking this through all day. The nearer the time of departure got, the more racing his thoughts of what came next. “And we’ll just practice our sketching. Mostly.”

“Ah yes, mostly sketching. Now there’s a perfectly innocent pastime.”

Warren grinned and kissed his forehead. “Back here again for the rest.”

He started to unwind Matty’s scarf so he could be on his way, but Matty stopped him.

“Keep it.” He kissed the crooked end and tucked it back securely, patting Warren’s chest right over his thumping heart. “Love in every stitch, you know.”

Where, exactly, the joke ended and the truth began in that particular statement, Warren really had no idea.

But after Matty left, he did not take it off all night, in spite of the teasing he got from his friends when all parts of him but that one lumpy object were pressed back into the shape of The Curious Fox’s seductive barkeep.

* * *

They did just as they said in the weeks that followed.

Classes were followed up by pints at the pub and further practice at Matty’s house, sometimes upstairs in near-perfect privacy, sometimes down in the common area to deflect any suspicion on the part of the landlady, who came to like Warren well enough.

She did comment on the oddness of their sudden friendship, but seemed so amused that quiet, serious Matty had taken on an artistic hobby and companion to match that she very much left them to it, occasionally asking harmless questions and having the kitchen girl bring them tea.

On the weekends, Matty was sneaked into the Fox off-hours.

Sometimes, Warren made the bedroom nice for them like he had at the first. Other times, he knew perfectly well they weren’t going to make it past the parlor and didn’t bother.

There were blokes who went farther behind the curtained alcoves than they were supposed to per the rules of the place, but he’d bet even most devilish card-shark Noah that he was the first to be brought off right on one of the barstools with all the most garish of the daytime lights on.

It was seeming very sustainable, actually, so long as he didn’t pay too much attention to Harry and Anjali’s implications that he was in for it with Mother if he didn’t come up with an explanation for his absences, and soon.

Everyone knew he was not working at White’s.

Everyone knew he didn’t really need to be working anywhere, much less somewhere that was such a hassle.

And now that Mother and Anjali were working peaceably together at last to manage the household (which, he began to suspect when he found some odd pickles in the pantry, might be expanding in a few months, and not just from the staff they’d finally hired that the women’s social responsibilities were outpacing the domestic ones), he could tell that Mother was losing patience with him.

A faint held him up one particular Friday when he was getting ready to head out to Soho.

He’d not been in the drawing room when it happened, but rather upstairs getting dressed.

His brother had recently floated the idea of hiring Warren a valet of his own, which had inspired a devilish fantasy as he brushed his coat and situated his linen.

It would be scandalous indeed to bring Matty on to pretend to fill the role as he’d done in that bygone case for Forester.

He couldn’t help but think that valeting would be a lot more fun for Matty this time around, and certainly more fun than Scotland Yard was at the moment.

An extreme shift occurred in Matty’s tone when he discussed the place now that his friend or whatever the devil Barrows had been was retired, from stoic and dutiful to irritated and occasionally even despairing.

He did not go into a lot of details, but Warren didn’t need them to know that a building full of bobbies—even “special” ones like the “special investigators” or whatever they were called—had never been much of a picnic in the first place.

“Why don’t you leave?” Warren had asked him one afternoon.

Autumn was well on its way to winter by now, and they’d lit a fire in the big room’s grate, huddled under the same quilt on the couch with a pot of tea before them.

Matty had gone melancholy, and was glaring into the flames, so Warren had put a finger under his chin and it tipped toward himself instead until their eyes met.

“You got a contract or something keeping you there? If it’s shit, get out. You don’t belong there anyway.”

“Quite the contrary, darling,” Matty’d replied with a hint of cynicism. “It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged.”

“That’s not true. You belong here.”

“Here? You mean the place I was literally sneaked into against the owner’s explicit wishes?”

“Don’t be like that.” Warren had tugged the quilt more tightly around their shoulders until their noses were touching. “I meant with me.”

The conversation had fizzled then, becoming more about tea-flavored kisses before the fire than anyone’s deteriorating employment, but it was on Warren’s mind again as he dressed.

Maybe it was selfish, maybe it was mere hope that a separation from the law might change Forester’s tune about Matty’s presence.

Either way, he now decided to float the valeting idea to Matty when next they saw each other—not seriously, of course, but the joke might get him thinking.

Six months was a long time to pretend to do something, after all.

He’d likely walked away with more skills than he thought.

In fact, he’d been shadowing Warren during all the Fox’s daily upkeep, learning his way around a bar and rented rooms. He had options, if only he could see them…

Those thoughts, though, as well as the tying of his cravat, were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a faint downstairs.

No thump or scream or anything so dramatic, but Warren was so well attuned to such things by now that it took only the sudden ceasing of far-off chatter and the gasp and rustle of guests responding to have him bolting out the door and down the stairs.

He found Mother slumped in her seat, her lemonade glass overturned in a puddle on the floor. The fashionable women she’d been chatting with clucked and fussed uselessly around her like a pack of well-dressed little birds.

“ Excuse me. ” He broke through their cluster and bent over her, checking. She was clammy. “Grab the smelling salts, madam,” he said sharply to one of the women. “Under that candy dish.”

“The candy…what?”