Page 51 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

“Sweet as this is, amore ,” said Miss Penelope, hand tight round her fan, “this is not the dramatic and public declaration you promised me.”

While it was usually Warren leaning over this bar, Forester had his elbows on it and his eyes trained on Penelope’s within a second. She was flanked by Charlie and Miles, but Forester had eyes only for his love—the love he clearly realized had been keeping something from him.

“You knew about this?” he said.

Penelope sighed, and leaned in too, becoming Noah again all at once.

“Yes, amore ,” he whispered. “I found them here together when I came to get that fan for Annie. They’ve been sneaking around.”

“Isn’t that romantic ?” said Charlie, clearly eating every bit of this up.

“That was weeks ago,” Forester said to Noah. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because this was going to be a lot more fun, wasn’t it?” He threw a look over his shoulder. “And…well…”

“Because he turned it into a little wager in the meantime,” Warren said. “He bet all the others I wouldn’t go through with it.”

The look that passed between Forester and Noah was more old-married-couple than ever.

“What the devil am I going to do with you?” Forester asked.

Noah tapped him playfully with the fan. “Share my winnings when Warren doesn’t get up the guts to turn this into an event, that’s what.”

Warren shook his head at his ridiculous friends and turned to Matty, to get a sense for their next action. But Matty seemed distracted, his gaze darting back and forth between Warren and something else on the other side of the bar.

An odd determination filled Warren when he saw that his confession—however backed up by emotional artwork—wasn’t even interesting enough to keep Matty’s attention, much less anyone else’s. Maybe Noah, irritating as he was, had a point, here.

In fact, the idea that even Noah, one of his dearest friends, had been so hoodwinked by the image Warren projected here that he’d bet literal money against the notion he could really fall in love…

well, he was suddenly sick of it. Warren wasn’t two people, living two lives.

He was one person. A complicated one, perhaps.

Maybe even an odd one. But there was room enough in him for both pieces, and it was time he started acting like it.

“Fine,” he said, moving the sketchbook over and putting both hands on the bar to lift himself to sitting on it. “You want a confession? I’ll give it.”

But as he turned and made to stand up right on the bar, to wave his portrait around and yell out for every bloody wanker in this place that Warren Bakshi the barkeep had found someone worth more to him than a bedpost notch, Matty grabbed him.

He looked blank again. A blankness that Warren hadn’t seen in a while.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“What?” Warren said, confused. “Don’t worry about it, Matty, I can take the ribbing, it’s not—”

But then Matty leaned in closer, gripping Warren’s arm tightly and whispering so he and the others nearby would all hear him:

“That bloke down there.” He jerked his head to the pair with the fizzes. “The one in the coat. I think he’s an entrapper.”

While the noises of the bar went on behind them, the skipped heartbeat all five of them shared made their corner of the place seem very quiet indeed.

“Do you know him?” Warren whispered.

Matty shook his head. “I haven’t been on that low a rung in a long time. But I don’t need to know him to know what he is. He’s obvious enough, if you know what you’re looking for. I absolutely guarantee he’s up to no good.”

They all looked. And while Warren didn’t know what he was looking for as well as Matty did, this fellow wasn’t the first to ever sneak in here.

He was new blood, here with Mr. Brady, who was always bringing someone or other along, acting like they’d been friends ten years when it had really been ten minutes (or sometimes ten shillings).

The fellow certainly fit the profile well enough, something Warren himself might have noticed sooner if he hadn’t been fretting about this bloody declaration business.

“What do we do?” Noah hissed.

“We get him out,” said Forester, rolling up his sleeves like he expected to do so very literally. He gave Matty a reluctant but distinctly grateful pat on the shoulder. “If you’re going to make a habit of saving my arse like this, I’m going to feel like a prick for not letting you in here.”

“If you let me in here,” said Matty, “I can go on making a habit of saving your arse whenever you like. I’m very invested in this place now, you know, and I’ve left Scotland Yard to boot.

As well as I got on with Mrs. Bakshi, I think I’d prove a very poor comfort to her if a spot of trouble here took her son away. ”

“He makes a good point,” said Warren. “Better than I did, admittedly. I know you’ve been thinking of him as a liability, but…”

They all glanced down the bar, where the entrapper in question was smiling and gesturing toward the back to poor, hapless Mr. Brady.

“Yeah. It’s a good point indeed. Mr. Shaw, out of curiosity, would it be the end of everyone here,” Forester asked, “if they’d made it to the back?”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Matty seriously. “Depends on the scope of this fellow’s orders. I only worked on larger operations myself, but most pretty pieces of bait are only after quick, dirty wins of one or two unlucky fellows. No matter what, it would be the end of the man he’s here with.”

“Serve him right,” Warren muttered.

“Warren.” Forester gave a scolding glare, then turned back to Matty. “And you care about that? Not just about Warren, or the club itself. But one little dolt of a patron like Mr. Brady?”

Matty nodded. “I find that I do.”

“So you’re going to let him in, aren’t you?

” Warren asked. When Forester still faltered, Warren lowered his voice a bit, but not his intensity.

“I love him, mate,” he said. It was a whisper, rather than the roar he’d intended, but it didn’t matter.

He knew he wouldn’t be the same after this; would never come off as quite the same barkeep as he was before, whether the patrons all heard the confession or just saw it in his eyes.

“I love him enough to risk everything I’ve built here.

If he can save your arse to boot…hell, if he can save Mr. Brady’s arse, when Mr. Brady sometimes seems more determined to lose it than to keep it?

Come on. Give me this one thing, Forester.

Please. I’ll take sketching classes and teas with him and my mum if that’s all we can have.

” He glanced warmly at Matty, think ing of what he’d said about being whatever he had to be.

“But you know it would be better if we had somewhere it could be easy, you know? Keeping each bloke safe is part of your vision. But there’s more to it, and you’ve got to remember that again. ”

Forester closed his eyes and gave his head a little shake, and Warren held his breath until his old chum opened his eyes and they were full of his characteristic, horrid, mushy sentiment.

“He’s in,” said Forester. “I’ll want to have a good chat with him about what happened at Scotland Yard. But assuming he’s got a good story there, and…well…” He paused. “You know. As long as we can work out an agreement—”

“He means a wedding,” Charlie stage-whispered.

“—then he’s in.”

“Fantastic,” said Warren. “Now, go get that traitor out of here, would you?”

“Will do,” Forester said, starting off down the bar to handle the mess.

“Hey!” Noah called. “What about my bet?”

Forester might as well have been glaring at his lover out of their matching rockers by the fire.

“Call that bloody thing off entirely, beautiful, and I’ll pretend it never happened. Deal?”

“Davy!”

“ Deal ?”

Noah sighed and flipped the fan open so roughly that it turned him straight back into Miss Penelope. “ Fine !”

Forester raised a brow at Warren. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” he said. “When you look like us in a few years.”

“We’ll figure that out if we come to it,” Warren said, not as distressed by the idea as he might have been. “Let’s just get the unpleasant business over with.”

“Right,” said Forester. “I’ll show that fellow the door, and—”

“Not that unpleasant business,” said Warren, rolling his eyes. “I was talking about the wedding.”

* * *

“So,” said Matty, once Noah and Charlie had vanished to the back to find a dress for him (he’d been dubbed the bride without a moment’s debate).

Now that the intruder was gone, he and Warren sat on the bar together, awaiting their fate.

“Can you explain this wedding thing to me? Forgive me, I’ve seen a lot of places like this for one reason or another, and as far as I know, this is not… the norm.”

It wasn’t, not these days anyway. David Forester, Warren had always thought, had perhaps been born a good century too late.

How exactly he’d gotten enamored of old stories of “Mother Clap’s” and the other old-timey molly houses that made The Curious Fox’s paltry number of blokes in dresses look like nothing and had tended to see their owners and patrons hanged in the end, Warren still wasn’t quite sure.

Henry Bellville treated me very badly , he’d said once.

But let’s just say, he sometimes took me places where I got to talk to people, and those people had sometimes talked to people, and fact is, I got a few stories about those spots passed down right from the source, and you don’t hear stories like that from people like that without it leaving an impression, you know?