Chapter 23 #2
“Mrs. Bright does the mending. But you may take over if you like.” He frowned at her, adding, “Once you’re recovered.”
She returned her cup to the tray. Scooping up a portion of jam with a knife, she awkwardly attempted to spread it over an uncooperative piece of toast.
Miles took hold of the crust without a word, keeping it steady for her.
“How would you feel if you were prohibited from doing what you loved best?” she asked as she finished spreading the jam. She glanced at him, curious. “What do you love best, by the way?” She picked up her toast. “And I don’t mean the newspaper. That’s work.”
“You’re speaking of hobbies.”
“If you like.”
He dusted the crumbs from his fingers. “I don’t have any.”
The toast stopped halfway to Nell’s mouth. “None? Not riding or chess or gambling? Or whatever else London gentlemen do?”
“I don’t ride,” he said. “I rarely play chess. And I never gamble.”
“Cats, then,” she said, biting into her toast.
He gave her a bewildered look. “Cats?”
She nodded as she chewed. “You do have five of them.”
“They’re not a hobby,” he said. “They’re a…I suppose they’re a necessity of life.”
“You’ve always had them?”
“No. Not until I went away for my apprenticeship.” Miles recalled those bleak early days in the West Country, away from the Rookery for the first time in his life, cut adrift from everyone and everything he knew.
“I was lonely,” he said. “I started feeding a tomcat who used to frequent the alley behind the printing shop. I made a pet of him. That’s how it started. ”
Nell’s expression softened with understanding. “They were your friends.”
“They were,” he acknowledged. “They still are.”
“But you’re not still lonely, are you?”
His mouth quirked dryly. “Less so recently.”
A hint of a smile touched her lips in reply. “Do you truly have nothing you enjoy doing outside of work?”
He drank more of his tea before finally confessing, “I frequent a boxing saloon in Lambeth.”
Her eyes glimmered with interest. “Boxing,” she repeated. She took another bite of her toast, crunching thoughtfully.
“You don’t approve?” he inquired as she chewed.
She covered her mouth with her hand while she swallowed. “On the contrary. I box a little myself.”
Miles stilled.
Her dimple emerged again. “Have I shocked you?”
“You can box?” he asked. “In addition to sword fighting?”
“Granted, I’m not as good at it as I am at fencing. Not in terms of pure power. But…I do have what you might call good science.”
Miles’s brows lowered. He was beginning to suspect she was quizzing him. “I’m to believe you’re an expert pugilist?”
“I’ve read the Oracle of the Ring.” She offered him what remained of her jam-covered toast.
Miles accepted it, absently taking a bite. He was familiar with the name of the old boxing text. “Is this another of your skills that’s more theory than practice?”
“Oh no.” She reached for her teacup again. “I’ve practiced.”
“I know they can defend themselves,” Gabriel had said.
And they could, apparently. With sword-canes, with razor-tipped parasols, with their fists.
Miles’s gaze dropped to Nell’s bare hand. It was pale and dainty, her slim fingers curled around her painted porcelain cup. It was decidedly not a hand meant for boxing.
“At the Academy?” Miles asked with studied casualness.
“Naturally.” She sipped her tea. “We prepare our girls for everything they might face in the real world.”
Miles temporarily ignored the we and the our in her statement. “You anticipate your graduates engaging in fisticuffs?”
“We’d be foolish to discount the possibility.” Nell lowered her cup. Her tone took on an edge. “Why? Do you imagine that females aren’t familiar with violence? That it doesn’t come our way regardless of our rank in society?”
Miles’s frown deepened. “No,” he said. “I’m aware how some men treat women.”
“What do you propose women do about it?” she asked. “Wait for a gentleman to rescue them? In many cases, it’s the gentlemen who are doing the offending.”
Miles knew that, too. Indeed, he’d long believed that his mother’s employer had been her seducer. Or possibly her ravisher. Why else would she have refused to tell Miles for whom she’d been working as a governess at the time she’d fallen pregnant with him?
“What I’d rather,” he said levelly, “is that my wife not court violence by venturing into the slum. Particularly after we’d already agreed that it was too dangerous.”
“I won’t apologize. Not when the result was the recovery of Miss Brent.” Nell picked up the orange.
Miles plucked it from her fingers. He peeled it for her. The sweet fragrance of fresh citrus permeated the air. “The end justifies the means, does it?”
“In this instance, yes. Besides,” she added, “I did tell you I wouldn’t give up looking for her.”
“You did.”
“And you said you wouldn’t ask me to.”
“I recall.”
“Anyway, it’s done now. Mr. and Mrs. Royce will be taking Miss Brent to the Academy today. She’ll be safe there.”
“What she’ll be is Miss Corvus’s responsibility.
” Miles sectioned the orange. “And you’re mine.
If you expect us to leave for the house party on Saturday, you’ll do as I say and rest for the next several days.
And you’ll stay out of trouble. If anything were to happen to you…
” The very possibility of her coming to further harm instantly darkened his mood.
Her mouth curved softly. “Are you growing fond of me?” she asked. “Is that it?”
He scowled at her. “If you don’t know the answer to that by now, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Nell’s smile reached her eyes. She beckoned him closer with a crook of her finger.
Miles dutifully leaned toward her across the breakfast tray.
His blood pumped furiously. She was going to kiss him, he knew, despite his scolding, despite his scowls.
She wasn’t at all put off by him. It seemed a miracle somehow, that a creature like her should find him at all appealing.
But she did.
This time, he didn’t wait for her to press her lips to his. He closed the remaining distance between them and pressed his to hers. A firm, claiming kiss, as brief as it was decisive.
“Now that’s settled,” he said gruffly.
A faint blush stained Nell’s face, but her tired eyes were still shining. “Yes,” she agreed.
Affection tugged at his heart. His mouth tilted in a lopsided smile. He felt like grinning. Drawing back, he handed her a section of orange. She popped it into her mouth.
He took one of the sections for himself, the two of them eating in companionable silence. It occurred to him that this was what lovers did, breakfasted together in bed in a state of comfortable dishabille. But she wasn’t his lover. She was his wife.
And more.
Somewhere between the moment he’d entered his office to find her sitting there, black-veiled and mysterious, and this moment now, the two of them had become friends. Intimate friends. He would pull down the moon for her if she asked him to.
But she never would, would she? Not when she was convinced she could pull it down for herself.
The fact both annoyed him and made him admire her all the more.
“I have something you can do to occupy your time while you’re on the mend,” he said.
She wiped her sticky hand on a cloth napkin from the tray. “Besides sewing? Or leaving the house? Or doing anything else remotely interesting?”
“Quite.” Miles rose from the bed. Once again, he disappeared through the connecting door and into his bedroom.
He promptly returned with the armful of documents he’d brought home from the office on Friday.
“Cowgill’s old columns,” he explained in answer to her questioning look.
“Along with his notebooks, and some articles Higgins pulled about the Fawn-Purvis family. I’ve gone through them once in a cursory fashion, but… ”
Nell sat up taller in bed. “You’d like me to go through them again?”
“If your aching head will permit it.”
Beaming at him, she held out her left hand. “You may leave them with me.”