Chapter 19
Beck spent the next hour or so bent over his desk at the Vixen, filling in the lines on a brand-new ledger.
He’d been keeping records of his end of the clinic efforts over the months. From his and Ember’s donations to the cost of the brickworks, removals, lended equipment, and laborers to small incidentals like food, water, and medicine for the patients.
He wanted to make sure Hannah had every penny accounted for, especially since she had been primarily running the funding side of things without seeing where the flow of wealth had been allocated.
His pile of slips from Mae Casper were all written in the tiniest handwriting he had ever seen, which required him to grit his teeth and wear his damn spectacles to translate them onto the neat lines of the ledger margins.
It was what he’d bought them for, he reminded himself. If he didn’t wear them, he was only going to need them more someday.
In the end, he forgot to take them off when he departed for the Fox, because despite his dislike of how they looked on his face, they really did improve things quite a bit insofar as to how he perceived the world around him.
The snow had stopped, but apparently Londoners were staying tight in their houses anyway. When he entered the Fox, he found only O’Sullivan behind the bar and Ember across from Ambrose Aster at one of the gaming tables.
One of Reed’s kits was asleep on the new chaise, his arm dangling off the side onto the rug below.
“You’re saying you can beat me?” Aster was asking, skepticism clear in his voice while O’Sullivan watched from across the room, rag rotating in a glass. “You’re sure about that?”
“Well, yes, I’m sure about it, amadán,” Ember snapped, shuffling the deck of cards in her hand. “I just told you I’d be cheating. Do you want me to show you or not?”
“Go on, then,” said Aster, perking up visibly. “How do we play?”
Beck sighed, deciding that watching more of this was not something he should spend what remained of his largely spent sanity on tonight. He trudged past them, rotating a hand at Ember’s “Well, good evening to you too, master!” as he passed, and headed directly for the back rooms.
They all knew who he was there for. There was no sense in pretending otherwise.
He opened the door, expecting to find her sitting at the desk, surrounded by her stacks of letters, with that glorious red hair spilling down around her shoulders. Instead, the chair was empty. He frowned, stepping farther in and clicking the door shut behind him, his eyes scanning the room.
They fell on her in the corner, hunched on all fours with her cheek pressed down into the wooden planks as she appeared to be scanning underneath a row of high-backed stools against the wall, her round little bottom sticking straight up in the air.
He heaved a little sigh, reached behind him, and threw the lock.
As much as he would enjoy leaning back against this door and watching her do whatever the devil she was about for the rest of his natural life, he thought it was probably prudent to make himself known.
“Hannah,” he said softly, trying not to chuckle when she squeaked and immediately knocked her head against the cushioned bottom of one of the stools. “What are you doing, love?”
“Oh,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Oh, Thaddeus. I’m afraid I took my ring off because it was catching in the quill. Then I knocked it off the desk with my elbow and it rolled away and now I … oh! There it is!”
She dove, completely without guile or regard for the picture she presented, wiggling her backside up in the air as her head vanished under the stool and Beck lost all the moisture in his mouth, then emerged again, holding it up with a victorious grin, like she’d done nothing more salacious than find an egg at a churchyard Easter egg hunt.
“Got it!”
“Hannah,” he said again, weakly. “Stand up.”
She gave him a reproachful little frown, pushing all that hair that had fallen in her face over her shoulders and settling back onto her heels. “In a moment,” she said, and set about working the ring back onto her finger. “What’s the rush?”
“You can’t go crawling around on the floor like that!” he said, exasperated. “What if someone else had walked in?”
“What?” She rotated the ring into place, getting the little blue gem to sit on top, and smiled happily at it like it was a very obedient pet. “What would it matter? Everyone crawls about from time to time.”
He stared at her, something somewhere in his brain clicking into place. He had thought, he supposed, that once they had finally consummated the tension between them, that this torment would come to a halt.
Why had he thought that?
She glanced up at him properly this time and gasped, her little fingertips going up over her mouth. “Oh, Thaddeus!” she breathed. “You look like a gentleman scholar. How very dashing!”
“What?” He gawked at her, uncertain if he should kiss her or haul her over his knee. “What are you saying?”
“Come help me up,” she said, reaching her arms up toward him. “Oh, your spectacles. They are so very handsome. Why do you never wear them?”
He blanched, his hand coming up to touch the frames at his ears. “I forgot I had them on,” he confessed, crossing the room to offer her his hands and haul her up to her feet. “I only really use them for reading. I’m a bit longsighted.”
“Are you?” she breathed, as though he’d just told her he was a tourney champion. “Oh, look at them!”
He could feel his cheeks heating. This was not a reaction he expected.
She grinned up at him, keeping her hands in his. “I did not expect you tonight, even though you said you were coming. Your sister seemed very cross with us.”
He winced. “She is going to apologize to you,” he said. “She had a difficult journey and was not herself today.”
That last part might have been a lie. Beck wasn’t entirely sure what Vix’s self was anymore, truth be told, but he hoped it was warmer than whatever that woman on the street in Clerkenwell had been.
“I hope you can give her a second chance,” he added, giving Hannah’s fingers a little squeeze.
“Oh, of course,” she said with an airy shrug. “I don’t have any brothers, but I suppose if some strange girl looked at one the way I look at you, I might want to claw her eyes out too.”
He blinked. He nodded. He was still blushing.
“I told her,” he said carefully, “that I am going to marry you.”
She paused, pressing her lips together, those big eyes tilting up to meet his. Her cheeks rounded like she was holding in a very large grin. “Thaddeus,” she said after a breath. “You might have told me that before you told her, hm?”
“I…” he stammered, looking left then right then back at her. “Didn’t I?!”
She shook her head and let a little gust of amusement out. “No.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I mean. Sorry. I … dammit!”
“Thaddeus,” she said again, fully laughing now. “Yes. I will marry you. I was planning on doing so whether you asked or not. We just have to work out the logistics.”
He nodded, releasing a tight burst of air. “Yes, I talked to the rabbi,” he said, getting an impressed widening of the eyes from her. “I’m not a complete oaf!”
“I called you an oak,” she reminded him with a teasing nudge of her shoulder. “Not an oaf.”
It made him laugh. He shook his head and pulled her toward the desk where he’d set the new ledger he’d brought for her, specially chosen with a royal blue cover that reminded him of her dresses.
“I wanted to sit with you tonight and go through the clinic expenditures,” he explained, flipping it open, “but it seems like we have more pressing business that we ought to get to instead, now that we’re talking.
I need to meet your parents. I need to arrange licenses and ecclesiastical permits and talk to a vicar and a barrister and a—”
She cut him off, putting her fingers on his mouth as she flipped the first page open on the ledger, looking down at it curiously and running her fingers down the numbers. “You made this for me?” she asked quietly, glancing back up at him.
He nodded, making the soft pads of her fingers slide over her lips.
She blinked at him, her touch slipping outward to stroke along the line of his jaw as she glanced back down at the ledger once more then at him again.
“Sit,” she said, giving him a nudge toward the desk chair.
“What?”
“Sit,” she said again, already pushing him backward into the embrace of the large leather armchair and crawling into his lap as he fell.
Her skirt pooled down around them, her knees squeezing on either side of his thighs as she laced her fingers behind his neck and pressed her lips to his, soft and sweet and insistent.
He, of course, had no choice but to kiss her back, his hands coming up to catch her around the narrow taper of her waist and sliding up the elegant swell of her ribs.
When she pulled back, her lips and her eyes both had a glossy sheen to them, her cheeks pink with warmth. “Why did we wait for so long?” she whispered, running her thumbs over the edges of his jaw. “Why didn’t we run away together directly from Blackcove?”
He reached up to catch her hand, pressing a kiss into her palm, and chuckled. “We weren’t ready. Or I wasn’t, yet. Hannah, I wouldn’t change a single day of any of this.”
“Even though Ember stopped me from crawling into your bed?” she teased. “Back then?”
“Even so,” he said seriously. “I think if I’d opened the door and found you there, I might have fainted and ruined any attraction at all you felt for me, anyhow.”
“Oh, stop it,” she tutted, shaking her head but unable to hide the smile that tugged at the corners of her lips. She sighed. “You’re probably right. I feel like I’ve grown a thousand years in just those two.”
“I feel like I’ve grown a thousand years since just this summer,” he replied with a shrug. “Maybe I have.”
“Is your sister going to live with us?” Hannah asked, stroking her touch along his shoulders and down the planes of his chest. “Is she in London to stay?”