Page 105 of The Marriage Method

“Yes.” Nell had marked every second of it on her heart.

“It’s unusual,” he said. “Most couples meet only a handful of times before they marry.”

“At a ball or a concert, I imagine. Everything formal and proper.”

“And brief. They don’t spend hours together on trains, or traversing the London slums.”

She gave him a fleeting half smile. “But that was after we married,” she said. “You might call it our honeymoon.”

The muscle at the corner of his mouth twitched. “A singular honeymoon.”

“An exciting one,” Nell said. “Yet for all that…you’re right.” She sat down on the window seat. The rain-beaded glass was cold at her back. “We don’t know each other as well as we ought, do we?”

Miles sank down at her side. His body was very close to hers. Tall and broad-shouldered and impossibly warm. “We know that we like each other tolerably well.”

Nell recognized the words she’d uttered to him two nights ago. The same ones she’d said when she’d proposed that they practice kissing. A disconcerting heat pooled low in her belly. “More than tolerably well, surely,” she returned, echoing the reply he’d given her then.

Miles was provoked into another wry smile. It didn’t last. His face reverted to solemn lines. “Are you returning to the Academy?” he asked.

Nell’s stomach trembled, recalling the things she’d said to him at the height of her distress. She’d never intended…

But it was too late now.

“I had planned to, when you first proposed,” she admitted.

Miles’s gaze was unflinching. “Had,” he repeated. “Past tense?”

Nell was ashamed to confess it. Too long had she prided herself on her dedication to the Academy. It had defined the last eighteen years of her life.

“What does that say about me?” she asked. “That I’ve devoted my life to teaching those girls, only to abandon the cause the moment I’m comfortably ensconced somewhere with a gentleman?”

“Not just any gentleman,” Miles said. “Your husband. And you’ve hardly abandoned the cause since we wed.”

“No,” Nell allowed. “I suppose not.” She subsided into silence, caught in a moment of aching indecision. For all their closeness, the weight of her secrets still remained between them.

And not only hers. The secrets of the Academy.

Nell didn’t want them there. Not anymore. Not if it meant being divided from the man she was coming to care for above anyone else in this world.

“As to the cause,” she said slowly, “it’s not what you think.”

Miles’s already rapt attention sharpened with journalistic awareness.

“Miss Corvus has no interest in grooming lady spies or female revolutionaries,” Nell told him. “Her first and best concern has always been in instilling us with an unfettered sense of our own strength. That’s the mission of the Academy. We’re encouraged to be self-sufficient in every regard. To think for ourselves, and to defend ourselves.”

Nell was rather proud of that fact, both as a teacher and as a former student.

“Society makes a prison of women’s bodies and minds,” she said. “It’s how they control us, by diminishing us. Academy girls are aware of such limitations, but we are none of us bound by them. We’re taught to navigate the confines of social restriction—to utilize our natural talents to advance the cause of women and to rectify wrongs when we can.”

“Such as the wrongs perpetrated by Viscount Compton?” Miles asked.

“His crimes were outside of the common way, but yes,” Nell acknowledged. “We have special classes for the most promising of our girls. The majority of them are never called on to use their skills, but given the chance…there’s little they’re not prepared to do.”

Girls like Nell, Effie, and Gemma. And Flora Brent, too, Nell endeavored to hope.

“The parish council doesn’t object to Miss Corvus’s curriculum?” Miles asked. “But I suppose they don’t know about it, do they?”

“No one does. At least, no one who might interfere. That’s why we couldn’t allow you to write about the Academy. We daren’t risk the scrutiny.”