Page 54 of The Marriage Method

Mr. Higgins and Mr. Flack promptly obeyed, stopping only long enough to bow to Nell and once again murmur their congratulations, before departing the office and shutting the door behind them.

Miles stood from behind his desk. “You don’t approve?”

“I thought we weren’t going to tip our hand,” Nell said.

“We can’t go back to the well with Mrs. Pritchard.”

Nell understood that much. People in the slum knew their faces now, and knew who it was they were looking for. “No, but—”

“Let the police find the evidence against her,” Miles said. “The Courant’s efforts are better spent chasing down the society gossip that precipitated the crime. For that, we must focus our investigations on the beau monde.”

“In the form of the Fawn-Purvis family?”

“For a start.”

“What about Flora Brent?”

“What about her?”

“She’s still missing,” Nell reminded him. “She may still be somewhere in the East End.”

“I advise you to leave it to the police,” Miles said.

Nell traced a pensive pattern over the embroidered raven on her sampler with the pad of her thumb. Naturally, she wasn’t going to leave it to the police. What did Scotland Yard care for a penniless orphan girl gone missing in a slum? Miss Brent was no one to them.

But not to Nell.

“In other words,” she said, “you suggest I sit back and let the men take charge?”

“I suggest you let the professionals take charge. They can do what we can’t for now, at least insofar as the East End is concerned.”

“I see. And what will you be doing while the police are investigating Mrs. Pritchard and searching for Miss Brent, and while your employees are scouring the archives for tittle-tattle about the Fawn-Purvis family?”

“Going to Hertfordshire,” Miles said as if it were obvious.

Nell set down her sewing with an exasperated breath. She didn’t know what irritated her more, the reality of him excluding her or the prospect of him getting himself killed. “How is that any less dangerous for you than it would be for them?”

The corner of Miles’s mouth lifted in a brief semblance of a smile. “Fear not, Mrs. Quincey,” he said. “Despite appearances, I’m not unaccustomed to a bit of danger.”

• • • • •

Miles strolled across his office to join Nell. The closer he came, the less rational he felt. Which was saying something. Rationality had been in short supply since the kiss they’d shared last night. He’d been struggling to regain it all morning. He’d begun to believe he had when—

My love, she’d called him.

He had immediately recognized the endearment for the wifely pantomime that it was. It hadn’t stopped his heart from pounding on a throb of longing so intense it had nearly stolen his breath.

And she was the cause of it.

She sat there in her modest blue dress, a scrap of needlework in her hands, as well-mannered as you please, when all the while, she was tormenting him to his core.

He’d scarcely slept last night because of her. He’d been…Bloody hell. There were no two ways about it. He had been wretched. And he had no one but himself to blame. It had been his reckless decision to kiss her. Having done so, it was taking every ounce of his not-insubstantial self-control to keep from doing it again.

“More than a bit of danger, I should think,” she said with a touch of asperity. “Unless you consider abduction, murder, and mutilation to be nothing very perilous.”

“I haven’t spent the whole of my life behind that desk,” Miles replied. “Lest you forget, I was raised in the Rookery.” He stopped in front of her. “What’s this you’ve been working on so diligently?”

“A sewing sampler,” she said.