Page 103 of The Marriage Method
“Oh, isn’t it?” There was an alarming quaver in her voice. “Then you aren’t writing a story about the Academy?”
Miles took a step toward her. Any distress he felt on his own behalf was at once overshadowed by concern. “I’m not. I swear I’m not.”
“It appears you are.”
“I take notes,” he said. “When there’s a story—even one I’m not going to publish—I have to organize it so that—”
“By writing down things I’ve told you in confidence?”
“What things?”
“Coded samplers,” she said, furiously tapping the word on the page with her fingertip.
Miles shook his head. “You didn’t tell me anything about them. I merely deduced it.”
Her cheeks flushed with anger. “How dare you? To be spying on me and making your deductions? I thought—”
He caught her arm to stop her retreating from him any further. His voice deepened. “If you would have been honest with me from the start, I wouldn’t have had to deduce anything.”
“Honest? Why? So you can add it to your rough draft?” She gestured to the page again with an angry flourish. “And what about that? That was this morning, Miles!”
He shot a glance back to his notes. To the line he’d added before departing for the office. Know your surroundings. He suppressed a flinch. “It was stupid of me to record it,” he said. “But it struck me as being important.”
She wrenched free of his grasp. “What a fool you must think me.”
“Nell—”
“Every conversation. Every secret. You made me forget—”
“Stop. Listen to me.”
She turned her back to him. “I came to London to prevent you writing about the school. And all I’ve done is given you fuel to compose your most damning article yet.”
He came up behind her. “Is that what you think of me?”
“I think you love the Courant,” she said. “That you’d do anything to save it. It’s why you married me, isn’t it? To save the paper from another scandal? If you’ll go that far, I must suppose that no length would be too great.”
“I do want to save the paper,” he acknowledged. “But—”
“Mrs. Bright said you were anxious to find a story that would restore the Courant’s fortunes.” Nell’s words thickened with emotion. “What better than a tale about a school full of upstart women attempting to reform the world on their own idiotic terms? It will be both titillating and hilarious to your gentlemen readers, I daresay.”
Miles’s chest tightened. He feared she might be weeping. “You wrong me.”
She folded her uninjured arm over her injured one. Her head bowed, revealing the vulnerable curve of her neck.
Miles had to clench his hand at his side to keep from reaching out to her. “If I am guilty,” he said, “it’s only in the method of my mind. It requires order to such a degree that if I don’t set the facts of a situation down on paper, I can’t make sense of them. That’s all those are. My attempts to make sense of the Academy—and of you.”
She flashed him a narrow glance over her shoulder. “Me?”
He was relieved to see she hadn’t shed any tears. “You’re still nine tenths a mystery to me.”
She scoffed.
“You are,” he said. “I don’t believe you even belong to me. You’re still hers. Still theirs.”
“I belong to no one.”
“Your loyalty does.”
