Page 93 of The Marriage Method
It took Miles a moment to recall what they’d been discussing. Her sewing, hadn’t it been? Her secrets, more like. “It’s that important to you? Those samplers you’ve been sewing night and day?”
“Samplers, plain work, fancy work. Any sort of sewing.” She added a dash of milk to her cup. Miles made a mental note of it—tea with milk, no sugar. “When I was recovering after my fall,” she said, “I’d have lost my sanity if I hadn’t had a needle and thread in my hand.”
“You sewed to pass the time?”
“There was a great deal of it to pass.” She raised her teacup to her lips. “I’m rather good, you know. At sewing.” She flashed him a roguish smile over the brim of her cup. “So, if you have any missing buttons that need attention…”
Wifely, he thought again. It shouldn’t be so attractive to him, these glimpses of domesticity. But it was. Because it was her pouring his tea and offering to mend his clothes. And because he hadn’t been lying last night. He was mad for her.
“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.
