Page 99 of A Shore Thing

“This machine works?” Muriel blinked. “She built it?”

“It works, and she’s built several versions—or had them built. She doesn’t hammer the metal, but she designed the thing, and it’s bloody brilliant. If she were a man, she’d work as an engineer.” He shook his head. “I can’t even convince her to apply for a patent. She wants my father to do it.”

He looked frustrated.

“Your mother is technological,” said Muriel, musing. “You must have her to thank for your aptitude with bicycles.”

His frustration transformed into startlement. “I suppose. I never thought of it that way. She disapproves of women bicycling.” He frowned and laughed at the same time. “But she could probably improve on the Rover if she put half her mind to it. At the least, she could invent a better luggage carrier. Perhaps I should ask her.”

“Would you really?”

“Good God, no.” He crossed his arms. “I try not to introduce any unnecessary surprises into our correspondence. And I don’t plan on visiting anytime soon, or anytime ever. In letters, I can omit. In person, I’d have to compromise.”

She scrutinized his face. There it was, the willfulness. She could see it in the set of his jaw.

He caught her looking and smiled. “My brothers established a precedent for long absence. We’re already a family that exists mostly on paper.”

“Where are they? Your brothers?”

“Argentina. They’re heavily involved in railways and refrigerated beef. I don’t think they’ll ever settle back in England. They both married Anglo-Argentine women. I’ve little to say to my brothers, so I fill my letters with illustrations of owls and hedgehogs for the children.” They were moving through a pool of light, and she saw his features sharpen. “I haven’t written in a while.”

They’d almost reached the steps that led to the hotel’s main entrance.

“My studio felt more like home to me than the house where I was raised,” he said. “And my Sisters in art felt more like family than my kinspeople. The ladies of the Hesperus Club felt like family too. I couldn’t talk to them about painting, but I could breathe among them, without the weight of the assumptions that pressed me everywhere else.”

Muriel nodded. Their lives had been so different. But she understood what he meant. “The heath was home to me,” she said quietly. “Not the rooms over my cousin’s shop.”

“You chose heath plants as your family?” The tenderness of his smile made her heart squeeze.

“And James. He rode on the heath. We’d meet by the pond and talk. But I never felt lonely there, even when I was alone.”

They’d climbed the steps. In front of the door, he turned to her. “Did you often feel lonely?”

His expression was serious. Pale fire shone in his eyes. Her heart squeezed harder.

As a child, she’d studied and stroked and sniffed every flower and tuft of grass, so they could grow in her mind when she was back at her deadening labors or lying in the dark under the slope of the roof. But nothing kept the loneliness at bay for long.

Sometimes she’d wanted to howl from the ache of it.

He read the answer in her face and touched the pad of his thumb to her cheek. “Do you still feel lonely?”

She hesitated, chest constricting. She controlled her life now. It was, by and large, the life she wanted. And yes, the ache persisted, often below her notice.

Not when she was with him.

Music was filtering through an open window.

She tipped her head toward the sound. Given the grandness of the hotel, she expected the strains of melody to resolve into a chamber work by Haydn, Mendelssohn, or Mozart. Instead, she heard voices mount into a raucous chorus.

Her brows came together. “That isn’t Pirates of Penzance?”

Griffith’s gaze kept smoldering. But after a moment, he smiled, allowing the deflection.

“Lady Chettam is fond of comic opera.” He turned back to the door and tugged it open. “We’ll follow our ears.”

Their ears—and a lanky, eager-to-please porter—led them between pillars and across the tiled mosaic floor of the hotel’s entrance hall to a private drawing room.

Inside, chandeliers twinkled, casting specks of starry light onto the occupants, most of them on their feet, swaying with their arms around each other’s waists or clapping their hands. A tall woman in a red guardsman’s jacket strutted between the armchairs, belting words with astounding velocity.