She’d heard the expression playing with fire before. She’d never before been tempted to employ the expression. Fire was a dangerous enough tool; any reasonable person kept it safely locked away when they could. But this was a heat she could enjoy.
She had to say something, anything, to bring back that necessary distance between them. It was a game between them, nothing more. She’d challenged him, and naturally he’d responded.
“You’re right,” she heard herself say. “That must be difficult for you. I’m pretty brilliant myself.”
“I had noticed. You’re both pretty and brilliant.”
She shook her head, clearing away all that heat. “All of this is why we need more proof.” She let out a breath. “We need to embarrass Delacey. Publicly. And to do that, we need to demonstrate conclusively that he has been deliberately trying to discredit me for his own purposes.”
He didn’t argue. He simply nodded. Free could get used to the notion of having a scoundrel to help out around here.
“And luckily for us,” she said, “I know just how to do that.”
IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING by the time Free cut the last sheet off the press. The pages were still wet, and the ink that had been transferred to them was still susceptible to smearing. She handed the paper to Alice, who took it from her and hung it up to dry. Behind her, Mr. Clark unlatched the drum that held the type. He’d remained behind, lifting and carrying without complaint. He set the drum to the side, removed the roll of heavy paper from the press, and hung it over the trough to drip dry.
“They’re going to be shipped still damp,” Alice warned.
There was nothing Free could do about that. So the sheets would be a little wrinkled on arrival. It didn’t matter.
“Go home,” Free said wearily, letting her head sink into her hands. “Go home and go to sleep. We’ve still to produce the paper itself tomorrow.” After that, it would be Sunday and they could all sleep.
She’d never thought her twenty-six years made her old, but she felt old now. Five years ago, she’d thought nothing of staying up till all hours, talking with her fellow students about anything. But if she wanted to figure out how Delacey was obtaining her advance proofs, first she had to figure out which one of them was going awry. They’d taken to burning the sheets that Free and Amanda marked up, but Free had been in the habit of printing off a few extras, sending out early copies to friends and family.
Only one way to know which was going astray—and that was to send out three different proofs to the people who received them. She’d made small changes only—a misspelled word in one, transposed sentences in another.
Still, making those false proofs—setting up the machinery for each one—had been exhausting.
“Thank you all,” she finished with a yawn.
“It’s our press, too,” Alice told her.
Free felt her cousin’s hand on her shoulder, a brief touch. She reached up blindly and held it for a moment.
“I’ll go home soon,” she said. “I’ll just wait for the sheets to dry a little, and then pack them up for the mails. I can rest my eyes here.”
Alice and her husband lived in the attached building behind the press. Alice usually supervised the running of the press at night; she was never asleep when the press was running. That also meant she was near enough that Free could call out if anything went wrong. The errand boy would come by in half an hour for the mails, which he’d cycle down to the train for later delivery. She buried her head in her arms, almost drifting off. She could hear the others gathering their things, feet shuffling against the floor. Then a cool draft of night air came as the door opened, cutting through the humid steam let off by the press’s engine.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Free said. “Leave the door open.”
They must have done so, because that lovely breeze kept on.
She dozed off—her thoughts became blurry and indistinct—but not for long. Slowly, she came back to consciousness, remembered why she was still here. She opened her eyes.
But she was not in an empty room. Sitting some three feet away from her was Edward Clark. She blinked, but the image of him didn’t alter.
“Why are you still here?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t think it was right to leave you alone, asleep, in the middle of the night with the door open.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I know,” he said. “You’re thinking that between the certainty of me and the unknown dark, you’d rather have the dark. Not that you have any reason to believe me, but I’m not that sort of scoundrel.”
She rubbed her eyes, coming to herself. “That’s not what I was thinking. My cousin is near enough that she’d come on a scream. I was thinking that it was an absurdly protective gesture.”
He’d said he felt sexual attraction, and she didn’t doubt he did. But that could mean anything. He might feel the stirrings of lust toward a thousand women a day. No, she was safer remembering his first words to her. He didn’t give a damn about her.