Page 131 of A Shore Thing

“I don’t think anything you’ve done is inexcusable.” She regarded him, expression as serious as he’d ever seen it. “Blaming you for betraying us was easier than transforming my idea of…well, us. Who you are, and who we are. I let everyone down, including myself. Kit.” Her tongue tripped a little, and she flushed. “Kit—I’m sorry.” She grabbed her tea, took a nervous gulp, and sputtered.

“Hairpin,” murmured Kit, with sympathy.

Gwen handed her a napkin.

“I should have written,” she gasped as she recovered, making a face and dropping the hairpin on the table. “But you weren’t responding to letters, and—”

“What do you mean?” he interrupted. “Whose letters didn’t I respond to?” He looked at Gwen and Nelly. “You wrote?”

“Often.” Nelly glanced at Gwen, who nodded.

“Until you wrote to Lucy and quit the Sisterhood.” Gwen rolled her pencil between her fingers. “We realized you might not want to hear from us.”

He had wanted to hear from them. More than he’d been willing to admit.

He frowned. “I collected my mail in Camborne every week. I received none of your letters.”

“Camborne?” Now Nelly was frowning. “Not Camelford? Thomas swore it was Camelford.”

Thomas Everett Ponsonby. The bloody bungler.

“Why in God’s name did you ask him?” Kit groaned. “I’d written you both with the address.”

“Yes, well, we lost the address.” Nelly cut him a defensive look. “I can’t find any of my correspondence. I kept it in a box that I needed for a new set of chisels, and I thought I’d transferred it to my writing desk, but it’s not there. And you know how absent-minded Gwen is.” She gestured at Gwen, bent over her sketch again.

“Thomas sounded absolutely certain.” Nelly scowled, and the exasperation in her black eyes was all for Ponsonby. “I should have remembered how he is.”

Kit winced, feeling a pang of compunction. “Go easy on the chap. He meant well.”

“Oh, he always means well.” Nelly gave a shrug. “I’m always easy on him, considering. I should go harder.”

“To crush his hopes,” agreed Gwen, still sketching. “It would be a kindness.”

Nelly sighed and began to pleat her napkin with precise but agitated movements. “We kissed once, under mistletoe. Mistletoe! I’d kiss a warthog under mistletoe. I told him that. I have abundant holiday spirit. He acted as though we were betrothed. Even after he snapped the toe off my Persephone, and I chased him out of my studio with a hammer.”

“That was an accident, with Persephone,” interjected Kit. He’d been there in Nelly’s studio when Ponsonby fell over her cat’s water bowl and landed on the base of the plaster cast model. The night lived on in infamy.

“My point is that I couldn’t say anything worse to Thomas than I’ve said already.” Nelly sipped her coffee. “He’s uncrushable.”

Lucy snorted, and Kit caught her eye, and they shared the look he’d thought they might never share again, as though they were of one mind. He brought the spoon to his lips, to catch the grin spilling off his face.

“We do have to thank Thomas for his wires,” conceded Nelly. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have made this trip.”

Kit removed the spoon, and now his grin was going everywhere. “We have to thank Muriel as well.”

“Muriel?” Lucy’s brows went up.

“Muriel?” Nelly wore an arch smile.

Gwen lifted her head from her sketch.

“She sat with you at the Travellers Rest. That’s how I knew to come here, to find you before you turned back.”

“Turned back?” Lucy looked blank.

“To London.”

“Muriel told you that we were turning back…to London?” Her tone was incredulous.