Free Courting Trouble by Jenny Schwartz Page B

her with a false assassination plot? At least he’d had the decency to realize how wrong it was, and to confess. It had been an outrageous attempt at courtship, typical of Jed’s inventive flair.
    People on the streets turned and stared. “What’s wrong? Where’s the fire?”
    She attracted a train of curious and concerned followers, and they all converged on Mrs. Hall’s boarding house and Jed’s shed.
    “Oh God.” She would have fallen, but sympathetic hands held her up.
    Neighbors and firemen were already there. The workshop was ablaze. Hot metal from the coal stove glinted evilly. Flames licked at the tortured wood. Green paint blistered and boiled off the door.
    “Please. Tell me he wasn’t in there. Tell me.”
    The fire captain was a courageous man, compassionate too. “We don’t know. Miss Esme, we’re sorry. No one knows where your Mr. Reeve is. We must hope.”
    Mrs. Hall, Jed’s landlady, pushed through the crowd and, ignoring the destruction of her outbuildings, gathered Esme into a maternal hug. “There, lovey, there. He’s a good man. Clever. He wouldn’t blow himself up.”
    Except the workshop was burning, filling the air with ash and the stink of chemicals. A wooden beam fell, bringing a side wall down with it. Esme flinched. The crowd murmured.
    Then from the back of the crowd, a different sound emerged. Shouts. Happy shouts. No words, but a cheer.
    She turned from the disaster in front of her, hardly daring to hope. “Jed?”
    His jacket gaped open and his chest heaved from exertion, but he hadn’t been in the workshop.
    “Jed!”
    His arms closed fiercely around her.
    She buried her face in the hot curve of his throat, inhaling the reassuring scent of him, bay rum and sweat. She couldn’t hold him tightly enough.
    * * *
    “God in heaven.” Jed looked over Esme’s head at the burning ruins of his workshop.
    She mumbled something, the words muffled by her closeness.
    “It’s all right.” He rubbed her back, soothing her, reassuring her, even as the implications of the explosion settled coldly in his bones. “I’m all right. I’m alive. I’m here.”
    He looked around at the crowd of excited and relieved faces. Familiar faces—European, Indian, Nyungar, Chinese. He couldn’t see Nazim, but he had no doubt that this was the bastard’s work. “Let’s get you home.”
    Esme nodded against his shoulder. He gave her his handkerchief, holding on to her as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, then smiled around at the watching, sympathetic crowd.
    “There now. Didn’t I tell you your man would be fine?” Mrs. Hall said.
    “I’ll make good your workshop,” Jed told her. He had money, both from his inventions and his inheritance, but the same wasn’t true for the elderly widow.
    “As to that…” The fire captain cleared his throat. “Any idea how this could have happened?”
    Jed met the man’s eyes. “I was down at the harbor.” Walking off his fight with Esme, watching the busy port and the soaring, noisy gulls while dealing with the turmoil of his emotions.
    “Humph. I’ll talk to you later.” The fire captain glanced disgustedly at their interested audience. “In private.”
    “Fair enough.” He turned Esme in the direction of her home, keeping an arm around her. In the circumstances, not even the highest stickler would quibble at their closeness. They walked that way, threading through the crowd and people’s congratulations on his being alive, until the street emptied out.
    Most of her servants stayed to watch the dying blaze.
    “I believe everything Lajli said about Nazim, now,” Esme said. “He tried to kill you.”
    “I don’t think so. He must have known I wasn’t in the workshop when he set the fire.”
    Neither considered for an instant that the fire might be accidental. Coincidence could only stretch so far.
    Jed thought of all that he’d lost in the fire. His current notebook, with its plans for his kangaroo bounding-vehicle, was safely