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Theo was quiet, his thumb making slow circles on her hip. Then, “Do you mind it?”

Her laugh was a touch hysterical. “Of course I don’t mind it. Of course I love it. I love this.”

“Can you spend the night?” He kissed her nape again, brushing her hair aside. “Spend the night. Lou is with Laura and David. I want to wake up with you.”

He truly was going to kill her. “I can’t. My brothers are expecting me.”

He made a wordless sound. “Next time,” he said softly.

Maggie put her hand on his where it lay against her stomach, intertwining their fingers. She squeezed; he squeezed back. Next time.

Endless, limitless times.

Chapter

Twenty

The kettle had just begun to steam when Bridgers unleashed his panic.

“It’s too much,” he sputtered, waving around a thick stack of what Maggie eventually understood to be orders. “There are only two thousand people in this town. Where are all of these coming from? I thought there was a boycott that was going to drown our business!”

It felt unfair, that their new business was hardly being touched by this bizarre church-sanctioned protest, although they had received some very colorful, anonymous letters from concerned citizens who seemed quite obsessed with the idea of Maggie communing with the devil while naked under the moonlight. She had read that one out loud to Theo, whose eyes had glazed over as he looked up and down her body.

Apparently, he wasn’t easily scared off.

Maggie plucked the top sheet from the bundle, squinting over it as she filled the pot with hot water and ground coffee beans. “Calm down,” she said, knowing it was the exact wrong thing to say. “Please,” she added.

“Magdalene.” Wonderful. The full name treatment. “We are going to die. We can’t fulfill,”—he rifled through the orders quickly—“thirty-four orders in any timely fashion. There are only four of us, and I can’t even sew, and Lou isn’t even an actual employee!”

“Of course she is.” Maggie poured the coffee into three cups, adding an extra spoon of sugar to Tom’s cup, and handed Bridgers back the paper she had taken. “What’s a divorce corset?”

“How would I know!” Bridgers flapped the papers at Maggie like a scolding finger. “I had heard the term and told Mrs. Trundle that they were back in fashion!”

“Why would you do that?”

His eyes were disturbingly close to being perfectly round. “I don’t know.”

“Bridgers, you can’t just make up terms and promise them to people.”

“Apparently I can and, more to the point, I’m quite good at it.” He dropped the stack of orders and picked up his coffee cup, cradling it in his hands like a warming fire despite the sweltering conditions in the kitchen at present. “This is all very stressful.”

When Bridgers was in a fit, it was best to let him simply wear himself out; that knowledge alone prevented Maggie from pointing out that he did not do any of the production for the shop and therefore was arguably in the position of the least amount of stress. “Of course.”

“We need to hire more people.”

They needed some opium and a strait jacket. “We certainly could afford some more workers, at least one.” She flexed her hand. The callouses were really beginning to thicken up now, and her knuckles were sometimes swollen. She wasn’t built for this sort of repetitive work, and she wasn’t afraid to complain about it. “I could try my hand at more designs rather than the actual sewing.” So far, they had used patterns Tom purchased from send-away correspondence, having no clue how up to date the fashion was. She wasn’t entirely uncreative—she improvised psychic readings for years, for Christ’s sake—so surely she was capable of drawing a dress. Well, telling someone else to draw it. She was hopeless at actual art.

“I’ll put an advertisement on the grocer’s board,” he muttered. He blew on his coffee. “‘Wanted: seamstress to sew outdated undergarments for clueless men.’”

“Excellent idea, Bridge.” Maggie looked at the clock on the wall. “I should go downstairs. Lou is coming over at ten. She said she would bring something from Stinson’s bakery for breakfast.”

At the idea of a warm sweet for breakfast, he brightened.

Tom emerged from his cave, grumbling, and silently picked up his coffee.

“Good morning to you, too,” Maggie said, draining her cup and setting it in the basin.

“You were out late,” Bridgers said coolly, eyeing Tom. “Whatever could you have gotten up to?”