Beckett’s brow went up. “Are you not staying here?” He nodded to the hotel.
Noah made a face, then said, “For tonight, at least. I was certain Marcus would fly into my arms once we were face to face again. I…I thought we might live wherever he’s been living.”
Beckett saw through Noah’s anxious expression and his sudden agitation. “Do you not have the money to continue to stay at the hotel?” he asked.
“Well,” Noah began, winced, shuffled, looked embarrassed, then let out a breath. “No. I havesomemoney. I could make it for about a week, I suppose.”
Beckett shook his head, knowing exactly what he needed to do. “We’ll go inside to fetch your things, then you’ll check out and come with me.”
“Will I?” Noah asked as they headed to the hotel’s door.
“I have just finished telling you that I live in a brownstone on Sixty-Third Street all by myself, and that I have too many rooms,” Beckett said. “The house needs guests, and you are in need of a guestroom.”
Noah stopped right inside the hotel lobby and looked at Beckett with an expression of surprise and sentimentality. “But we’ve barely just met.”
Beckett shrugged. “I’m not asking you to marry me,” he said. “I have room for you is all.”
For a moment, Beckett thought Noah would weep right then and there, in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. It was a stark—and slightly unnerving—contrast to the cheer he’d shown in the restaurant, not to mention the despair he’d had after Marcus’s dismissal.
“No one has ever been so kind to me,” Noah said.
“Then consider this your lucky day, for you have met a friend at last,” Beckett said with a smile. “Now, go fetch your things. I’ll be waiting right here for you, and then I’ll take you home.”
And once he and Noah were comfortable and safe, they could put their heads together and come up with ways to win the men who should have loved them all along.
ChapterThree
Noah hurried up to his hotel room and packed his things with lightning speed, not that he had much to begin with. For the first time in what felt like an age, he had a friend who knew him and understood him, and who wouldn’t take him to task and lecture him for being unrealistic and manic. Beckett understood what it was to love devotedly and to have to fight for that love.
It was a relief. More than that, it was an inspiration. Noah could accomplish what everyone else so callously told him was impossible. He could win back Marcus’s love, and the two of them would live happily ever after.
“Is that all you’ve brought with you?” Beckett asked when Noah returned to the lobby with his single traveling bag.
“Yes, I do not need much to survive,” Noah said, gesturing for Beckett to come with him to the desk while he checked out and settled his bill. “One does not need the burdens of wealth when one is on a mission of love.”
“I suppose not,” Beckett said, laughing amiably.
In truth, Noah didn’t have much left to his name. The job he’d left to make his trek across the ocean was a menial clerk’s position that paid little, but it had been the only place willing to hire him with what his past employers had branded his “unreliable and tempestuous moods”. He’d been careless with a great many of his possessions as well and either given them away to strangers in fits of philanthropic high spirits or accidentally smashed them in moments of frustration. His sister had taken the few valuable things their parents had left to them, for “safe keeping”, as she’d called it.
Simply put, Noah didn’t have much at all. But he had a friend now, and that meant the world to him.
“Have you seen much of New York yet?” Beckett asked as they made their way out of the hotel to the noise and activity of the Bowery.
“No,” Noah confessed. “I’ve concentrated my efforts to find Marcus in this area, since that is where some of our fellows in The Brotherhood said he is staying.”
“So you haven’t been uptown at all yet?” Beckett appeared both amused and horrified at the prospect.
“Not at all,” Noah said as Beckett waved to a cab waiting in front of the hotel. “It’s quite as large as London. For some reason, I did not imagine it being so.”
“I am certain London is far more populous,” Beckett said as he nudged Noah toward the cab with him, “but all of the great cities of Europe would do well to watch out for us. New York is a city on the rise that will challenge everyone for the title of greatest city on earth before we reach the next century.”
Noah smiled broadly, lifted by Beckett’s optimistic outlook. In fact, the man’s enthusiasm and love for his city raised his estimation in Noah’s eyes a hundredfold. Beckett had a lively step as he launched himself into the carriage, and the way he gave directions to the driver to take them to his address via a route that would show off the city was exactly the sort of attitude Noah felt most comfortable with.
“Have you lived in New York all your life?” Noah asked his new companion once they were settled in the cab, Noah’s meager bag on the floor between them.
“Yes,” Beckett said, removing his hat and setting it on the seat beside him. Noah marveled at how thick the man’s dark hair was, but ignored his impulse to run his fingers through it. “As I said, my father had begun to see success in glass manufacture before my sister, Aurora, or I were born. His factories have always been within the city limits, though he’s been talking quite a bit about opening new, larger factories in New Jersey.”
“I grew up in the country,” Noah said, more eager to share his history than he usually was. “In Kent. Quite near the sea, actually. It provided me with ample opportunity to roam over hill and dale, as they say, and to explore the coastline.”