For a moment, when the realisation of just what his admission might have entailed caught up with him, he thought he'd gotten away with it. How silly of him.

If he'd had cheeks, Warsman would have blushed. "It's..." How could he possibly make this sound appropriate? It wasn't that he'd been caught with an issue of The Pearl, but it seemed like precisely the sort of thing he could be misunderstood about. "It's about the life of a sinful woman," he settled on eventually, then busied himself leaning over a nearby armchair to check behind it, completely missing the book at his feet in his hurry.