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He smiled at her insistence. “I did not know you were a medical professional.”
She cut him an irritated look. “I find I do not like it when you are talkative.”
He gave a little bark of laughter and stole a small, delicious kiss. “You cannot blame me for having less interest in my bruises than in your body, Hattie.”
She went soft at the words. “Really?”
“It’s your own fault . . . now I’m curious about your undergarments.”
She resisted the excitement and amusement that came at the words, instead affecting her most serious look. “But I am interested in your bruises.”
A pause, and then a barely-there grunt of acceptance. “If I let you tend to my wounds, will you let me ruin you?”
There it was again, the temptation of freedom. The answer that she did not have to hesitate over.
She met his eyes, loving the fire in them. “Yes.”
Chapter Nineteen
Contrary to Hattie’s belief, Whit had never had a woman in his rooms.
The house had a massive ground floor receiving area and an office for Whit and Devil, so there’d never been reason to have Annika or any of the other women from the warehouse in his rooms. Grace had been in them a half-dozen times, but only long enough to mock his extravagant decor and leave.
As for other women—Whit never brought them here. He didn’t want to answer questions about the space. Didn’t want to defend the odd-shaped garret filled with the things he loved most in the world. And he certainly didn’t want to give another person such access to his private pleasures.
But he had not hesitated to bring Hattie inside, even though the act of welcoming her into the space she called his lair had left him far more exposed than he’d felt when he’d bathed in front of her.
Bathing in front of her had only made him want to pull her into the bathtub with him, strip her out of her ridiculous disguise, and wash her until they were both panting with desire and he had no choice but to make her come until she screamed.
Whit thought he’d been immensely measured in not doing just that, honestly.
And then the woman had started talking about undergarments. He should be fucking sainted for stopping the sinful kiss they’d shared, full of heat and exploration and promise, and letting her tend to him with bandages and ointments when what he needed was her lips and hands.
He thought he showed immense restraint, when all he wished to do was prove that there was nothing at all impeding about the bruises, and he was quite capable of tossing her over his shoulder and taking her to bed.
But he didn’t. Instead, he sat and watched as she selected a wide strip of bandage and a pot of ointment, coming to sit beside him. “Turn toward the light,” she said, staring at his naked torso, as perfunctory as any doctor.
He did, and she reached out, slowly and tentatively. “I’m going to . . .”
“Touch me,” he growled. He didn’t think he could go much longer without her soft fingers on him.
She did as he asked, and they both sucked in a breath. Her gaze flew to his, and she lifted her hand as though she’d been burned. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said, catching her fingers and returning them to his skin. “Don’t stop.”
Don’t ever stop.
She didn’t, smoothing over the mottled skin there. “This is a wicked bruise.”
He grunted, trying to ignore the pleasure that came with the sting.
“You should see a surgeon. Do you have a surgeon?”
“I don’t need a surgeon,” he said.
I need this. I need you.
She traced her fingers over the darkest part of the bruise. “I think you might have broken a rib.”
He nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first.”
Her brows shot together. “I don’t like that.”
Pleasure was not enough of a word to describe the way her stern reply coursed through him, untethered and electric. He sucked in a breath at the sensation, wanting to assuage her worry. “They heal.”
She didn’t look convinced, but opened the pot of salve, lifting it to her nose. “Bay,” she said softly before meeting his eyes. “You use this frequently.”
“I fight frequently.”
She winced at the words and he wished he could take them back. “Why?”
He didn’t reply as she spread the ointment over his torso, her movements smooth and sure, and gentle enough to make him ache in an entirely different way. When was the last time he’d been tended to?
Not for decades.
He found he did not want to go back, not now that he knew the feel of her hands on him. Her soothing touch. The way she awakened every inch of him as she cocooned them in lemon and bay.
“What is in it?” she asked. “How does it work?”
“Willow bark and bay leaf.” If anyone else had asked, Whit would have ended his reply there. But this was Hattie, and everything was different with her. “My mother used to make something similar. She called it suave de sauce. Rubbed it on her hands before bed.”
“They ached from the needlework.”
He hated how easily she understood something it had taken him years to work out. Hated the guilt that racked him. “I did what I could to bring money in, so she didn’t have to work so hard, but she didn’t want me on the streets. She paid for me to take lessons in the back room of a haberdasher off Saint Clement’s Lane. Insisted I learn to read. Some weeks, the candles cost more than the money from her work.” It was a lesson Whit had never forgotten. One he thought of every time he lit the candles in this room—more than he’d ever need, as though he could light that room for his mother if he tried hard enough. “Every time I told her I wanted to work, she would remind me that the lessons were already paid for. Used to say that if—”
He stopped.
Hattie’s touch didn’t waver. He focused on the smooth, wonderful strokes.
“She used to say that if it killed her, I’d grow up to be a gentleman.”
It was why he’d left her. How his father had kept him fighting for a dukedom he’d never been meant to inherit.
And it had killed her.
He swallowed the thought, letting the bitterness settle before he added softly, “What she would think of me now.”
Hattie was quiet for a long moment—long enough for Whit to think that she might not reply. But she did, because she always knew what to say. “I think she’d be proud of you.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” he said. His mother would have loathed his life. She would have hated the violence he lived daily, the filth of his world. And she would have found the way he’d betrayed Hattie unconscionable. “She’d have hated everything but the books.”
She smiled at the words, her touch unwavering. “There are a lot of books.”
“We couldn’t afford them.” He didn’t want to tell her that. It wasn’t her business. And somehow, he couldn’t stop talking. “She couldn’t read, but she revered them.” He cast a look around the room. “She couldn’t afford them, and I don’t even keep them in a bookcase.” Another way he’d failed his mother.
Hattie didn’t look up from her work. “Seems to me that the best way for you to honor her reverence is to read them. And these all look well-read.”
