As he entered, Mr. MacLean flashed a smile she could feel all the way to her toes. He lifted a pair of delicious-smelling parcels. “I brought you a present!”
Her stomach growled in response.
Angelica ignored her stomach. And the tingling in her toes. She might take whatever was in those parcels off his hands, but Mr. MacLean she ought to send packing.
“I said we could havedinnerstogether.” She cast her gaze pointedly at the clock behind her. “It’s not dinnertime.”
“And yet, one must eat.” He placed the parcels in the middle of the counter, between her work area and the display of jewelry.
“One must do one’s work,” she corrected, but it was no use. Her belly’s insistent grumbles loudly drowned out her own.
In her haste to return to her work, she’d once again failed to break her fast this morning. The Yuletide ball was in two days.
“One small respite,” she informed Mr. MacLean, who grinned at her. “One very quick, very fast, minuscule—ow.” A flash of heat slashed through the muscles of her wrist, convulsing the muscles of her hand. The tools she’d been attempting to carefully put away clattered into the drawer.
In seconds, Mr. MacLean was there in front of her.
“Let me see,” he demanded.
She rotated her wrist carefully, wincing at the pain. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something,” he said firmly. His eyes were not on her wrist, but rather on her face. His rakish smile was gone.
She shook her head. “It happens all the time.”
He raised a brow. “Allthe time?”
Well... all the time when she worked too much for too long without pause. Sometimes she held tiny tools in a cramped position for hours on end. Her muscles forgot what it was like to finally let go.
Mr. MacLean held out his hand, palm up. “May I?”
She wasn’t certain it was wise.
She was a Black woman with no husband. A professional jeweler in her place of business.
Mr. MacLean was not her friend. He wasn’t even a customer. He was a foppish white man who’d entered her shop on a lark because he was bored, and had nothing better to do with his time.
But he’d asked permission. And the secret truth was... Angelica was desperate to know how it would feel if he touched her.
Not “if.”Whenhe touched her.
She gave a little nod and held her crooked wrist out, just above his palm. She would not place her hand in his. He would have to do it himself.
His hands were warm and impossibly gentle. Strong and firm, as confident as the man himself. Smooth, as though he’d never worked a day in his life.
The pad of his thumb feathered softly against the inside of her wrist.
Her fingers flexed involuntarily, but not in pain. At the shock of her hand cradled in his, at the pleasure of being caressed so tenderly.
Everything about her hand felt suddenly unfamiliar. The way her muscles melted at the slow, calming strokes of his thumb. Over long, patient minutes, he coaxed all the tension from her wrist, then the base of her palm, then the center, tracing each line again and again before moving to the pads below her fingers and thumb, then the fingers themselves, one by one, gently, deliciously.
If it weren’t for the sturdy wooden counter between them, Angelica herself would have melted right into his exquisitely tailored chest.
Pity he was leaving after Christmas. She would pay him to stand here for the rest of their lives, her hand in his, massaging away all the pain until all she felt was this soporific lightness, as though the world weren’t quite real, and all that existed was the warm stroke of his thumb against her sensitive flesh.
She could kiss him for this. The thought made her lift her languorous gaze from her utterly relaxed fingers to the sharp angles of his jaw, his firm, narrow lips. Angelica did not lift her gaze higher. She didn’t want to see him watching her drink him in.
Mr. MacLean was handsome as sin, blast the man. He knew it, of course. It was in every stitch of his clothing, the swagger in his stride, the way his impish grin lit him from the inside whenever her eyes met his.
