Marriage had a lot to teach Nicholas, for although just minutes ago he had been adamant that Isadora would not have a hand in tending to his wound, she had somehow contrived to lead him upstairs and sit him down on the edge of his bed, while she rang for warm water and rags so she could bathe his fresh cut.
There was a line of fire down his side where the man’s knife had caught him. A shallow slice, painful but by no means dangerous. Then her fingers went to his shirt buttons, and every thought of that pain left him entirely. She worked them loose until cool air kissed his bared skin, and her gaze followed, sliding slow as poured honey down the ridges of his stomach to the bloodied cut at his side. The pink tip of her tongue touched her upper lip before she caught it.
She asked nothing of the shoddy clothes. Or the mask. With her, he hadn’t had a chance to change, much less explain why he was there, or why he had gone out of his way to conceal his identity.
Something she had risked compromising.
Why had she gone out of her way to follow him at all?
“Are all men like… this…jaggedhere?” she whispered by his abdomen.
His brow arched as he looked down at her bent auburn head. “I am… not entirely sure how to answer that.”
Her curls had slipped their pins, garnet-dark, wine-dark, coiling loose against the milk-white nape of her neck, and her breath spilled warm across his ribs with every exhale. When he had seen those two ragamuffins crowding her against the wall, rage had risen in him like floodwater. He had wanted to break their legs for speaking to her.Speaking to her.No, he had wanted far, far worse.
She was too delicate for that world. Too soft, too unbruised. She’d never seen the darkness that lingered in the gutters of society, and if he had his way, he would keep it that way.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, raising her head and framing him with those honey-brown eyes. They looked softer in the candlelight, like melted syrup.
“Not much.”
“Don’t lie to me. A cut like thishasto hurt.”
“If you think you know the answer, why ask?”
“Because I just wanted to hear you say it,” she murmured, so gently he almost missed it.
“You wanted me to say I was in pain?” he frowned.
“Iwantedto know you could admit to weakness.” She dipped the rag back and dabbed it against his side, and warm water traced a thin rivulet down his ribs. Her fingers followed it, cool as pearls against the burn of the cut, and they were trembling—he was almostcertainthey were trembling—her knuckles grazing his waist and lingering there a breath longer than any nursing required.
“All right.” His voice rasped, but he couldn’t help it. All he could think about was her scent, the feel of her fingers on his skin, and the lushness of her mouth as she sank her teeth into her lower lip, worrying it. He wished he could free it, slide his fingers there instead. “I’ll admit it if you want me to.”
Her eyes shot back up to his. “You will?”
He nodded. “It hurts.But,” he prefaced, wrapping a hand around her dainty wrist to still hers, “it hurts far less now than it did.”
“Really?” Her thin brows drew together. “You bled right through your shirt.”
“I’ll buy a new one.”
She leaned closer, her breath flowering across his skin as she bent to examine the cut. “Should I stitch it closed?”
“No.” He tugged on the wrist he held, gently pulling her away. She came easily, looking up at him trustingly, and the thought that she could be so comfortable with him when he had seen her be so viscerally afraid with the other men made his chest ache.
He did not deserve to look at her the way he did in that moment, but he didn’t think he could stop himself. Already, despite his injury, he could feel himself hardening at her proximity, and the knowledge they were so close to a bed.
“I don’t need stitches,” he breathed, as gently as he could manage. Only hours ago, she’d had the fright of her life, and stitching his flesh back together was the very last thing she needed. “I promise you, Isadora.”
She glanced down at the place his fingers wrapped around her wrist.
He ought to release her, he knew, but he could not bring himself to.
Wanting Grace had been the very worst sin he could have committed, and it had gone so terribly, it had scarred him for the rest of his days. If not for him, she might still be alive now. It washis irrepressible passion that had led them down this dark path, and he had vowed—never again.
But in doing so, he had not considered Isadora.
This close, he could nearly count the scattered, faint freckles on her nose and cheeks, sun-blurred into almost nothingness. Her shell-pink lips were soft, twisting into an expression partway between a smile and something else. Something that drew him in and beckoned him forward.
