Page 45 of Faceless

She heard the smallest huff of amusement. Barely a breath. It surprised her as much by its ordinariness as by its existence — the sound an ordinary man made at an ordinary joke across an ordinary supper-table, and the fact that he had made it across this one, in the dark, was a thing she could not quite dismiss.

“Not yet thirty,” he said.

She had been sure she would hear a number and turn it against the picture she had been building all day. What the picture had been was vague and mostly elderly — an infirmity, a long decline, a reason to take a wife by proxy and not come to her bed the first night as a husband had a right to. His hands were strong enough, but hands could be young on a man whose face was not.

Not yet thirty did not fit the picture. Not yet thirty was a man in the prime of his youth — a man who hid his face but had not been broken slowly by the years. Something had happened to him, and he had not yet finished being young in spite of it.

If he were telling her the truth.

“How tall are you?”

“Why?”

“Because you are a person in a room with me and I cannot see you, and I want to know at least one physical fact about you that is not your hands.”

He did not answer immediately. She heard the silence and thought he was going to decline. Then she heard his chair push back.

His footsteps crossed towards her — four steps, five — and stopped. Nothing happened for a moment that was long enough to wonder if he had changed his mind. Then his fingers found her hair first, very lightly — he had misjudged where her shoulder was in the dark. “Forgive me,” he said, very low, and his hand moved carefully down until it found her arm.

He found her hands by lightly tracking down her sleeves, drew her very lightly to her feet, both his hands finding hers, and then he guided her hands up… and up… until they rested on his shoulders.

His shoulders were level with her forehead.

She had not expected that. She had been building a picture of him since the first evening, and the picture had been wrong on this point — she had imagined someone her father’s height, something manageable, and instead she was standing with her palms on his shoulders, and he exceeded six feet by several inches.

She spread her fingers carefully and felt what she thought was a finely made waistcoat beneath her palms, and beneath the waistcoat the breadth of him — not a labourer’s bulk but a large frame, the solidity of shoulders that had grown into themselves with a gentleman’s level of activity.

She was trying to take the full measure of it. She was also aware that her hands could keep going — to his neck, to his jaw, to whatever his face was — and that this was exactly what he was not offering her, and that the restraint required to keep her hands where they were was more than she had anticipated needing.

He was warm. Even through the layers between them, his warmth reached her palms, and the cold of the room had been receding since she came to her feet. She had not known how cold she was until she was this close to him.

She heard his breathing, controlled and even; he was holding himself very still. At last, he stepped back, and she heard the distance open between them again, and the cold came back to her hands.

“Does that satisfy your question?” he whispered.

“One question. I find it has raised several more.”

There was that faint huff again, almost as if he would have wished to laugh. “I regret that is the only one I can answer for you.” His hand found hers and guided her back to her chair, and he held it for her before he returned to his own side of the table.

Tall. Considerably taller than she had imagined. Broad. Standing square and even, no favouring of one side. She had been quietly ruling out a crippling injury since she first heard his footsteps the night before. Now she was certain. Whatever had disfigured him was not something he carried in his body.

His face, then. It had to be his face. Something bad enough that he would go to these lengths rather than let her see it. She had been on the verge of asking to touch his face — the thought rose, and she closed her mouth on it and sat down and picked up her fork.

She settled her foot where it ought to go and found something firm against her shoe. Either the table leg or his boot. She could not tell which and could not think of a way to investigate that was not mortifying. She drew her foot back.

“Did you like the dog?” he asked.

The shift was so completely unexpected that she nearly laughed out loud. “I — yes. Considerably.”

“What does it look like?”

“What does it—” She stopped. “Angus said you paid double for it because you wanted that specific dog, and you do not know what it looks like?”

“I asked for a young dog, large enough to be company on a walk and of an easy disposition. Angus brought what he could get. I have not laid eyes on it myself.”

She found this unreasonably affecting — that he had arranged something he could not see for someone he had met once, entirely on good faith.

She told him about the dog. The paws. The legs. The ears. The total confident certainty with which the dog had installed himself in the kitchen. And he listened with an active interest, asking questions in that careful, rehearsed whisper that sounded nothing like polite detachment.