Page 22 of The Boxer’s Belle

“Probably for the best,” West agreed, because he was also a nincompoop.

Bella bit her tongue and stood to take her place at the table, where she snatched a piece of toast and started buttering it.

“Does she have specifications for her plantings?” she asked her brother, studiously ignoring the impossible man now seated beside her.

“There are diagrams,” Ben mumbled between urgent bites. “She’s got chrysanthemums, dahlias, asters, marigolds, and a few others growing in pots in the greenhouse.”

“Very well. Leave it with me.”

“Are you digging, then?” West asked, interest laden in the tone.

Bella had to fight to keep the smile from her lips. “Supervising, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“I’ll be painting the rest of your little signs,” Bella chirped as she speared a bite of sausage and brought it to her mouth.

* * *

The hours that followed found Bella with a paintbrush in her hands and Weston with a saw in his. Though they’d hoped to begin digging, the ground remained too wet after yet more rain, and they had to delay another day in favor of more booth assembly.

He’d set up another pair of sawhorses with the wooden signs he’d cut and assembled over the course of the previous days alongside her paints and brushes—because of course he had.

“Satisfactory for the supervising?” he asked when he arrived earlier that morning at the clearing, carrying a pile of lumber.

“Hardly, but I’ll make do.”

“You always do,” he said as he placed the wood down. Which was when Bella noticed his attire—or lack thereof. At least yesterday he’d worn a waistcoat. Today he’d donned only the thinnest of shirts, unbuttoned halfway to his navel, and those damn braces hung from his hips.

She whirled around to face her makeshift easel, her cheeks heating. Bella had very little experience in undressing a man—just the one instance with just this one man. But those braces—there had been something incomprehensibly satisfying about tugging those scraps of fabric and leather down his broad shoulders. She could still conjure his protesting groan when she’d implicitly asked him to remove his hands from her body to free himself of them.

But West intended to taunt her with them as they swayed around masculine thighs—a matador with a cape. Her dress sat far too high on her bosom to serve as fitting punishment for those damned braces.

“Brought you one of Mam’s old aprons. Didn’t want you to ruin your pretty frock,” he said, voice low, thick, and right behind her.

Masculine, calloused hands urged the white fabric over her head. Her memory hadn’t done those fingers justice—long and strong, rough, with squared nails. And there was still a hint of bruising at the knuckles, whether from his fight or his practice the other day, she didn’t know.

She spun around, trapped between West and the wooden board, apron tangled between them. “Thank you.” Her voice was raw, with a tinny quality, but that could be attributed to disuse.

“It’s a very pretty frock. Surprised you wanted to paint in it.”

“It’s older. The fit isn’t quite right⁠—”

“Oh, I’d say the fit perfectly achieves your aims,” he said, voice graveled, lips quirked up at one corner.

She fought to regain her footing against such an onslaught—with the braces, and the gravel, and the smirk. “What could you possibly know about my aims?”

His gaze flicked to her newly covered bosom and back to her eyes—a shade darker than the sky and so clear.

“You don’t need the dress, Belle. You’ve always had my attention.”

The diminutive slid along her spine before wrapping around her rib cage like a warm embrace.

“The day I do anything for your attention is the day the sun ceases to rise. And it’s Lady Arabella.” She snapped, a hateful, brittle note in the letters of her full name.

West merely nodded and stepped back, ripping the air with him. It made no sense, the way her lungs fought for air now that she was no longer sharing his.

He leaned back in and whispered, “Lady Arabella,” like a teasing caress. Damn him for turning those six syllables into something arousing.