Page 10

She set the kettle on the range, competently now, and he watched her face for any sign she was testing him. There was none. She had no idea how close to the truth she'd come.

He set the Friar's Balsam and the laudanum on the table.

"What are those?"

"Balsam for the cut on your hand. Laudanum for the hip."

She stared at the bottles, then at him. "You've been watching me?"

"There’s no money for a physician. Tend to it before they get worse."

She looked at him. "I am not certain whether to thank you or not."

"Don't hurt yourself pulling weeds that won't fill our bellies."

"What shall I do then?"

"Clear the grates, black the stove, clean the lamps."

"What will you be doing?"

"That is my business."

"Everything you do on this property is my business. I am the mistress here."

"You’ve been paying me with insults."

She opened her mouth to fire back and stopped. Her fingers turned the vial of laudanum, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. He watched the argument leave her face in stages. What remained was harder to look at.

"You are right," she said. "I have been unkind to you. You repaired the floorboard and the window frame in the dining room, and you brought me medicine and I have given you nothing but abuse in return. I apologise. That was badly done of me."

He had no answer for this. In thirty years of life, no one had ever said those words to him. Not least of all a lady. The mistress of the manor.

He picked up the Friar's Balsam from the table where she'd set it down. Unstopped it. Took her hand, the one with the cut from the garden thorns, and turned it over.

Her palm was soft. Even with the cut and the blisters from the flint and the calluses beginning to form at the base of her fingers, the skin beneath was fine-grained and pale, the hand of a woman who'd not held more than a pen. His own hand beneath it was twice the width, brown, the knuckles scarred, the nails cracked and black with soil that no amount of scrubbing would shift. Her hand sat in his like something that didn't belong there, pale on brown, soft on rough, a world apart measured in skin.

He dabbed the balsam along the cut with his thumb, careful, and the sting of it made her breath catch. Her fingers curled involuntarily against his palm and he felt the smallness of them, the bones beneath the skin as light and precise as a bird's, and he let go before he felt something.

"Thank you," she said. Quiet. Her cheeks had flushed, and her lips were red and damp where she'd bitten them against the sting, and she was looking at him with an expression he hadn't earned—open, uncertain, stripped of the armour she wore against him every other hour of the day.

He should have said something. Tend your hands or don't mention it or anything that closed the moment down and put the distance back. Instead, he stood there, watching her mouth.

He had spent his whole life thieving in the dark, but looking at her mouth made him want to commit a far worse sin. Her lower lip was still bitten white, her breath coming short, the flush on her throat creeping past her collar. Every gutter-born instinct in him wanted to pin her to the wall and swallow every word she'd ever say to him.

He didn't have a gentleman's patience to woo her. He had only the raw urge to ruin them both. He was hardening and soon there would be no hiding it.

Kit turned on his heel and left the kitchen.

Then he heard a thud and the dull clank of wood on wood. Kit stopped. Didn't look behind him. He knew by now that she'd rather he walk on than acknowledge he'd witnessed her fall. So he kept walking, out through the side door and into the yard.

He picked up the axe. There was no wood that needed splitting. He split it anyway.

Anger he knew what to do with. Anger kept a woman at a distance, which was where she needed to stay. A woman who shouted and threw orders and called him a brute was a woman he could dismiss, file away, keep small enough in his mind to finish the job and move on. He had not planned for an apology. He had not planned for a voice gone quiet and honest or for the sight of her standing in a crumbling kitchen naming the things he'd done for her as though each one mattered, as though she'd been counting them in silence all along.

He'd expected to pity her. Pity kept a man at arm's length, which was where he needed to be. Wanting pulled him closer. He hadn't planned for closer.

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