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“What?” Andrew looked up. “Oh. You’d never know it but Gillie is handier with a knife than anyone should be, man or woman. And she has a room just across the close with a landlady who’s nearly deaf and couldn’t care what hour she returns home.”
“How convenient. And why does she get a knife?” asked Lavinia.
He shot her a crooked smile. “Because she bought herself one.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I’m glad you didn’t. If you deviated from our plan so much that you staged a fainting spell, who knows what sort of a menace you might have been while armed?” He rose from his chair, circled the desk, and gingerly framed her bruise with his fingertips. “How are you truly?”
The unexpected tenderness of his question sent a tingling sensation firing through her belly, and she had to swallow hard before answering. “I don’t know. I know you’re angry with me.”
“Angry, but appreciative. This is more than Gillie’s been able to find out in two weeks of work.”
“I just acted.”
“Almost without thinking,” he said with a nod, as though he understood completely.
“After the doctor came and declared that I could be moved, they sent me home in Wark’s carriage. As soon as I was inside the shop I started shivering and I couldn’t stop.”
He opened his arms, and she went to him without protest. As he pressed her against him, she couldn’t help feeling as though he were trying to pour some of his strength into her. She closed her eyes and drank it in, relishing it for as long as she could take it, because although she knew better than to hope for his forgiveness, she couldn’t deny that she was still drawn to him. It wasn’t just sex and intimacy she missed. It was Andrew himself.
“When you put your hood down and I saw your bruise, I thought . . .”
His low rumble reverberated through her chest to fill the spaces around her heart. Clenching her fingers in the light linen of his shirt, she said, “There was a time when I thought you’d welcome such a sight.”
“I never wished to see you hurt like that, Lavinia,” he said, pulling away slightly so that she was forced to gaze up at his earnest expression. “But don’t think kindly of me for that. I wanted worse for you.
“I wished that you would one day feel what it was like to have your heart ripped in two. When I found out you were married . . .”
“I know,” she said, remembering the way his face had crumpled.
She’d just left Alistair’s house. It had been two days after her wedding, and Alistair had claimed there had been no time to plan a honeymoon, although Lavinia now suspected that he’d already begun to feel the financial pressure that would eventually sink him. Her basket hung on her arm, she had intended to go to the little bookseller and the shop that sold ribbons, but then she’d spotted Andrew.
He hadn’t looked like himself, burnt brown as a berry and wearing a thick, barely contained beard, but she’d recognized him in an instant. It was his eyes, piercing blue and clear as the ocean on a calm day. Their eyes met and she knew in a moment that her life, her hope, was over.
He’d half run to her in the rolling jog of a man still unsteady on his feet after some long illness. But when he reached for her, she made herself step back, and confusion flooded his eyes.
“Lavinia,” he’d said, his words cracking as though he hadn’t used his voice in a long time.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “We all thought you were dead.”
A crooked smile lit up his sunburned face. “Lost at sea and found again. I’m home, Lavinia.”
She’d squeezed her eyes shut against the tears spilling out. It was too late for them. Just two days more and she could’ve been Mrs. Andrew Colter as she’d always wanted, but fate had played a cruel trick on her.
“Andrew, I have to tell you something.”
He brushed his fingertips along her arm, as though to touch her was to worship her. “I want to hear everything you would’ve put in a letter. I want to know every minute I’ve missed since I was lost.”
“I—”
“You’d do well to take your hands off my wife.” Alistair’s voice rang out from the front door of the house she now called home.
“Wife?” Andrew laughed, but when he saw the expression on her face he stepped back. “Wife.”
“As of two days ago,” said Alistair, striding forward to pull Lavinia to him by the waist. She struggled free and took a step away from her husband. “Who are you?”
“Andrew Colter,” she said, her voice hardly a whisper.
