Page 102

"I am filthy," he said.

"So I see," she said with a smile.

That startled a laugh out of him, low, tired, and real. She crossed the room, took his wrist, and undid the cuff he had been fighting with, then the other, then the buttons at his throat. He let her.

When she drew the shirt over his head, she found a red welt across his ribs where Whitlow's knee had caught him, and the healing scar on his left side where her own stitches had been.

She touched the scar with her fingertips, and he caught her hand against his skin.

"It's ticklish," he rasped.

She licked her lips. "Good to know."

He finished undressing himself and stepped into the water with a groan that was nearly indecent. Then he held out his hand.

"Would you like to join me?"

She looked at the water and wrinkled her nose. "Perhaps when you are not coated in blood and grime."

He laughed, and she settled on her knees by the tub. "But I can help you."

She took up the cloth and the soap from the rim before he could object.

She began with his hands. His knuckles were split, and there was dried blood in the creases. She washed it away, one finger at a time. Then his forearms, crusted with mud where his sleeves had been pushed back for the ride. Then his shoulders, and the back of his neck, where the rain had run down under his collar for a full day and night.

With every stroke of the cloth, she wished it away. Not just the mud, blood, and grime of the road, but all the rest of it, too.

The empty room at Sutton Hall and the note on the pillow. The letters that never came. The harbor in the mornings. The years spent waiting for a carriage that never turned up the drive.

She poured water over his hair from the jug and worked the soap through it. He closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward.

"You should know," he said after a while, taking the soap from her hands to wash his legs, "that my letters about Norway never reached you, because Whitlow never sent them. Nor did yours reach me. He meant to keep us apart, so that I should never have an heir, and perhaps so that I would drink myself into an early grave. I am not certain of the whole of his plan, but he was to blame for all of it."

Temperance swallowed. "Tell me," she said. "About your journey to Norway."

A pause.

"The winds were against us the whole way," he said finally. "I barely slept. I stood at the rail and counted the days, and every day we were later I told myself you would wait one more." He let out a breath. "We came in on the twentieth. I went to every house on that wharf. No one could tell me anything I understood. The only man who spoke English was a drunken watchman, who told me exactly what he thought of English wives who run off. Tyrone broke his nose for it. We spent the night in a Norwegian cell, and I sat there thinking you had not waited at all."

"Every morning," she said quietly, "I walked down to the harbor before the town was up and watched the sails come in, and then I walked back. I stayed a month past the date I gave you. I left on the fifteenth."

"Five days," he said.

"Five days."

He caught her wrist, wet and soapy, and pressed his mouth to the inside of it, holding it there.

"I wish I could have read your letters," he said at last. "All of them. Every one he took."

"Whitlow probably burned them." She laid her palm against his cheek, against the beard and the bruise along his jaw. "Besides, they are in the past. And you do not need letters, Edward. You have me."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"I do," he said, as if he were only now believing it.

"That night before our wedding, in the garden," she said. "With Daniel⁠—"

"You do not need to explain." His fingers tightened around her wrist. "It was a long time ago."