He prowled closer to her, deceptively slow and casual in the low light of the morning, stopping just behind where she sat and draping his fingers over the back of her chair. “Yes, you will. In fact, perhaps you ought to save the padded one until you really need it.”
She was holding her hair at the middle, winding the comb through it, watching him with a wary sort of fascination, their eyes locked through the reflection in the mirror. “When will that be?”
“It is hard to say,” he replied with a wistful little shrug. “However long it takes until you can’t sit comfortably anymore.”
Outside, the bell rang once more, as though to punctuate the threat.
She stared at him, waiting for elaboration. Surely he didn’t mean …
“Because of exhaustion?” she prompted.
He chuckled rather than answering, choosing instead to lick his thumb and lean down next to her, until their cheeks were almost touching. He dragged it along the tip of her chin, where a streak of flour had managed to linger through the night. “Dirty,” he whispered. “Must keep up appearances.”
She almost choked at it, her breath sticking in her throat like a thicket. “You said I was safe in my room,” she reminded him thinly.
“I did say that,” he agreed, rubbing away the flour from between his fingers, pulling away the thin night rail fabric from her shoulder and dropping a warm little kiss there before he stood back up. “But then you invited me in. You knew better than to do that, Claire.”
She managed to make herself swallow, turning to the side at his hand still resting on her bare shoulder and then blinking up at him from where she sat. “For the night,” she reminded him,knowing now that this was just theater, that she didn’t mean a damn word she was saying. “For one night.”
He only smiled again. Only laughed.
And then he turned and left her there, alone with the sunlight and the mirror and the rest of the flour staining her flesh.
Alone with the promise of what was to come.
“Shin-kicking?”Claire repeated in horrified disbelief. “And it’s what it sounds like?”
“Oh, entirely,” Tommy confirmed with a bark of laughter. “Two gents hold one another by the shoulders and just thrash away until one or the other collapses. When I was still the countess, we had to put a man in jail for hiding nails in the toe of his boot.”
“Oh,” said Freddy from ahead of them, turning slightly from where Oliver rode on his shoulders. “In front of the boy, Tommy?”
“Nails!” Oliver repeated, mouth still half full with his breakfast pie. “In his boot!”
“Charming,” Freddy said with a sigh.
“It is, isn’t it?” Tommy replied, clearly unbothered. “Anyway, a lot of them will pad their trousers with hay or otherwise try to skew the odds in their favor. It’s a lot more boring to watch than you might imagine, though, just a bunch of muffled thumping as they grimace at one another.”
“But it is called the Olympicks,” Claire pressed, still a little unwilling to believe it. “Aren’t they going to do the ancient games, javelins and discus and so on?”
“They are not,” Tommy said with an apologetic shrug, “and they won’t be naked either.”
“Tommy!” Freddy said without turning around this time, only making her laugh.
At this point, Dot and Silas caught up to them, working at a bit of a jog from how they’d fallen behind in the first place.
“We overslept,” Dot said with a weak smile of apology as her husband caught his breath beside her.
“Did we?” Silas replied mildly, making Dot blush.
“We were just discussing the games themselves,” Claire told them, glancing between the couple and wondering if they, too, had discovered the allure of an empty kitchen in the night. “Silas, why didn’t you warn us about shin-kicking?”
Silas gave a startled laugh, glancing knowingly at Tommy. “Ah, I should have, shouldn’t I? I find that there’s a bit of glee in watching people react to it all for the first time, to be honest. Did they tell you about the dwile flonking?”
“The what?” Dot repeated, aghast.
“Those are not real words,” Claire replied dismissively, well-trained to know when she was being teased after even a brief marriage with Freddy.
“I’m afraid they are,” Freddy put in, recognizing her tone.
