It hadn’t been a knife, but rather an unlucky blow from The Builder, who’d been wearing a gaudily oversized ring that ought to have been outlawed. If only The Nemesis had any rules about that sort of thing.
But the fact that they didn’t was the very reason Nathaniel liked it.
“You have taken care of it as well as anyone could. Help me to stand,” he said, though he was only half sure his legs would support him. Anything to stop her questions about how he came by his injury.
With effort, he pulled his boots under him and shoved himself up the wall, using the support of her slim shoulder under his arm as little as possible.
He didn’t want to touch her, sweaty and fouled with the dregs of the fight as he was. It would be akin to rubbing dirt on the face of the Mona Lisa. A sin.
But what was one more sin?
When Bess curled a careful arm about his waist and anchored herself more securely under his side, Nathaniel did not resist. He let her lead him the few steps to the wooden chair set against the marble-topped worktable in the center of the kitchen.
Exhausted by the whole ordeal, Nathaniel all but fell into the offered seat. Evidently unprepared for his abrupt collapse, Bess gasped and toppled forward with him, only barely managing to catch herself with both hands against his shoulders.
Instinct had him reaching to steady her, despite the pain in his side—which faded into insignificance against the sensation of her lithe waist under his bare palms. The thin muslin of her dress was no barrier at all. He flexed his hands, almost able to imagine the fine-grained texture of her skin, the bare heat of her.
At his shoulders her hands flexed too, a reflexive mimicry that made him set his jaw against the moan that wanted to escape. He looked up into her face, so close and yet so unbearably far.
She stared down at him as though she’d forgotten where they were, and even perhaps who they were.
In this surreal moment out of time, they were not a duke and a chaperone. They were a man and a woman locked in the primal anticipation of the most intimate sharing possible between two people.
Her gaze dropped to his lips, which parted with his labored breathing. The lingering bloodlust singing through him was rapidly converting to an altogether different sort of lust, no less fierce and consuming.
He would have given everything he had, everything he possessed, for the right to take her lips in a kiss.
But Nathaniel did not have that right.
So he gathered the tattered, frayed remnants of his self-control and called upon the one thing he possessed that he had not inherited from his faithless fool of a father.
His honor.
With care, with respect, he eased her away from his straining body that yearned for nothing more than to pull her closer.
Her eyelashes fluttered briefly, masking the warm brown eyes with their flecks of cognac and cinnamon. “Thank you for your help, Bess. I promise you, I will be all right. Leave me, now.”
While you still can.
She straightened in a flustered rush. “Oh! Of course. You’re very welcome. Obviously, I could never leave anyone bleeding on the floor at my feet?—”
“Not even me.” Nathaniel realized he was smiling again. It felt strange, as though he’d forgotten how.
“Not even you,” she agreed, that deliciously tart note returning to her voice and making him want to lick her like a lemon ice. “But that is entirely enough excitement for me for one evening. I will bid you—oh no!”
Nathaniel quirked a brow as she rushed to the oven and used her own skirts to grab the iron handle of the door. Pulling it open, she reached in and pulled out a tray of…biscuits?
“I didn’t burn them!” To his amusement, she sounded nearly as relieved and pleased about that as she had when she’d pronounced his wound looking better. “Smell that, what do you think?”
She inhaled the scent of the biscuits—it was ginger, he realized suddenly, that dark spice he couldn’t place before—and the look on her face made Nathaniel clench his hands round the hard wooden seat of his chair to stop himself from reaching for her.
But he knew he’d picture that blissful expression of ecstasy on her beautiful features when he lay down in his bed later to pretend to sleep. That night, and every night that followed.
“They’re a little hot—ouch!—but oh.” With a giddy laugh, she plucked a steaming biscuit from the tray and blew on it before taking a bite. “Dear sweet lord in heaven, that is good.”
Mouth dry, breath caught, cock harder than stone in his breeches, Nathaniel watched avidly as Bess ate the entire biscuit and licked her fingers clean. When she opened her eyes after one final purr of satisfaction to find him staring, she flushed.
For a moment, he thought she’d tuck away those fingers and stammer an apology, embarrassed to be caught putting her hand to her mouth like a wayward child.
