It didn’t mean she’d misled him about anything else, necessarily. But it was certainly intriguing. Intriguing enough that he’d had to forcibly turn his mind away from the puzzle of Elizabeth Pickford to concentrate on his work.
Nothing less than the furthering of his most cherished goal would have sufficed to distract him from her. And if he’d spent any time in her company that day, it would have been all over.
Fortunately for Nathaniel’s sanity, Bess and Lucy had been busy with their own plans all week. Today, they had been engaged to attend a lecture followed by a supper in honor of a mathematician who had discovered some new realm of numbers—an event for which Nathaniel’s presence was neither required nor requested.
Right now, through the low-hanging haze of tobacco smoke and with the hum of the crowd in his ears, was the first time he’d seen Bess today.
It took everything he had not to stride across the ring to grab her and taste her lips. But instead they shared nothing more than a smoldering look before he applied himself to the business of knocking out Georgie “The Lad” Miller in three rounds.
Miller, a workmanlike but damned tenacious brawler, did not cooperate. It was nine brutal, exhausting rounds before Nathaniel managed to wear the man down enough to knock him to his knees. When Miller finally toppled over like a sack of spilled grain, Nathaniel blinked the stinging sweat from his eyes and touched his tongue to the copper taste of blood at the corner of his split lip.
Nothing hurt; the fight was still too near for that, but he knew that soon his hands would swell and throb. His shoulders would ache and burn. His legs would shake, especially the right knee where Miller had landed a vicious kick in the fifth.
But he had time. And she was here.
Or was she?
The place where she’d stood, head held high watching the fight, like a beacon in Nathaniel’s peripheral vision—was empty. Nathaniel scanned the crowd and found her speaking with Leda and Rufus by the back stairs.
As though she felt his eyes on her, Bess—or, Elizabeth, he should think of her that way to keep from slipping—looked up. He nodded at her, feeling strangely wrong-footed at this deviation from their usual routine.
Even the idea that they had a “usual routine” after only a week spent together. But what a week it had been.
She smiled, a burst of sunshine across the crowded tavern, and nodded back before disappearing up the stairs with Madame Leda. Nathaniel ducked under the rough rope that marked the outside of the ring and made to follow, but Rufus intercepted him with a slap on the back.
Impatient, Nathaniel barely spared him a glance, but Rufus blocked his route to the stairs with a cheerful forearm across his chest. Glaring down at the man, Nathaniel growled, “What?”
“Congratulations on the fight,” Rufus said jovially. “That uppercut in the third was a thing of beauty.”
“Get out of my way.” Nathaniel paused. “Unless…you know something I don’t.”
She was here. She’d gone upstairs. But perhaps she’d changed her mind.
“Ah, what could an old tar like me know that you don’t, guv? But you might like to give the ladies a moment. You know how they can be when a man blunders in and scuppers their plans.”
Nathaniel felt a bit of tension slide out of his shoulders. She still wanted him. It wasn’t over yet.
But now he had to wait.
Rufus handed him the shirt Nathaniel had stripped off before entering the ring, and Nathaniel shrugged it on.
“Come on, Berserker. I’ll stand you a drink.”
Nathaniel sighed and followed him to the bar. Patience had never felt so far from his reach. At least Rufus had a bottle of decent scotch whiskey he kept behind the bar for himself, to be shared only with the winners.
He dragged it out as far as he could stand to, but exactly fifteen minutes later, Nathaniel set his empty glass on the bar.
Rufus, who had left him severely alone once his first couple of attempts at conversation were met with one-word replies, looked up from the glass he was polishing and said, “Go ahead. She should be ready by now.”
Curiosity and impatience pounded in the back of Nathaniel’s skull as he took the stairs two at a time. It was strange to be the one knocking upon the familiar door this time. Anticipation made it a sharp, staccato rap.
He opened the door to find their room slightly less dimly lit than usual, by the light of not only their usual candle by the bed, but another on a small, spindly-legged table in the opposite corner that was set up next to an enormous copper bathtub.
Elizabeth stood beside the full tub, radiant in the steam curling up from the water. She looked well pleased with herself.
It was an expression Nathaniel particularly enjoyed seeing on her pretty face. He stepped further into the room.
“What’s all this?”
