“Your Grace,” he said, a soft rumble of thunder. “I must have done something wrong. You only ever call me by my honorific when you’re displeased with me.”
“That’s not true,” Bess said, swiping the back of her wrist over her damp forehead in irritation. “I call you ‘Your Grace’ because that’s what you are. A duke. And this is what I am.”
She lifted both hands free of the dough, scraps of the mixture clinging to her stickily, and swept her arms out to encompass the homely little kitchen, so much smaller and plainer than the grand kitchens at Ashbourn House.
Not that she would have been a suitable match for a duke if she worked in the finest kitchen in all the land. And it did neither of them any good to pretend otherwise.
So Bess lifted her chin defiantly and faced him down, daring him to…she hardly knew what. To look at her, finally, and see her as she truly was. No masks, no fancy dresses, no more secrets or half-truths or fantasies.
She waited and watched, using everything she’d learned about how to read this unreadable man.
Perhaps it was perverse, but she wanted to see the moment his attraction turned to revulsion, the moment he realized how far beneath him she was.
Maybe that would be enough to convince her poor fool of a heart to stop yearning and pining for what it could never have.
But instead of curling his lip and turning on his heel, Nathaniel leaned a hip against the tall worktable and crossed his arms. He was only in his shirtsleeves, she realized, cuffs turned back to expose the sinewy muscles of his forearms.
“You are what you have always been,” he said simply, as if it was just that easy.
It enraged her. “Yes. This is what I have always been. A simple woman, with a simple life.”
A woman he never would have touched if he’d known who she was. He must have been so shocked at the masked ball when he overheard her conversation with Lord Phillip and realized the truth of her identity.
He studied her, a half-smile twisting his lips on one side. “Is that what you want? A simple life. Now that you’ve had your London adventure and come home again. Are you content?”
“Yes,” she bit out. “Ecstatic. Can’t you tell?”
There was a pause. He watched her in silence for several long moments while Bess pounded and kneaded and worked the dough, and felt the yawning gulf between them open back up like a rift in the earth. Deep and impassable.
There had been no distance between them at The Nemesis. In that room, in that strange, liminal space between his brutal fights and their passionate lovemaking, they had been as intimate as it was possible for two people to be.
Stripped of the trappings of names and social standing, they had been nothing more than two human beings searching for closeness. And they’d found it together. Briefly.
That closeness felt like it belonged to another lifetime now.
“That looks like hard work,” he said, frowning. “Can I help?”
Bess snorted, then raised her brows at his stubborn expression. “Oh, you aren’t jesting. You want to help me knead bread? I don’t—it’s messy. Your hands…”
He held out the hands in question, broad palms and long, blunt fingers, thick, scarred knuckles. Those hands that had delivered hit after devastating hit in the ring—and then coaxed such pleasure from her body. Bess shivered.
Almost as though echoing her thoughts, he gave a wry smile. “These hands have done much worse than knead bread. Show me what to do.”
She wanted to argue that it was beneath his dignity, surely, but the words stuck in her throat.
There was nothing lowly about baking bread. Baking was art and craft and a bit of alchemy and almost entirely a labor of love. She wouldn’t be the one to belittle that labor.
Taking a bit of flour, Bess scrubbed her hands together to remove as much of the sticky, clingy dough as she could. Then she went round the table to where he leaned, all long-legged casual grace and power, and scattered another handful of flour across the clean surface on his side.
Taking another ball of dough from the small row she had waiting to be kneaded and set to rise in the warmest corner of the kitchen, Bess tossed it down in front of Nathaniel before going back to her side of the table.
“Go ahead,” she told him when he took a step back and stared down at the lumpy mass blankly. “It won’t bite you. Just do what I do.”
She went back to her own work, falling into the rhythmic pattern of the movements with a little exhalation of tension. But she kept a weather eye on her helper, and after a few minutes, took pity on him.
“Not like that. You’ll wear yourself out before you’ve got one loaf done. All it takes is this, just a simple push and press and turn, push and press and turn. No, let me show you.”
“Now I see why your hands are so strong,” he commented, flexing his fingers before plunging them back into the dough.
