But neither of those thoughts were doing him one whit of good any more than the reckless ones which had preceded it had.
His days of practice with Lady Evie had taught him there were certain words he struggled with, also certain sounds. She made an excellent teacher, however, and her gentle tutelage, coupled with his rudimentary past knowledge, had painstakingly turned into something promising. Just as well, for their time together was almost at an end. Difficult to believe the speed with which the last fortnight had passed.
He would miss Lady Evie Saltisford. Would miss her luscious apple scent, her smiles, her gold-brown eyes, her generous curves, and…having her near.Christ.What was the matter with him?
He forced his attention back to the words on the page she had written out for this lesson, struggling to make sense of the letters before him, strung into words and sentences. To follow the loops and swirls of the ink. To find meaning. Damnation, trying to read was not much different from trying to make sense of the way Lady Evie made him feel. Both seemed nigh impossible.
But try he would.
“The,” he read haltingly, his ears going hot with acute shame as he revealed the extent of his inability to her. “The… ball… stared to roll.”
Made no damned sense. Not any more sense than the way he felt about her did. A lady. Finer than Cora had been. Out of his reach. Betrothed to a fancy nib who would never appreciate her the way she deserved.
He sighed.
“Excellent work, Theo,” she praised, beaming at him as if he had just conquered all the world for her and laid it at her feet as spoils. “But try this word again, if you please. Sound it out slowly to make certain you are seeingallthe letters.”
He tore his gaze from her beautiful face and pinned his attention back to the paper and the words she had written. “The… ball…st-ar-ted to roll.” This time, he understood the sentence. “The ball started to roll.”
There.He had read a damned sentence, and it made sense this time, when he took care and sounded out the letters. Mayhap he was not as witless as the woman who had birthed him had always claimed. The only reason she had been able to read was because her father had been an apothecary and had taught her to help him with his ledgers. But when Devil labored over the words slowly, taking care to watch each letter and recall its sound, he could actually read a few words strung together.
“Wonderful!” Lady Evie exclaimed, her approval making other places go hot. Not just his ears.
His cheeks, for one. His heart for another. And as for the warmth sweeping to his ballocks, well, that could hardly be denied either. She was fetching and…sweet. Two words he had never supposed he would associate with milady at their first meeting.
“Will you try another?” she asked, her tone coaxing.
She was being patient and kind in a fashion no female before her ever had, showing him the sort of compassion he had only previously experienced from his siblings. He ached with the need to kiss her. To take her in his arms, the paper and the words she had written upon it be damned.
He glanced down at the next line, because he did not just want her approval. He wanted to bask in it. He wanted to make her proud, to prove to both her and himself that he could read.
Because he could. He suspected he had been capable of reading all along, but the mockery of the woman who had raised him still rang in his ears and landed in his chest like a vicious thorn.
“I…have…a kiss f-f—” He stumbled over the word, struggling.
“Note the sounds,” she encouraged.
“I have a kiss f-for you,” he finished, a triumphant sense of accomplishment bursting open inside him, rather like a bud in full bloom.
And then he realized what he had just read.
The scandalous bit of baggage.
“You have a kiss for me?” she asked.
She was smiling. The expression on her face could only be described with one word: pride. She wasproudof him. She, an elegant lady as fine as any he had ever met, was proud of him, Devil Winter. Bastard son of a Covent Garden whore. Born to the rookeries, sometime buzgloak—the pickpocket who had robbed the pockets of fancy coves to fill his belly.
Another knot was rising in his throat, along with a foreign emotion, lifting him up. Pride. In himself.
He swallowed against an unwanted rush of emotion. Something was pricking his bloody eyes, and he knew it was not tears because he did not cry. Not even when the man he and Dom had been sold to had attempted to hurt them. Not when he had acted first, defending them both with his quick thinking and his sharp blade.
“Theo?” she asked, her voice hushed.
As if she feared someone would overhear, when thanks to her, there was no chaperone to be found. No observation of propriety. Not that Devil gave a goddamn about such nonsense. Because he did not. Scandals and rules and polite society did not exist in the East End.
“You should call me Mr. Winter,” he forced himself to remind her. “When our time here is at an end, you will forget me.”
The smile faded from her lips. “I could never forget you.”
