Mr. Pike’s fine eyes had lit with a certain appreciation throughout this.
“But what if you open the door to thugs, bent on mayhem?”
“But what if it’s a lady, who is running away from harm and feels more comfortable and welcome speaking with another lady?” she countered.
He pressed his lips together as he considered this. “Your point is taken.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Forgive me,” he said humbly. “I did not realize there was a particular art to answering the door at a boardinghouse. And clearly there is.”
Pike had kind eyes, Dot thought, but they were also very intense eyes, not dissimilar to Captain Hardy’s. He was not, on the whole, a soft or very easy person, she would warrant. But he had said “forgive me,” and she knew enough about men to know the ones who conceded anything at all to a woman were rare as hen’s teeth.
“Idothink about things, you know,” she said. Quietly.
“It sounds rather nice, the way you put it. Answering the door. Opening the peep hatch,” he said wistfully. “Being excited about the new people.”
“Oh, itis,” Dot agreed.
Mr. Pike seemed thoughtful. He sighed. “How is your hand?” he asked. “Does it hurt?”
“It does, a little,” she said shyly.
“May I see?”
Dot had a powerful sense of propriety. One did not go about casually surrendering their hands to men, and touching the very handsome ones was particularly inadvisable.
But his eyes were wry and reassuring, so finally she gingerly laid her wounded hand in his outstretched palm.
He inspected her knuckles. “You ought to put cool water on it as soon as you can. The water in the basin in your room should be nice and cold now.”
“All right,” she said. Blushing. “How is your face?”
His face was handsome, that’s how it was. This fresh realization made her own face even hotter.
“Never mind my face. I’ve stood up to worse than you. But don’t take that as a dare!” he added, hurriedly, with a laugh. And then a wince.
He was going to be sporting a bruise.
“What if... we answer the door together when someone knocks after dark,” he suggested, tentatively.
“Perhaps... every Wednesday, when there is a full moon, you can have your turn,” she said magnanimously.
Mr. Pike could tell that it cost her. “Are you jesting?”
“A little,” she admitted. “Or we can flip a coin.”
“That is very generous of you, indeed,” he said humbly. “You’ve a kind heart, Dot. Perhaps now that I’m working here you’ll even find you have more free time to do other things you want to do.”
“Like write my memoirs?” she said brightly.
He blinked.
“Perhaps you can include a chapter about the time you knocked a six-foot-tall footman to the ground.”
“Maybe I will include a sentence or two about that in one of the chapters,” she humored, kindly.
He stared at her. Pike had never, in all of his born days, met a more confounding female. And he’d worked withmanydifferent sorts of women, housemaids and the like, and he had a sister. And it was increasingly clear to him that while Dot wasn’t featherbrained or witless or silly, her mind operated in unfathomable-to-him ways. Ben Pike was a serious person, dutiful and intelligent and straightforward. Following the run of Dot’s thoughts, or predicting what she might say next, felt to him as futile as trying to catch hold of a sunbeam. Wherever had Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand found her? he wondered.
