She sighed heavily and reached into his large coat. Her searching fingers brushed over a little collection of the kinds of homely things men carried about: something made of stiff paper, perhaps a theater ticket, a tiny box that might have been for snuff, or perhaps a flint and steel—did he take snuff? Surely not. A few shilling coins.
How terribly odd and sad it seemed that she didn’t know the kinds of things her husband tucked into his coat pockets.
It smelled of tobacco and woodsmoke, a hint of cloves, and perhaps a touch of horse. She didn’t know why all of this together should be comforting. Somehow it was.
Her hand emerged holding a handsome little silver flask. His initials were engraved upon it in fancy curlicues. It was the sort of thing men were given as a gift.
She pulled the bung, took a breath as though she were about to wade into freezing water, and recklessly took her first-ever gulp of whiskey.
She immediately coughed and spluttered.
Dear God. She might as well have poured fire down her throat.
Eyes streaming, she stared him, half in amazement, half in betrayal.
She’d hadnoidea about whiskey.
The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “It gets better in a moment.”
Even as he said that, a blessed warmth wasstealing through her solar plexus, and into her veins, it seemed, flowing like satin over the raw, jagged edges of her nerves.
“Oh, I understand whiskey now,” she breathed.
His smile was fleeting, but real.
And so they sat together quietly.
She didn’t apologize for throwing things.
He didn’t apologize for being the icy, imperious bastard who had inspired her to throw things.
She supposed they tacitly agreed they were both entitled to be somewhat awful, given the circumstances.
A weighted detente of some sort seemed to settle. She tucked the whiskey back into his pocket.
Then again, over the course of his life, he’d been shot at by bullets and cannonballs, a few of which famously had not missed. A hurled slipper or dress was child’s play. If anything ever truly shook him, it was impossible to tell. Impassivity seemed to be his special skill. Revealing vulnerabilities could get one killed in battle, she supposed. Perhaps it went bone deep. Perhaps, despite his flashes of humor, he was merely an iceberg in Weston-cut clothes.
After all, a man had to be assumed invincible if he wanted to get men to follow him into battle and do all that fighting.
This was what she told herself, anyhow.
It was easier to believe this.
Because she sometimes awoke from fitful dreams of turning around that fateful night inthat twilit garden, to find him standing there. A silent witness to her perfidy.
He’d been utterly motionless. His face white and stunned as if he had just taken a cannonball to the gut.
Chapter Four
“Why do you have whiskey so readily to hand?” she wondered, almost conversationally, into the elongating silence. “In case you need to subdue hysterical women? Or is it for fortifyingyourselfagainst hysterical women?”
“For pain,” he said shortly. Absently. His expression was thoughtful. But he wasn’t blinking.
She leveled a searching gaze at him. Damn it all. Despite everything, she didn’t like the notion of him being in pain.
“So in other words, yes to both,” he added, a second later. With a flickering ghost of a smile.
She eyed him cautiously. Though she did indeed find this rather blackly funny, she was disinclined to reward him with anything like a laugh. It seemed inadvisable to betray any sort of weakness to this man. To relent in any way. Though she wasn’t precisely entitled to it, she had her pride, too.
