He had noticed other things, too. The way the wet muslin clung to her waist and hips when he carried her. The weight of her against his chest. The hollow at the base of her throat, where the rain collected. The way her dress turned sheer where it pressed against her skin, and the effort it took him to keep his eyes on the path ahead.
He was trained to notice details. That training had never been less welcome.
He took off his coat, then his shirt and boots. He filled the basin from the pitcher and washed the mud from his hands, face, and arms. The water was cold. He did not mind cold. Cold was familiar. Cold was simple. It did not ask anything of him.
He thought about her face when she had pushed him away in the garden. Not afraid. Not angry. But something else. Something he did not have a name for yet.
He thought about the way she had looked at him when he told her about the orphans. No pity. No performance. Just attention. As though what he said mattered to her, and not because he was the Hound or because he had a title, but because he was a man standing in the rain telling the truth.
Nobody looked at him like that. Nobody had looked at him like that in twelve years.
He dried his hands. Put on a clean shirt. Sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress was too soft. He had slept on stone floors and ship decks and the hard ground of a dozen countries. A mattress like this made him feel as though he were sinking.
The room was warm. Someone had lit the fire while he was out in the storm. The flames threw light across the walls, the furniture, and the writing desk in the corner.
It was a nice room. Better than most of the rooms he had slept in over the past decade. Better than the cellar in Vienna, where the rats had names and the water came from a cracked jug. Better than the attic in Constantinople, where he had spent hot and weary days waiting for a man who never came home. Better than the narrow cot on the ship from Lisbon, where the ceiling was so low he could not sit up without hitting his head.
He had a house now. Nathaniel had seen to that. A manor in the north, near the Scottish border, with land and tenants and a roof that leaked in three places.
Edward had been there twice. Both times, he had slept on the floor of the study rather than the bed in the master chamber, because the bed was enormous and empty, and sleeping in it alone made him feel like a fraud.
A wife would change that. A wife would changeeverything. The house would have someone in it. The rooms would be used. The tenants would see a duchess at the door, and they would stop looking at him as though he might murder them in their sleep—which was fair enough given his reputation, but tiresome all the same.
He did not want a wife for the reasons most men wanted one. He did not want a companion or a mother for his children or a hostess for his dinner parties, because he did not have children and did not intend to host dinner parties, and companionship was a concept he had never fully understood.
What he wanted was simpler and harder to explain. He wanted someone who knew what he was and chose to stay anyway. He wanted someone who did not flinch.
Valeria Hughes did not flinch. She shook, and she went pale, and her fingers trembled around the ghost of a teacup. But she did not flinch. And that one stubborn act of courage had undone twelve years of careful indifference in the space of an afternoon.
He should write to Nathaniel. His brother would want a report. How the auction was going, whether Edward had embarrassed himself, and whether the Hound had frightened everyone into leaving. Nathaniel worried about these things. He believed that Edward could be civilized, which was either touching or deluded, depending on the day.
Edward thought about what Nathaniel had said before he left. They had been in Nathaniel’s study, a warm room with too many books and a fire that was always too hot. Nathaniel had sat behind his desk with his fingers steepled and his brow furrowed and that look on his face that meant he was about to say something Edward would not want to hear.
“Ye cannot keep doing this,” he had said. “Living in rooms with no furniture. Eating while standing up. Sleeping with a knife under yer pillow.”
“The knife is practical.”
“The knife is a symptom. Ye are not at war anymore, Edward. The war is over. It has been over for two years. You have a title and a house and an income, and ye are living like a man who expects to be killed in his sleep.”
“Old habits.”
“Old habits that are going to eat ye alive if ye do not find something else.Someoneelse.” Nathaniel had looked at him then with the expression of an older brother who had spent his entire adult life worrying about his younger one. “Go to theauction. Meet the woman. Try to be a person for one week. That is all I am asking.”
Edward had agreed because saying no to Nathaniel required more energy than saying yes, and because somewhere underneath the spy and the soldier and the killer, there was still a man who wanted to sit at a table and enjoy a meal without checking the exits first.
However, he did not tell Nathaniel that. He merely said, “Aye, fine,” and then left the study, packed a bag, rode to Thornhill, and walked into a room full of men who were afraid of him and a woman who was not.
He looked at the writing desk. The inkpot. The paper. He did not write. He did not know what he would say.
Dear Nathaniel, I have kissed my hostess in the garden, but she pushed me away. I stopped immediately, and she agreed to marry me. I do not understand any of it.
That was not a letter. That was a confession.
He leaned back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. The plaster had a crack in it that ran from the window to the center beam. His eyes followed it.
Her smile. That was the part he kept circling back to. Small and quiet and directed at him in front of everyone, as though shewere not afraid to be seen choosing him. As though he were a man worth smiling at.
He was the Hound. He had killed men in cellars and alleys and once on the steps of an opera house. He had done things that woke him in the middle of the night and kept him awake till dawn. He was not a man worth smiling at. He knew that.
