“Awful, Nicholas.” She shivered.
“You remember him? Did you meet him with Adam on the docks?”
“I want to forget him, all who hurt us.”
How many stories had he told Ruth of unreliable Nickie, his sometime-friend, sometime-enemy cousin? He hadn’t realized the depth of the treachery between them.
“I should do something for privacy, Mrs. Wilky.”
He moved and shared the step with her. He put his back to the window and spun her to face him. “See, my cape comes in handy.”
“I still have your other one. I like it. I like the smell of it, of you.”
“Bay Rum? You like? Doesn’t seem like your fragrance.”
“Yes, I love that cologne. It was Adam’s.”
“The man had great taste.”
She held his gaze and that feeling of the two of them against the world wrapped about him.
“I think we need to walk, Mrs. Wilky. If we stand like this much longer, I won’t be a good cousin. I’ll be a man who’s fallen for a good woman.”
She took off her spectacles. Then those wicked, teasing fingers slipped across his chest and put her lenses into his tailcoat. “I’m ready. Escort me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m confused on your orders. Do you want to walk or are you asking me to have at you now?”
“Walk, my lord.”
“An order from a woman is an interesting thing. Yes, ma’am, my spirited minx.”
She shook her head. She was easy again, more relaxed, more old Ruth, his Ruth. Good.
Yet he was hot and bothered, falling more in want of her.
Ruth looked as if she could arrange flowers.
“Do you have anything else for my pocket—a necklace, a handkerchief? Feel free to use me.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Wycliff started down the steps, taking her with him. They made it to the last one, but he did not stop. He kept going, leading her with fingers entwined.
Like a boat in still waters, she floated alongside him. In silence, they walked a block and then another.
They were in step. It was like old times, except it wasn’t. Her face was pinned to his chest, her knuckles had become white within his palm.
“Tell me how to make this better, Mrs. Wilky.”
“Do you truly wish to meet my son?”
Wycliff loved a turn of phrase, the punniest puns. Something stung when she said her son, not theirs, not hers and Adam’s.
Was this her way of admitting the truth, that Christopher Wilky wasn’t…
He pushed questions of the boy’s paternity to the back of his mind. Ruth thought him dead. Whatever had happened, what choices she’d made, even if she’d found comfort in her grief—none of it mattered.
Wycliff was here now, and he’d take on any responsibility that made Ruth happy. He owed her that. “I do wish to know Christopher Wilky. It will be my pleasure to meet him, to be a part of his life, Ruth.”
