He looked at her, and something flickered in his expression, surprise or recognition or both, and he sat in the chair beside the worktable without another word.
Mary moved. She found a basin on the lower shelf and filled it with water from the pump. She pulled clean clothes from the linen cupboard beside the pantry. On the highest shelf, behind a row of cooking wines, she spotted a bottle of brandy and brought it down.
She set everything on the worktable beside him. Evander looked at the basin, the cloths, the brandy. He looked at her.
“I told you I can manage this.”
“And I am ignoring you.” Mary positioned the candle closer and examined his coat. The blood had soaked through three layers of fabric. She could see the tear in the wool where something sharp had opened a line from shoulder to elbow. “You need to remove your shirt.”
The words came out steadily. The heat that followed them up her neck did not.
The Duke shrugged out of his coat with his right hand, his jaw tight. He pulled the ruined shirt over his head in a single motion and dropped it on the floor beside the chair. He did it the way he did everything. Without ceremony. Without hesitation.
Mary had prepared herself. She had told herself she would look at the wound and only the wound, because she was a practical woman in a practical situation, and the fact that her husband was sitting shirtless in a kitchen chair at three in the morning was a medical matter and nothing more.
She looked.
The firelight moved across his chest and shoulders the way water moves across stone, finding the planes and hollows, the ridges of muscle along his stomach, the broad line of his collarbone. His skin was warm-toned in the candlelight, marked with a scar she had not expected beneath his right collarbone and another along his ribs.
He was built the way men were built who used their bodies for something other than sitting in club chairs. Lean. Defined. The kind of physique that lived beneath perfectly tailored waistcoats and gave no warning.
One second. She allowed herself one second. Then she looked at the wound.
The cut ran the length of his left triceps, a long, clean line that had parted the skin and was bleeding with the steady insistenceof a wound that needed closing. She dipped a cloth in the basin and cleaned the blood away from the edges.
“This is a knife cut,” she said. “Not a fall.”
Evander clenched his jaw, but stayed silent. She poured brandy onto a clean cloth and pressed it against the wound. His breath hissed between his teeth. The muscles of his arm contracted under her fingers, hard and sudden, and she felt the heat of his skin through the wet linen.
“Hold still,” she said.
“You might have warned me.”
“You might have told me the truth.” She held the cloth against the cut and nodded toward the bottle. “Drink. It will help.”
He picked up the brandy with his right hand and took a long pull. He swallowed, looked at the label, and something crossed his face. Not pain. Something older.
“My father’s favorite.” He turned the bottle in his hand. “He drank three of these a week toward the end. I found the empty bottles in his study after he died, lined up behind the curtains like soldiers.”
He set the bottle down with a wince.
Mary paused, the cloth still pressed to his arm. The way he said it. The flatness. The practiced distance of a man describing a landscape he had walked through so many times that it no longer registered as terrain.
“Your father drank,” she said.
“My father was a drunk.” He met her eyes. “There is a difference. One implies a habit. The other implies a life.”
Mary held his gaze. She thought of the book inscription she had found in the library. She thought of the way the Duke moved through this house, controlled and measured, never raising his voice, never reaching for a glass. The rigid discipline she had mistaken for coldness rearranged itself in her mind, and she saw it for what it was.
A man building himself into the opposite of his father, brick by brick, every single day.
She said nothing. She removed the cloth and examined the wound. The bleeding had slowed but not stopped. “I can bind it tight enough to hold until morning, but you need a physician. This wants stitching.”
“I can bind it myself.”
“Evander.”
He closed his mouth.
