The kitchen was not the problem. The wound was not the problem.
The problem was the woman sleeping two floors above him, and that he had kissed her in this very room six hours ago, and that his mouth still remembered every second of it.
Evander ate his eggs without tasting them, drank his coffee in four long swallows, and was reaching for his coat when footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Light. Unhurried. Mary’s step, which he had learned to recognize despite every effort not to.
She appeared in the dining room doorway. Her hair was pinned, her dress fresh, and her face composed in the way it had been composed for the past ten days, polished and pleasant and giving nothing away. Her gaze moved from his face to his left arm, where the sleeve of his coat covered the bandage, and back to his face.
“Good morning,” she said.
Evander stood. The chair scraped. “Good morning.” The words came out stiffer than he intended, clipped at the edges, and he cleared his throat. “I trust you slept well.”
“I did.” Mary crossed to the sideboard and lifted the lid of the serving dish. Her back was to him. “You are up early.”
“Business.” Evander collected his coffee cup and set it on the tray for the kitchen. “I have correspondence that needs attention before the morning post.”
Mary turned. Her eyes found his, and for a moment, the composure slipped, just enough for him to see what lay behind it. A question she was choosing not to ask. A bruise she was choosing not to show.
“Of course,” she said. “Enjoy your morning.”
“And you, yours.” Evander inclined his head, walked past her, and pulled the dining room door shut behind him.
The corridor stretched ahead, dim and empty, and he made it to his study before the tension left his shoulders.
The study door closed. Evander sank into the chair behind his desk and pressed his right palm flat against the surface.
His left arm throbbed. His chest was worse.
The kiss.
Mary’s mouth against his. Her hands on his bare skin. The sound she had made when his lips found her jaw, soft and involuntary, as though the breath had been pulled from her lungs by something neither of them controlled. The way her fingers had curled against his chest, not pushing him away but pulling him closer, and the heat of her body against his, and the taste of her, and the moment the kettle screamed and shattered whatever madness had taken hold of him.
I should not have done that.
Four words. Evander had watched the effect of them land on Mary’s face in the firelight, watched the brightness drain from her eyes and the composure slide back into place like a visor being lowered, and he had picked up his coat and thanked her for the bandage and walked away.
Thanked her. As though she had mended a torn hem.
Evander pulled the stack of correspondence toward him and opened the first letter. The solicitor’s update on the Brightshaw estate. Rent figures. Maintenance costs. Perfectly legible numbers arranged in perfectly logical columns, and not one of them registered because his mind kept circling back to the kitchen, the candlelight, and the way Mary had said his name.
The pen sat untouched beside the inkwell. Evander stared at the solicitor’s figures and forced himself to read them. The Dorset tenants. The east wing roof. Richard’s gambling debts, which the Bow Street runner had traced to three separate establishments, the boxing ring in Southwark among them. Madame Fontaine’s was next on the list. Another thread to pull, another corner of his brother’s wreckage to sort through.
Richard. That was where his attention belonged. Not on the memory of his wife’s mouth, or the look in her eyes telling him he did not have to lie to her.
A knock at the study door pulled him back.
“Dr. Kreutzer has arrived, Your Grace,” Harding announced.
“You will hold still, please.”
Dr. Kreutzer was a compact, silver-haired man with wire spectacles and the brisk efficiency of someone who had stitched soldiers together on battlefields and found civilian patients charmingly fragile by comparison.
Evander sat in the leather chair beside the study window with his shirt removed and his left arm extended while the physician examined Mary’s bandage.
“Hmm.” Kreutzer unwound the linen with careful fingers and studied the cut beneath. “It is clean and well-dressed. Pressure applied in exactly the right place.” He glanced over his spectacles at Evander. “Your own work?”
“My wife’s.”
