Arms. Shoulders. The firelight moving across bare skin.
Evander’s chest beneath her palms. The ridge of muscle along his stomach. The scar beneath his collarbone that she had wanted to ask about and hadn’t. His skin had been warm, impossibly warm, and when the muscles of his arm had contracted beneath her fingers as she cleaned the wound, she had felt the flex of it all the way down to her wrists.
And then the kiss. His hand in her hair, tilting her face up to meet his. The hunger in it, the urgency, the sound he had made against her mouth that had sent heat spilling through her body like wine tipped from a glass. Her own hands pressing flat against his bare chest instead of pushing him away, pulling him closer, wanting more of the warmth and the weight and the taste of brandy on his tongue.
A flush crept up the back of Mary’s neck. She adjusted Tommy against her shoulder and kept walking.
The corridor was cool, and the stone floor was solid beneath her feet, and she focused on these things because the alternative was standing in a hallway with a sleeping baby on her chest, flushed and breathless over a man who had apologized for kissing her.
Tommy sighed against her neck. Mary pressed her lips to the top of his head and breathed in the smell of clean linen and lavender soap.
“It is just you and me this afternoon,” she murmured. “Your uncle is hiding in his study, and I am walking in circles with a head full of nonsense.”
Tommy’s grip tightened on her collar. Mary turned at the end of the corridor and started back toward the staircase.
The nonsense did not leave. It followed her up the stairs, down the east corridor, and into the nursery, where she settled Tommy in his crib and covered him with the wool blanket Mrs. Bridwell kept folded at the foot. Tommy’s eyes fluttered closed, his fingers uncurling one by one as sleep took hold.
Mary sank into the rocking chair and pressed her hands against her cheeks. They were still warm.
She was being foolish. One kiss in a dark kitchen, born out of exhaustion and adrenaline and the strange intimacy of cleaning another person’s blood from your hands, did not constitute a romance.
Evander had made that clear enough.
And yet…
Yet his hand had shaken when he reached for his coat. She had seen it. A tremor in his fingers, brief and quickly mastered, but real. A man who regretted a kiss did not tremble afterward. A man who regretted a kiss did not flee breakfast the next morning because he could not sit across from the woman he had kissed without his composure cracking.
Evander was not indifferent to her. The kiss had proved that much. Whatever walls he built, whatever distance hemaintained, his body had told a different story in that kitchen, and Mary’s body had answered it, and no amount of cold tea and sensible thinking was going to undo what both of them now knew.
The question was what to do with the knowing.
Mary rocked the chair and watched Tommy sleep and tried to think about anything other than the way Evander’s mouth had felt against her jaw, the scrape of stubble, the heat of his breath, the low sound in his throat that she could still feel vibrating somewhere behind her ribs.
She did not succeed.
But Tommy slept, and the nursery was quiet, and for now, that was enough to keep her steady.
The rest, whatever it became, would have to wait for a man who had not yet learned that walls built to keep people out had a habit of keeping a person locked in.
CHAPTER 13
“Mr. William Harcourt, Your Grace. He says he wrote to you regarding a manuscript.”
Evander looked up from the estate ledger.
He had a vague memory of a letter, something about a first edition of Selden’sTable Talk, the copy his grandfather had acquired at auction, which had been gathering dust in the library for the better part of forty years. An academic inquiry, polite and formal, with the kind of careful penmanship that suggested a scholar accustomed to making requests of men who outranked him.
“Send him in.”
Harding stepped aside, and a young man entered the study. He was perhaps twenty-seven, lean and fair-haired, with the kind of face that would have been unremarkable in any university reading room in England. His coat was well-made but notexpensive, his boots polished but showing wear at the heels. He carried a leather satchel over one shoulder and held his hat in both hands, turning it between his fingers.
“Your Grace.” Harcourt bowed. “Thank you for seeing me. I realize this is an imposition.”
“You mentioned Selden.” Evander gestured to the chair opposite the desk. “Sit.”
Harcourt sat. His eyes moved briefly to the study door, then to the corridor beyond it, before returning to Evander. The glance was quick, but Evander noticed it.
“I’m completing a study on seventeenth-century legal philosophy for the Royal Society,” Harcourt said. His voice was steady, but his fingers had not stopped working the brim of his hat. “Your family’s copy ofTable Talkis one of only three first editions known to survive. I was hoping you might allow me to examine it and take some notes on it.”
