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The axe hadn't helped, so he'd saddled the mare and ridden her hard along the ridge until the animal was lathered and his thighs burned. That hadn't helped either. He'd come back and hauled stone from the collapsed boundary wall to the gap in the orchard fence, fifty yards each way, load after load, the weight of each one grinding into his shoulders and his lower back until his muscles shook and his vision narrowed to the ground in front of his boots and nothing else.

None of it worked. The images sat behind everything he did.

He'd held women's hands before. Briefly, transactionally, never with care. He had held hers for ten seconds and the warmth of it had stayed in his grip for hours, faint and persistent, like a burn that wouldn't cool.

Her shapely legs. The pale strip of thigh above the stocking top. The image had burned itself into place and stayed there all day, patient, waiting.

Her hips when she'd leaned over the range, one hand braced on the edge, her back to him. Slim, yes. But the dress pulled across her hips and there was enough curve beneath the fabric to make his mouth go dry, and he'd left the kitchen without a word.

He leaned back against the stable wall and pressed the heel of his hand against himself. Don't. He was on a job. She was the job. Five years. That was all this was. He'd lived with the Lintons, five women under one roof, and kept his hands to himself because any attachment was a trail Reeve could follow.

Five years without a woman's touch, and now there was one sleeping twenty feet from his door, and his body had lost the ability to tell the difference between wanting and convenience.

Except that was a lie. He could tell the difference. Wanting was a woman who’d looked up at him with damp lips and said thank you in a voice stripped bare. Wanting was Audrey.

He took himself in hand. He didn't make it tender. He thought about her mouth and what sound it would make when he entered her. Imagined his fingers caressing her thigh and spreading her and filling her. He closed his eyes and saw her defiant eyes flutter closed.

It didn't take long. It was fast and graceless, and he came into his own fist with his teeth clenched and her name behind them, unspoken, and stood there afterward with his chest heaving and the sweat cooling on his neck and the smell of hay and horse and leather around him.

He cleaned himself with his shirt. Stood for a while with his head against the wall and his eyes closed. Then he crossed the yard and carried charcoal and water and logs inside because she'd need the fire in the morning.

The kitchen was empty and he was relieved. He hoped the lack of interaction the rest of the evening would help him clear his head.

Then he found her in the drawing room.

She was asleep in the chair by the fire. The coals were a deep, sullen red, barely enough light to see by. The laudanum bottle sat on the side table, uncorked, the level barely touched. Her cut hand had curled loosely around the pencil, the split thumb tucked against her palm.

He stood in the doorway and watched her breathe.

The trained part of his mind was already working. Angle of approach. Her position in the chair. Loss of balance if she woke, no leverage, the cane out of reach against the far wall. The distance from the door to the chair: four strides. Her throat was exposed above the collar of her dress, the tendons slack with sleep, the pulse visible in the hollow. His body knew what to do with this information. It had always known. Reeve had made sure of that.

He took one step into the room. Then another. The floorboard did not creak. He was good at floors that did not creak.

At the third step he stopped. Not because she stirred. She slept with her mouth slack, her brow still furrowed as though the work had followed her down. A dried tear track ran through the soot on her cheek. She had not washed her face.

He looked at her hands. Blistered from the flint. Scratched from the brambles. The nails dark with garden dirt she had not been able to scrub clean. These were not the hands of a woman who poisoned husbands. These were the hands of a woman who had taught herself to light a fire in the space of a week and considered it the greatest achievement of her life.

He thought about what Reeve would say. Sentiment. The death of every good man I ever trained. Reeve would be right. Sentiment was what got you caught, what made you hesitate, what put a knife in the wrong hand. Reeve had burned it out of him at twelve with an iron and a lesson he had never forgotten: you don't love the thing you're told to break.

But Reeve had never met a woman who ate burnt porridge standing at the range because sitting down would mean admitting she had failed. Reeve had never watched someone fix a door handle with a carving knife and a nail and bleed for it and try again. Reeve had never heard a voice say I am not leaving to an empty corridor, not a threat, not a plea, just a woman telling the dark what she had decided.

Kit stood over her. His hand moved to the knife in his boot. His fingers closed around the handle. The grip was familiar. It always was.

He held it for a long time. Long enough for the fire to shift and settle. Long enough for the shadows to move across the ceiling and the cold to find the gap beneath the door. Long enough to understand that the man who could do this had been dying for weeks, killed not by conscience but by porridge and door handles and a voice in the dark.

He let go of the knife. Took his jacket from the back of the chair and laid it over her. Took the candle so it wouldn't catch the notebook.

In the kitchen he stood at the basin and washed his hands. They were clean. He washed them again.

Chapter five

Bread

Kit

He smelled it before he reached the door—the acrid, unmistakable smell of burnt flour, sharp enough to cut through the damp stone and cold ash that were the house's permanent atmosphere. Not a cooking smell. A failure smell. He'd grown up around it in the coaching inns where Reeve's men ate: bread put too close to the heat by someone who didn't know what they were doing, the outside charring while the inside stayed raw.

He pushed through the side door and found her standing at the range with two halves of something in her hands. The thing had been a loaf once or had tried to be. The crust was black and cracked, and where she'd broken it open the inside was a wet, grey, gluey mass that slumped away from the shell. A line of dough stretched between the two halves and broke, and a glob of it hit the floor.