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She looked up at him, and the smile was still there, and it hit him like a fist below the ribs.

"Less water next time," he said, and left the kitchen.

Outside, he stood with his hands on the door frame and his head bowed and breathed, because that smile was going to be a problem.

Chapter six

Second Shelf

Kit

He could not get the smile out of his head.

It had been four days. He had split enough wood to heat the house through January. He had re-dug the drainage ditch along the east wall, hauled stone for the orchard fence, ridden the mare hard along the ridge until his thighs burned and his vision narrowed to the ground in front of his boots. None of it worked. The images sat behind everything he did, patient, waiting, and the smile was the worst of them.

Not the stocking. Not the curve of her hip when she leaned over the range. Not even her mouth, though her mouth was an enduring problem he had no solution for. The smile. The way her face had opened when the bread tore clean, the steam rising, the crust golden, and she had looked up at him with flour on her cheek and an expression so unguarded that it had hit him like a fist below the ribs. He had said something about water and left the kitchen because staying would have meant showing her what her happiness did to him and that was information she could not have.

He sat on the kitchen floor in the dark with a cup of brandy and waited for the house to settle around him. This was his habit now. After she went up, he came down. The kitchen at night was neutral ground, emptied of her, and he could sit in it and breathe without catching her scent on the air or hearing her move through the next room or watching her hands do the ordinary things: stirring, reaching, lifting.

He heard the cane on the stairs before he heard her footstep. The uneven rhythm he knew better than his own pulse. Tap and step, tap and step, the left foot landing heavier than the right, the cane bearing what the hip refused to.

He should have spoken. Announced himself in the dark the way he'd learned to do after she'd flinched that first night, when his voice had come out of nowhere and she'd screamed and raised the lantern like a mace. He should have said her name, or coughed, or scraped his boot across the flagstone. Instead, he sat against the wall and watched her come into the kitchen in her nightgown and bare feet, the candle she carried throwing her shadow long across the floor and said nothing.

She did not see him. She crossed to the shelf and reached for the laudanum, rising onto her good foot, the nightgown lifting off her ankles, her fingers stretching for the bottle. He watched her balance shift. Watched the hip tighten. Watched her jaw set against it.

He stood. Crossed the room. Reached past her and took the bottle from the shelf and set it on the dresser.

He had intended to step back. That had been the plan. Get the bottle, set it down, return to the wall. The plan lasted until she said "thank you" to the shelf in a voice that was not steady, and then the plan was gone because she was in front of him and he was behind her and the distance between his chest and her shoulder blades was an inch he could feel like a held breath.

She smelled of soap. Not the hard kitchen soap he used. Something else. Something she must have brought in her trunk or found in Marian's room, faint and clean, and it cut through the permanent smell of damp stone and cold ash the way her voice cut through his silence — sharp, specific, impossible to ignore.

"You could step back," she said.

"I could."

"You are not stepping back."

"No."

He was not. His hands hung at his sides and every muscle in his forearms was rigid with the effort of keeping them there. The inch between his chest and her back was the width of everything he could not afford and the narrowness of everything he wanted. If she shifted her weight half a step she would be against him and the pretence would be finished.

She turned around. He should have moved then. Created the distance. But she turned and her shoulder brushed his chest, and her face was below his in the dark, tilted up, her eyes finding his.

She said something about him being couth. He said something back. The words were sounds he produced to keep his mouth occupied with something other than what it wanted.

"And yet you keep coming here. At night," he said, and wished he'd said nothing because the flinch she gave was not fear. It was recognition. She knew why she was here. She had known before she'd come down and she had come down anyway and that knowledge sat between them, warm and dangerous.

She lifted her chin. "The laudanum is on the second shelf."

"I know."

"You could have moved it lower."

"So could you."

He knew why he hadn’t moved it. When she stretched, she rose onto one foot and the nightgown lifted and when the nightgown lifted he could see her ankles.

She left the kitchen. He stood at the dresser and listened to her footsteps cross the passage to the drawing room and heard the chair creak as she sat down and pressed his palms flat against the wood and closed his eyes.