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She studied him for a long moment. That quiet intelligence working behind her gaze, turning over what he had said and what he had not. He waited for the questions. He had not decided whether he would answer all or none. He had thought he would secure the tunnel and go on as before. Distant. Composed. He had not planned for this.

"Will you tell me why?" she asked, her eyes holding his.

He handed her the cane. Drew her against his chest, his fingers spread over the back of her head. An ache settled deep in him, and he closed his eyes to hold this moment before she lost every feeling for him except anger. He kissed her hair and pulled away. He had meant to tell her then, but the words caught in his throat. So he kissed her instead, tender and slow, a silent confession of what he owed her and what he had done.

When he released her, he felt ready. "Let us talk over tea," he said, and led her to the kitchen table.

Chapter twelve

Groom

Trust is not owed to the safest man. It is owed to the honest one.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Audrey

He made the tea. She sat at the kitchen table and watched him move around the kitchen. She didn’t speak. His expression was hard and cold. Heavier and more intense than she’d seen him before. It frightened her.

She tried to catch his gaze, but he did not look at her. Dread arrived swiftly, and she wrapped her arms around her stomach. There had been servant girls ruined by men like this. Men who changed between the wanting and the having. Hugh had been the same. Tender on their wedding day. Attentive. His hand on her elbow, his voice soft in her ear. By the third week his hand had moved from her elbow to the back of her neck and the softness had curdled into something she could not scrub from her skin.

Kit stood at the range with his back to her and his head bowed. Perhaps he had a wife somewhere. A woman in a village, in a port town, in any of the dozens of places a man like Kit might have passed through and left something behind. She had not asked. She had wrapped her legs around a man whose surname she did not know, and she had not thought to ask if there was someone waiting for him.

He set a cup of tea in front of her and sat across from her. Wrapped both hands around his own cup and stared into it as though the words he needed were somewhere at the bottom.

She gave him a moment. She gave him several. The tea cooled. The fire popped and a log shifted in the grate. A draught came through the gap beneath the door and moved the hem of her skirt against her ankle.

"I was sent here to kill you," he said.

The words sat on the table between them, solid as the cups and the cooling tea and the bread neither of them had touched. She heard each one distinctly. Sent. Here. Kill. You. She understood them individually. She understood them together. Her mind refused to close around them.

The walls drew closer. The boarded windows darker. The candlelight smaller. The kitchen that had become familiar turned foreign around her, emptied of everything she had thought she knew about it. She had eaten breakfast in this room with this man. She had cooked in this room while he sat behind her. She had slept in this house, doors unlocked, his room across the hall, and the distance between her breathing body and his hands had been nothing. A few steps. A closed door. Less than that.

"By whom?"

He looked up. His face was flat. Controlled. Delivering this the way he might report a death: precisely, distantly, as though the facts belonged to another man.

"Reeve. The man I worked for. The one who sent men to find me for years. When the captain died, the arrangement that kept him at bay died with him. He found me. Offered me the job."

"What job?"

"You own the house above his tunnel. He wanted the passage reopened and you dealt with."

"Dealt with." The words tasted of metal.

"He told me you were dangerous. That you had poisoned your husband." Kit's voice was strained. "He said Hugh Kendal died slowly, and that you were patient enough and cold enough to have done it."

The air left her lungs as though someone had pressed a fist into her chest.

"And you believed him. Still believe him."

"No. I don’t believe him." Kit said it flat and certain. "He lied. I knew within a week."

"How?"

"A woman who claws through every day to survive doesn't poison a man for convenience. She outlasts him."

She pressed her hand to the table to steady herself. Hugh had been cruel, and neglectful, and had whispered useless into her neck as he climbed off her, yet she had never wished him dead. She had only wished him gone.