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"After you."

"Rafe—"

"After you. I want to watch."

She could not keep her eyes open when she came.

He followed her three strokes later. She watched that too. His jaw clenched, his eyes squeezed shut despite his own rule, his mouth opened on her name and his voice broke in the middle of it and his body shuddered against hers and she held him. She held him through it with her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and felt everything.

* * *

They leaned against the desk afterward. Side by side, bare skin against bare skin, their shoulders touching. The sun had moved across the floor.

She looked down at their bodies in the light. His brown. Hers pale. The scars on his chest and the knot of her hip and his bandaged hand and her bruised palm resting on her thigh. Two damaged people in a rectangle of October sun.

"We have not finished the windows," she said.

"No."

"We should finish the windows."

"We should."

Neither of them moved.

“Did Reeve name you Kit?” she asked.

“He did. For being useful. A tool.”

“Now you are my tool. For my pleasure.”

He kissed her jaw. “I like that.”

"We had better prepare," she said. “Ensure he does not bother us again.”

His jaw clenched. He reached for his trousers.

They dressed and picked up the hammer and the nails and the chalk and went back to work. She held the planks steadier now and he hammered the nails straighter and the silence between them had changed from a wall into a bridge.

Chapter seventeen

Closer to God

Awoman who only waits is a woman who has agreed to be left.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Kit

He woke to her fingers tracing his jaw.

The room was black. No moon through the boarded window. The air was cold and her body was warm against his and his hand moved down her side before his mind had caught up: her ribs, her waist, the dip of her hip, the curve of her thigh. He pressed himself against her and put his mouth to her ear.

"Can't sleep? Shall I tire you out?"

He reached for her mouth. She put a finger over his lips.

"I think I should play dead," she said.