Page 9

Wanting a thing does not make you weak for wanting it.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Kit

A week, and he still hadn't decided.

He told himself that wasn't unusual. Reeve's last message had said the cargo was delayed. Two to three weeks, perhaps longer, before the shipment came through. He had time, and a man with time made better use of it than a man in a hurry. That was the excuse he kept in his pocket like a second knife, and he took it out and turned it over more often than he liked to admit.

He was mending the fence along the east paddock when he heard her in the garden, and he let himself watch. The same way he'd watched every day since she'd arrived. It wasn't affection. It was reconnaissance.

She was on her knees in the dirt, in a dress that had been fine once, pulling weeds from what had been Marian's rose bed with a viciousness that had nothing to do with roses.

Reeve had described a woman cold enough and patient enough to poison a man so gradually that physicians called it illness. Kit watched her rip a bramble from the earth with her bare hands, thorns and all, until her palm bled.

A woman who fought brambles with her bare hands did not poison husbands. She endured them. She swore at the roots in language no lady should know, and she kept pulling. But it didn't matter whether Reeve's story fit. It mattered whether Kit could finish the work.

He took a step forward to help, then stopped himself. Because the woman was now on her feet, leaning against the wall, and bending forward. Her skirt was hiked above her knee, and she was reaching down to retie the stocking that had slipped. Her fingers fumbled with the ribbon of the garter, pulling it taut against the top of the stocking, and the pale strip of thigh above the silk caught the light— soft, white, untouched by sun.

He should have turned around. Stepped back. That was what a decent man would do, and he had been passing for a decent man with moderate success for the better part of a decade.

But he didn't turn around. He stood behind the hedges and watched her fingers tighten the ribbon and smooth the stocking and straighten. When she let her skirt fall, the fabric brushed down over her calf and settled against her ankle. Even when the thigh disappeared, he was still looking at the place where it had been.

She tugged her skirt straight, picked up her cane, and walked toward the kitchen without knowing he was there.

His hand was gripping the fencepost hard enough to ache. The image had already burned in—the ribbon, the pale skin, the garter around her thigh—and it was going to stay there, vivid, for the rest of the day and likely the rest of the week.

There was not a thing he could do about any of it except stand there with the cold air on his face and breathe until his hands unclenched.

She is not a woman. She is the passage to my freedom.

He repeated it twice. It didn’t work.

* * *

At the midday meal she came into the kitchen and reached past him for the bread knife on the block, and every muscle in him went still and ready before his mind had finished the thought. Her hand on the handle. Her wrist turned away. Her body exposed to him. Three feet, less than a second.

She sliced bread. With the injured hand, grimacing, the knife scraping the board. Spread butter. Sat down. Ate. Winced when she shifted her weight.

He watched her hands. A month ago, he would have measured the distance between her grip and his reach. Now he was watching to see if the cut from the garden had closed.

She was entirely unaware that for four seconds she'd held her life in her own hand and he'd been half a breath from taking it from her. The bread knife sat between them on the table, ordinary, harmless, still holding the warmth of her grip, and the kitchen ticked around them in its small domestic sounds: the fire, the kettle, the drip from the basin. As though nothing had happened. Because nothing had. Yet.

He hated how disappointed some old, ugly part of him was that she hadn't given him a reason. A woman who came at him with a blade, he could kill and call it defence and sleep that night same as any other. A woman who winced but did not complain gave him nothing to work with.

He went upstairs, took the Friar's Balsam and a small vial of laudanum from his room, and went back down.

She was standing on a chair on her toes, reaching for the tea caddy. Her body swayed and he crossed the kitchen in three strides and his hands closed around her waist, fingers nearly meeting at the front.

She looked over her shoulder. He kept his eyes on the shelf, reached past her, and brought the caddy down.

"Ask for help unless you're looking to shatter your other hip," he said.

"How do you know— ”

“Marian.”

“Oh." She stepped down from the chair. "I do not ask you because you always look as though you'd sooner strangle me than speak to me."