Chapter 10
“Boil, would you?” Mary glared at the kettle as though it had wronged her.
The kitchen was dark save for the low fire she had coaxed back to life from the banked coals, and the single candle she had carried down three flights of stairs in her dressing gown because sleep had abandoned her at half-past two and she refused to ring for Hattie over a cup of tea.
She leaned against the worktable and crossed her arms. The house was silent above her. Tommy had settled after his midnight feeding, and Mrs. Bridwell had things well in hand, and there was no reason for Mary to be awake except that her mind would not stop turning.
The kettle ticked against the grate. Mary watched the firelight play across the flagstones and listened to the silence and did not think about where the Duke was tonight or whose bed he was in or whether he would come home smelling of perfume she would never wear.
She was very good at not thinking about these things. She had practiced.
The kitchen door opened.
Mary spun. The Duke stood in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame.
His greatcoat hung open. His cravat was gone.
In the dim firelight, the front of his white shirt looked wrong.
Dark. Wet. The stain spread from his left shoulder down across his chest, and it was not dirt, and it was not rain.
“What happened?” Mary crossed the kitchen in three strides. “You are bleeding.”
“I fell.” He straightened from the doorframe and took a step inside. His face was pale beneath the stubble. “On my way back. The steps were—”
“That is a lie.” Mary caught his arm and felt him flinch. The fabric of his coat was soaked through the left sleeve, warm and heavy under her fingers. She pulled her hand away and saw her palm stained red. “Sit down.”
“I can handle this myself.”
“Sit down, Evander.”
His name left her mouth before she could think about it. She had never used it. In three weeks of marriage, he had been “the Duke” and “Your Grace” and “my husband” in the privacy of her own thoughts, but never his name, never the word itself on her tongue.
It stopped him.
He looked at her, and something flickered in his expression, surprise or recognition or both, and he sat in the chair beside the worktable without another word.
Mary moved. She found a basin on the lower shelf and filled it with water from the pump. She pulled clean clothes from the linen cupboard beside the pantry. On the highest shelf, behind a row of cooking wines, she spotted a bottle of brandy and brought it down.
She set everything on the worktable beside him. Evander looked at the basin, the cloths, the brandy. He looked at her.
“I told you I can manage this.”
“And I am ignoring you.” Mary positioned the candle closer and examined his coat. The blood had soaked through three layers of fabric. She could see the tear in the wool where something sharp had opened a line from shoulder to elbow. “You need to remove your shirt.”
The words came out steadily. The heat that followed them up her neck did not.
The Duke shrugged out of his coat with his right hand, his jaw tight. He pulled the ruined shirt over his head in a single motion and dropped it on the floor beside the chair. He did it the way he did everything. Without ceremony. Without hesitation.
Mary had prepared herself. She had told herself she would look at the wound and only the wound, because she was a practical woman in a practical situation, and the fact that her husband was sitting shirtless in a kitchen chair at three in the morning was a medical matter and nothing more.
She looked.
The firelight moved across his chest and shoulders the way water moves across stone, finding the planes and hollows, the ridges of muscle along his stomach, the broad line of his collarbone.
His skin was warm-toned in the candlelight, marked with a scar she had not expected beneath his right collarbone and another along his ribs.
He was built the way men were built who used their bodies for something other than sitting in club chairs. Lean. Defined. The kind of physique that lived beneath perfectly tailored waistcoats and gave no warning.
One second. She allowed herself one second. Then she looked at the wound.
The cut ran the length of his left triceps, a long, clean line that had parted the skin and was bleeding with the steady insistence of a wound that needed closing. She dipped a cloth in the basin and cleaned the blood away from the edges.
“This is a knife cut,” she said. “Not a fall.”
Evander clenched his jaw, but stayed silent. She poured brandy onto a clean cloth and pressed it against the wound. His breath hissed between his teeth. The muscles of his arm contracted under her fingers, hard and sudden, and she felt the heat of his skin through the wet linen.
“Hold still,” she said.
“You might have warned me.”
“You might have told me the truth.” She held the cloth against the cut and nodded toward the bottle. “Drink. It will help.”
He picked up the brandy with his right hand and took a long pull. He swallowed, looked at the label, and something crossed his face. Not pain. Something older.
“My father’s favorite.” He turned the bottle in his hand. “He drank three of these a week toward the end. I found the empty bottles in his study after he died, lined up behind the curtains like soldiers.”
He set the bottle down with a wince.
Mary paused, the cloth still pressed to his arm. The way he said it. The flatness. The practiced distance of a man describing a landscape he had walked through so many times that it no longer registered as terrain.
“Your father drank,” she said.
“My father was a drunk.” He met her eyes. “There is a difference. One implies a habit. The other implies a life.”
Mary held his gaze. She thought of the book inscription she had found in the library.
She thought of the way the Duke moved through this house, controlled and measured, never raising his voice, never reaching for a glass.
The rigid discipline she had mistaken for coldness rearranged itself in her mind, and she saw it for what it was.
A man building himself into the opposite of his father, brick by brick, every single day.
She said nothing. She removed the cloth and examined the wound. The bleeding had slowed but not stopped. “I can bind it tight enough to hold until morning, but you need a physician. This wants stitching.”
“I can bind it myself.”
“Evander.”
He closed his mouth.
Mary folded a thick pad of linen and pressed it against the cut.
He winced. She felt his arm tense beneath her hands, the muscle rigid, and she held the pressure steady and did not let herself think about the warmth of his skin or the closeness of him or the fact that her fingers were wrapped around his bare arm and his pulse beat against her palm.
She tore a long strip from the cleanest cloth and began to wind it around his triceps, layering it over the pad, pulling it firm.
She worked in silence. He watched her hands.
She could feel his gaze on her fingers as she tucked the end of the strip and tied it off, and the awareness of being watched made her movements careful in a way that had nothing to do with medicine.
“There.” She stepped back. The bandage was clean and tight. Her hands were stained with his blood. “Tell whatever lie you need to tell the physician tomorrow. But you do not have to lie to me.”
The Duke looked at the bandage. He flexed his arm once, testing the hold, and his jaw tightened at the pull. “It is nothing to concern yourself with.”
“I am your wife.”
“In name.”
The words landed. Mary felt them settle into the bruised place beneath her ribs where she kept every reminder of what this marriage was and was not.
“In name,” she repeated. “In law. In the eyes of God and every person who watched us speak our vows. You may not have wanted this marriage, and I may not have chosen it, but I will not stand here and pretend I do not care when my husband disappears at night and comes home cut open.” She stepped closer.
“I cannot do this. I cannot live in a house with a man who will not let me help him. I cannot—”
“You need to stop.” The words came out rough and strained, as though each one cost him effort.
Evander sat in the kitchen chair with his shirt off and his bandaged arm resting on the table, and his eyes were not on her face. They were on her collarbone, where the neckline of her dressing gown had slipped, and the look in them was not cold, not controlled.
It was the look of a man holding a rope that was fraying.
“Stop what?” Mary asked. “Stop caring? Stop asking questions? Stop being your wife?”
“Stop standing that close to me.” His voice dropped. His gaze climbed from her collarbone to her mouth and stayed there. “In that.”
Mary looked down at herself. Her nightgown. Her wrapper, untied, hanging open over cotton so thin the kitchen firelight made it glow.
She had not thought about what she was wearing when she came downstairs. She had thought about chamomile tea, sleeplessness, and nothing else. Now, she stood two feet from a shirtless man with brandy on his breath and a wound she had just dressed, and the air between them had changed.
“I am wearing a nightgown, Your Grace. It is three in the morning. What did you expect?”
“I expected to come home without finding you in my kitchen.” His jaw tightened. “I expected to dress this wound myself and go to bed and not have to—” He stopped.
“Not have to what?”
Evander’s good hand gripped the edge of the table. The knuckles went white. Mary watched the struggle play out across his face, the control warring with something older and deeper.
She realized with a jolt that he was not angry with her. He was angry with himself.
“You should go to bed,” he said. But his voice had lost its authority, and they both knew it.
“Answer my question.” Mary held her ground. “Not have to what?”
“Mary,” he grumbled in warning.
“What?” she pressed, unwavering.
“Not have to look at you and want to devour you,” Evander growled, the words scraping past his teeth.
Before she could gasp, he stood and backed her up until her spine hit the edge of the heavy kitchen table.
“I expected to keep my hands off you,” he muttered, his gaze tracing the heavy pulse fluttering at her throat before locking onto her lips. “I expected to starve in silence. But you came down here looking like a temptation no mortal man could survive. And here, before you, Mary, I am a sinner.”
His thumb brushed roughly over her bottom lip, parting it.
She remained still, gazing up at him, her vision narrowing into him and only him.
“Evander…” she uttered almost breathlessly and leaned into his touch.
And with that, he kissed her.
His right hand came up and caught the side of her face, his fingers sliding into her hair, and his mouth found hers, and every thought in Mary’s head went silent.
The kiss was not gentle. It was not the careful, measured thing she might have expected from a man who controlled every other aspect of his life.
It was hungry.
His lips moved against hers with an urgency that felt like something breaking open, something held too tight for too long, and Mary’s hands flew to his chest, her palms flat against bare skin, and the heat of him burned through her fingers and spread up her arms and settled in the center of her body like a flame finding air.
She kissed him back, her body deciding for her, her fingers curling against his chest, her mouth opening to his. His hand tightened in her hair and pulled her closer, his body pressing harder against hers.
He was warm, solid, and he tasted of brandy and something darker, and the sound he made against her mouth, low and rough, sent a shiver down her spine that reached her toes.
His bandaged arm came around her waist. She felt him wince at the pull, and she should have stopped, should have been careful, should have remembered that he was wounded and she was angry and this solved nothing, but his mouth moved to the corner of her jaw, and his breath was hot against her skin, and she tipped her head back and forgot every rational thought she had ever had.
The kettle screamed.
The shrill, furious whistle cut through the kitchen like a blade.
Mary gasped. Evander pulled back.
They stood inches apart, breathing hard, his hand still tangled in her hair, her palms still pressed against his bare chest, and the kettle shrieked on the grate, and the fire popped, and the candle flame shuddered in the draft of their breathing.
Mary stepped away. She crossed to the hearth and pulled the kettle from the fire with a cloth. The whistling died. The kitchen settled into a silence so loud it pressed against her ears.
She stood at the hearth with her back to him and felt her pulse hammering in her throat, her lips, her fingertips.
She could still feel the shape of his mouth on hers.
She could still feel the heat of his skin under her hands and the way his arm had pulled her closer, and the echo of it ran through her body like a current that had not yet found ground.
“I… I should not have done that.”
His voice came from behind her. Rough around the edges. Controlled in the center. She heard him clear his throat.
Mary turned. He stood beside the chair with his ruined shirt in his hand and his jaw set and his eyes dark in the firelight. The bandage on his arm was white against his skin. He looked at her the way a man looks at a door he has just opened and is already regretting.
“Thank you,” he said. “For the wound.”
He picked up his coat. He walked past her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him as he passed, and he left the kitchen, and his footsteps faded up the stairs, and the door to his chambers closed, and Mary stood alone in the kitchen with a cooling kettle and blood on her hands and the taste of brandy on her lips.
She touched her mouth.
Her fingers trembled.
The fire crackled. The candle guttered. Mary stood in the silence of the kitchen and let herself feel every single thing she had spent three weeks refusing to feel, and she did not push any of it away.