Chapter 4 #3
She retrieved it, uncapped it, and came to stand at the side of the bed.
He watched her catch the smell. It was not a subtle smell.
It was an assertive smell, with strong notes and a tendency to dominate any room it entered.
Angelo had described it once as an acquired appreciation, and Nicholas had told him it was acquired only under duress.
He found himself utterly delighted when she wrinkled her nose and her eyes widened momentarily before she resumed control, clearly reassessing the commitment she had made before full information was available.
“It is rather pungent,” she said.
“It is rather effective,” he said. “Those two facts are related.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. On the very edge.
The maximum structural distance she could achieve while still being within reach of his leg.
And she concentrated on his thigh with the attention she had previously directed at his correspondence and his bookshelves.
He noticed the jar was perfectly steady in her hands.
He noticed her breathing was not entirely steady.
He noticed the loose fall of her fair hair over the white wrapper and the way the flickering light caught the gold in it and turned it warm.
And he noticed that he was going to need to think about something else very shortly or the banyan was not going to be sufficient coverage for his dignity.
He thought about the cipher. About the axe and the substitution alphabet. He thought about Matteo di Bianchi with the focused intensity of a drowning man locating something solid.
She put her hands on his leg.
He felt the warmth before the pressure. The warmth of her palms spreading outward through the liniment from the point of contact.
Then the pressure of her fingers, finding the muscle with an instinct he had not anticipated and beginning to work.
She was not tentative. He had not expected her to be.
She was not tentative about anything. But the steadiness of it, the immediate competence, was something he had not fully prepared for.
Her hands were small and her grip was stronger than it had any right to be, and she applied herself to the task with the thorough, unselfconscious dedication she likely applied to everything.
The tip of her tongue was just visible at the corner of her mouth from her concentration.
He was watching her from beneath his lashes. He intended to stop doing that in approximately one moment.
He turned his gaze to the ceiling and resolutely kept it there.
The physical relief was immediate and real, beneath all else that was happening, which was considerable.
Days of accumulated tension in the muscle, the relentless knotting that came from a long day confined in a carriage after days of inadequate treatment, began to yield under the steady pressure of her hands.
He felt it all move through him in long, slow waves: the warmth of the liniment and the warmth of her hands and the release of tension held too tight for too long.
And his jaw was clenched with the effort of remaining still and keeping his expression in the range of a man receiving medical attention rather than a man in the grip of a rather different experience entirely.
Her thumb found an unyielding point of tension in the upper muscle and kneaded with thorough, steady pressure, and his jaw tightened involuntarily.
His loins had been attempting to interject for the past several minutes with increasing insistence, and he was willing them, with all the will he had, to exercise patience. They were not finding him persuasive.
He was fairly certain he had rearranged the banyan in time.
He was also fairly certain she knew what she was doing to him, from the vigilant concentration she was devoting to a point on the coverlet approximately six inches from his knee.
Her breathing had gone uneven again, he noted with distant satisfaction while his dignity was hanging by a thread.
He was nonetheless gratified by the symmetry of their reactions.
Neither of them said anything.
The fire settled in the grate with a sound like a quiet conclusion.
Her breathing steadied as she found the rhythm of the work.
The warmth of the room and the warmth of her hands and the slow release of the pain combined into a sensation that moved through him like the end of a long argument.
Nicholas, who had spent the past several months dismantling every comfortable habit he had ever had and rebuilding something he did not yet have a name for, let it happen.
He was almost certainly going to be in very serious trouble by the time they reached Oxford.
The thought arrived with the clarity of a fact that he had known for longer than he had been willing to admit. And he did not argue with it.
Her hands slowed. The pressure gentled, moving from the deep kneading to lighter strokes that spread the remaining liniment and eased the last of the tension from the muscle.
His leg went quiet in a way it had not been quiet in days.
The rise and fall of his chest was utterly even.
He was fairly certain he appeared entirely relaxed.
Which was, under the circumstances, a genuine achievement he was adding to the short list of things he was very proud of.
He was enjoying his time with her far more than he ought.