13 #2
Her eyes darted about, bouncing from shadow to shadow without seeming to see a thing.
“Not that they don’t already have a fully capable family member to teach them the necessary skills,” she said, the words quick and nervous.
“And your own skills must be impressive, considering your previous profession.” She frowned, her expression one of concern. “But what of your mother?”
“My mother?”
“Yes.” She raised her hands, considering them. “Her hands. Would she be able to implement any of the skills?” Before he could think to answer, she continued, her voice dipping low with worry. “They seem to pain her greatly. Has she seen a doctor?”
Her obvious concern thawed something deep within him. Touched, and in turn flustered because of it, he answered with more openness than he normally would have. “The doctors say she has an arthritic inflammation of the joints.”
“And is there any treatment?”
A hot anger sizzled through his veins. “They made her suffer through everything from bloodletting to hot mustard baths to copious amounts of laudanum. She was so miserable that she now refuses to seek further treatment. She says the pain in her joints is preferable to feeling like a pincushion or being so affected in her mind that she becomes insensible to the world around her.”
“I am sorry for it,” she replied softly. “It must pain you to see her suffer.”
He glanced down at her, surprised at her mournful tone. But it was more than mournful, wasn’t it? There was a sad knowledge in it as well. “You sound as if you know what I’m going through.”
“I do.” She clutched her bag to her side tighter.
“My own mother, while passionate and full of life, had her own health concerns. Her lungs were enemies to her at times. When they failed her and she struggled to breathe, those were some of the most terrifying moments of my life. I felt utterly powerless. There was nothing I could do to help her.” She paused a moment, her profile tense, her brow bunched.
“Though they were never as horrible as that last time, when I could only watch, impotent, while she suffocated.”
“I am so very sorry,” he said quietly, his heart fairly breaking for her. Dear God, he could not imagine witnessing such a thing.
She was silent for a moment, the heaviness of her memory making her appear as if she had shrunk in on herself, before she continued.
“I should be happy I had the time I did with her, I suppose. She was the best of mothers. I was not the easiest child, and she never made me feel as if I were lacking.” Her voice dipped, turning low and tense.
“Others were more than adept at proving that I am lacking.”
“Who?” he demanded, the question bursting from his lips before he could think better of it. It didn’t matter to him. Her concerns were not his concerns. Not only were they nothing to each other, but the more he learned about her, the more that knowledge would cloud his judgment of her.
But that judgment was already severely compromised, he realized as she turned to look up at him with those damnably beautiful eyes of hers. Even now, in the deepening shadows, he could see the spark of emotion in them, animating her whole face and drawing him in like a moth to a flame.
“My father, for one,” she said with that baffling, guileless honesty.
“My late husband was another, though he pretended otherwise before our marriage. Then there were the servants at our estate, the vicar, the local blacksmith, the man who ran the village shop?.? .? .” She gave him a sad smile.
“Too many to name, I suppose. I have come to terms with it. I am odd, after all.”
Again that outrage blossomed in his chest, though this time he wasn’t able to talk himself out of it. “You are not odd,” he said.
Her lips twisted. “That is kind of you to say. But I assure you, I am.”
He huffed. “I am hardly kind, and so you may take my words at face value.”
Though they could just begin to make out the golden lights of Rose House in the distance shining through the tree line, she stopped in the middle of the road, tilting her head as she looked up at him. Oliver, for his part, could only squirm under her perusal. “What?” he mumbled.
“You are too severe on yourself. Though you and I got off on the wrong foot, and though our meetings with each other have been anything but pleasant—”
He huffed another laugh, though this time there was the flavor of surprised humor in it.
“—I would not describe you as unkind. If you were, you would have exposed my presence to Lord Durand immediately.” She frowned as if trying to understand him. “Why did you not tell him?”
“Damned if I know,” he muttered, suddenly uncomfortable under that quizzical gaze.
She pursed her lips. “You must have a reason.”
“I don’t, really.” Why did he suddenly feel as if he were being strangled? He tugged at his cravat, but it didn’t help a bit.
“Come now, Mr. Beckett,” she pushed, taking a step closer to him, eyes squinting as she peered up at him, trying to make him out more clearly in the shadows. “What is the reason you did not say anything to your employer?”
It was the step closer that did it, shifting something in his brain, that necessary portion that had managed to keep his defenses intact where she was concerned. “Because I did not want any harm to come to you,” he blurted.
Her eyes opened wide, her mouth forming a soft oval. “You were worried about me?”
But he was already hard at work rebuilding his defenses, shoring up the dam, pushing those pesky emotions back behind it where they belonged. “No, I never said that.”
“Oh, but you did.” She blinked, staring at him. “You were worried about me.”
And then she smiled, a glorious smile that lit up the dark and obliterated that newly erected protective dam into a million pieces.
He might have been able to ignore her—to see her the rest of the way home, to turn and walk away and forget this moment ever happened—had she not then taken the last two steps toward him, closing the distance between them.
Just before she wound her arms about his waist.
“Thank you,” she said into his chest.
Oliver, however, hardly heard her over the beating of his heart in his ears, a mad, rapid rushing.
His arms came about her, an instinctual reaction, pressing her even closer against him.
And one thing became very clear: While he had thought her fragile before, now, with his hands splaying over her back and her arms tightening about his waist, he realized that had been a mirage.
She was so much stronger than he had believed, both inside and out.
She stilled, as if she had just realized the liberties she had taken.
But she did not gasp and stutter apologies and run away from him as he expected—and somehow dreaded.
No, she pulled back, just enough to look up at him, a peculiar light in her eyes.
Eyes that drifted over his face, down, down, to land on his lips.
And then she did the thing he least expected in the world—not that anything she had done thus far in their short acquaintance had been expected: She rose up on her toes and pressed her mouth to his.
He froze, every muscle in his body going rigid.
It was a chaste kiss, her lips pressed tight together, eyes primly shut.
Yet as he stared down at her, brain utterly and completely blank for the shock that ripped through it, his body was another matter entirely.
A shiver of something dark and primal shuddered through his bones, causing his breath to seize in his chest. And in a moment everything became crystalline, from the soft flutter of her lashes, to the warmth of the rapid breaths exhaling through her nose and bathing his cheek, to the convulsion of her fingers against his sides.
But more than anything, he felt the length of her body pressed to his, from her small breasts to the gentle curve of her stomach to her strong thighs.
Just as his mind attempted to understand what the devil was happening, she pulled back, separating from him with an aching release of plump lips.
Her lids rose then, and though night had fully descended, the half-moon was bright enough to cast deep pools of luminescence in her eyes, of such beauty that he ached to fall into them and never emerge.
“Oh,” she whispered, blinking myopically.
Oh? All she had to say was oh ? An insignificant word for the plethora of emotions currently bombarding his insides.
She bit her bottom lip, that wonderfully soft lip that had been pressed against his just seconds ago. “Well then, I’d better be off.”
She stepped back from his embrace. Just as she turned to go and disappear into the shadows, however, he grabbed her hand.
Later, much later, he would think how utterly stupid he had been to do such a thing.
Hadn’t she already proved that she could send him on his arse, quite literally, if he was not on guard?
And he was most definitely not on guard.
But even if he had been able to think clearly, he wouldn’t have cared. All he knew was he wanted her back in his arms, her mouth beneath his again. And then she was, and it was, and there had never been a more perfect bliss in his life.