Chapter 5 #3
She was going to be professional about this. She had decided. She was going to knock and enter and administer the treatment with the brisk competence she brought to matters that required her attention. Then leave.
She was not going to think about his thigh or how it felt hard and muscular beneath her hands.
She was not going to think about the smell of leather.
She was not going to think about the shaving-soap smell of him, which had been a delightful presence in the carriage all day.
She was not going to think about the kiss in Cornwall.
Which she had been not thinking about with increasing effort since it had happened.
Which had not grown less important with the passage of time. It had, if anything, done the opposite.
She was going to knock. Enter. Administer. Leave.
She knocked.
He opened the door, and her heart did a little flip she had not authorized it to do.
A small, inconvenient lift that she noted and declined to acknowledge.
He was in his banyan again. Dark-haired and slightly rumpled.
He beamed down at her with the expression she was beginning to recognize as his default.
The expression that was not quite a smile but contained the structural components of one. Assembled and ready.
“Miss Metcalfe,” he said, and stepped back.
She entered. She set the jar on the table.
She was professional. She was focused. She was a woman with a mission and a papa, whose affairs required her full attention, and a journal to retrieve from the Radcliffe Camera, and no business whatsoever thinking about a private secretary’s sculpted mouth.
Would it be so terrible to kiss again? The thought slipped in before she could intercept it. A proper one this time. Without the interruption.
She moved to the edge of the bed with her back to him while he arranged himself, until he said he was ready.
She sat. She uncapped the jar. She put her hands on his leg.
The liniment was warm from the room, and her palms were warmer.
She began to work with the methodical attention she had exhibited since Exeter.
Finding the muscle. Reading the resistance in it.
Adjusting the pressure without being asked.
Because the injury was beginning to be familiar to her, in the way that things became familiar when you paid them careful attention.
Which she was paying. Professionally. To the injury.
“You are better at this than Angelo,” he said in a conversational tone, as though making an observation he had been sitting on for some time.
She concentrated on a particular knot of tension below the old break, distracted by the way the hard muscle yielded under sustained pressure, and said, “Who is Angelo?”
“My …” A brief pause. “A friend. Italian. He has been administering the treatment since autumn. He follows a procedure.” Another pause. “You do not follow a procedure.”
“I follow what is needed,” she said. “A procedure is only useful if the injury cooperates with it.”
“Angelo would find that observation interesting.”
“Is he a physician?”
“Something of the kind.”
She worked in silence for a moment. The room was very quiet.
The fire settled. Outside, Bath was conducting its evening business muffled by the thick inn walls which made it feel very far away.
The room exuded a peace that made what was going on outside seem less urgent than it actually was.
She was aware, inconveniently, of the exact geometry of his leg beneath her hands.
The length of it. The heat of the skin through the liniment.
The way the muscle, rigid with accumulated complaint, was slowly, grudgingly, yielding.
She licked her lips.
Stop it, she told herself, with a crisp internal firmness, having given herself this instruction before. I am performing a medical service. I am a practical woman. I am not thinking about—
She was thinking about it. Thinking about draping herself across him.
Finding out, with the methodical thoroughness she applied to every question that genuinely interested her, whether the kiss in Cornwall had been as extraordinary as she remembered it.
Or whether it had been a product of the hour and the candlelight and the general improbability of the situation.
She was fairly certain it had been extraordinary.
She was also fairly certain that conducting this experiment was not consistent with her current professional resolve, and that resolve was the only factor keeping the swirling confusion of feelings about Nick at bay.
She pressed her thumb into a point of tension and felt him go still.
She glanced up.
He was staring at her. Not with the sardonic amusement he deployed as a general-purpose defense to most subjects, but with an intensity that made her feel that she currently occupied the entirety of his thoughts. She froze, and the moment stretched as they stared deep into each other’s eyes.
He drew a breath and averted his gaze to the ceiling.
“The journal,” he said, changing the subject with deliberate intention. “The one Mr. Metcalfe hid in the Camera. You said he sensed he was being followed.”
She returned to the treatment. Professionally.
“He did. He became careful about it. He would take different routes to the library. He stopped keeping his notes at home.” She worked along the muscle, steady and even.
“He had a designated place in the Camera. Upper gallery. He knew the shelving. The voids behind the backboards. He was meticulous about it.”
“And you know where to search.”
“He told me. During a period of clarity. About eighteen months ago. He took my hand and told me in the unique way he tells me things he wants me to remember. Slowly and repeated twice. I wrote it down immediately afterward.” She paused. “Behind the Leland volumes. He said it four times.”