“Wait,” he said, digging his heels into the ground.
She whirled on him, still holding his wrist. “You are injured, Devon.”
“I’m a bit beat up, true. Nothing that hasn’t happened before.”
She stepped nearer to him, gently cradled his face between her hands, and looked over every inch of it. She saw him tonight, in this moment, under the spring moon. It made her realize that not everyone who needed to be seen was invisible. Some, like this man, were as visible as they could be, but still no one saw them right.
She drew a line along the cut on his cheekbone, and he winced.
“Come,” she said softly. “Let me fix you up. I know we have materials at home for any cut or scrape acquired in a workshop.” She took his wrist once more and turned, tugging him along behind her and down the street.
For a breathless step or two, he followed her, a silent shadow. Then his step lengthened with purpose, and he took on more weight and warmth than any shadow had ever possessed. He drew up beside her and used one arm to pull her hood back up and tug it low over her face. Then he eased her up against his side, bolting his arm tight around her waist like she belonged there in the bitter-sweet coffee scent of his clothes and skin.
They’d likely look like a gentleman and his doxy out for a stroll, and Lillian should care. She kept her face toward their feet and couldn’t muster a single care in the world.
Except one.
Would he really risk his coffeehouse dream for her wallflower project? If Freddy was right, Devon refused to use any money that came from his family, and now that she knew how he felt about being a second son, she believed it. But he did not have enough money to buy Freddy’s. Where did that leave him? Where did it leave them?
His arm tightened, and she looked up at him. The hint of a smile had settled on his lips, and he looked truly comfortable, truly content.
She pressed her face to his side. It felt warm and thumped with life, energy, delight. His heart or hers? Both for one another. She swallowed the lump forming in her throat as he pulled away to hail a hackney.
They clambered inside one, and he kept her tight to his side even as they clattered over cobblestones toward her home. They sat in the type of silence that did not need to be filled, and she imagined spending many such coach rides home with him after a long night at balls or coffeehouses, parties or family gatherings.
It was no fairy tale she faced. It was somethingmore, and she closed her eyes so she did not have to fully see it. Though, contradictory little thing she was turning out to be, she wanted not only to see it but to live it.
When the hack rolled to a stop, they alighted and entered the house together. Bereft of the deafening echo and powdery scent of explosions, it seemed another world entirely from the one they sparred in near daily. The house, like the rest of the evening, a symbol of something new, tentative, and unexpected growing between them like a flower that unfurls only beneath the moon.
His arm still embraced her waist, and she poked his ribs to get him to let go.
He lurched with a laugh, which he caught with cupped hands before it spilled from his lips.
Ticklish, was he? A good thing to know about a husband.
She pointed toward the parlor and left him to find the kitchen. Cook kept bits of plaster, cloth, thread, and needle for sewing up the random injury she or one of the cooks sustained. She gathered it all into a basket that usually carted vegetables, found a convenient pitcher of water in the middle of the large table, and brought both with her into the parlor.
Devon stretched out on a too-small chaise, his legs dangling over the end, his arms folded behind his head as he stared at the ceiling with unblinking eyes. His big body eclipsed the feeble piece of furniture. She’d laugh if he wasn’t so achingly lovely. His sumptuous mouth curved into the most satisfied of grins. Her footsteps had been light enough that he had not heard her approach. At least, as far as she could tell. One of his feet swayed back and forth leisurely. She could not seem to stop studying him this evening—his long, lean frame, his high cheekbones, and messed hair. In the dark room, it was silvered by shadows, though she knew that color to be a lie. His sun-gold hair was streaked here and there with hints of strawberry. He looked like summer, and she loved summer.
The wordloveslammed like a door in her head, jolting her out of her dreamy reverie. She slipped the stolen black cloak from her shoulders and draped it over a chair. Then she rummaged in the basket and hummed to alert him of her presence and knelt beside the chaise.
He jolted to a sitting position and groaned as he cradled his head with both hands. He leaned forward and spread his legs wide, resting his elbows on his knees, straddling her with tight muscles hardened by riding and who knew what else.
She swallowed the lump of insistent desire in her throat and rummaged in the basket for a clean cloth. She poured a bit of water on it from the pitcher and tried not to remember when she’d been this near him with a pitcher of water in hand. It had not been her best moment. It had also not been his.
She reached up and patted the wet cloth against his split lip, wiping away the blood.
He winced, and then he laughed, a dark, deep chuckle. “Do you remember the last time we met with a jug of water between us?”
Mind reader, he was. She ducked her head and re-wet the cloth. When she met his gaze again, it was with defiance. “You deserved it.”
“I did.”
She went back to work on his lip with one hand and reached into the basket with another, pulling out a slab of wrapped meat. “Put this on your eye.”
He did. “You’re not a particularly soothing nursemaid.”
“I’ve not had much opportunity to play one.”
