Page 95 of Snapdragons
It was good to see him smile, however tiny the expression. He took hold of her hand, the one touching his face, and lowered it, clasped in his, to his heart.
“I have debated all day,” she said, “whether I was more frustrated that ladies aren’t permitted to attend pugilistic contests and are, therefore, left to fear the worst or more grateful because it meant not seeing you get hurt.”
“Have you reached a conclusion?”
She scooted closer. “If I’d had to watch someone punching you, I’d have been hard-pressed not to march into the box or ring or whatever it is called and start throwing a few punches myself.”
“We’d need to work on your technique first.”
He was lucid and witty, speaking with the difficulty one would expect from a person whose face had taken a beating but without the misery that would come if his jaw were broken or he’d lost a great many teeth. And while his eye was swollen, it was notswollen shut.
Her perusal of his face led to a sudden realization that she had missed an alteration in him so significant that she began to doubt her powers of observation. “What happened to your hair?” It was cut quite short.
“Hair that is long enough to grab hold of is a significant liability in boxing.”
That was surprising. “Is holding one’s opponent by the hair permitted?”
“There are very few things that are not.”
It sounded as brutal as she’d heard it was. Still, he had emerged relatively whole.
She looked at Marston, who was gathering strips of linen and what appeared to be jars of liniment. “His injuries are all ones he will recover from? I needn’t be worried that something horrible is soon to come of this?”
“He’ll be a touch miserable for a few days,” the valet said. “But he’ll entirely recover.”
Penelope’s heart at last eased. She wasn’t going to lose him, and he wouldn’t suffer endlessly for that day’s bout.
With her most pressing concern addressed, she needed to know the outcome of the fight. The winning purse was enormous, significant enough that he would be very close to having money enough to purchase an estate near Fairfield. It would cut years off the amount of time they needed to wait to begin their lives together.
She turned back to her beloved Niles. “Did you win the fight?”
He hesitated for the length of a breath. “I didn’t.” He sounded genuinely ashamed. “The Bath Butcher is legendary. Not the very best boxer in the kingdom but a better one than I am. I did warn you of that. I fought very hard, Penny. I really did.”
She lifted one of his battered hands to her lips and gently kissed a comparatively unscathed bit of it.
“I don’t want you to be disappointed in me,” he said quietly.
“I never could be, Niles Greenberry. You fought, quite literally, for the chance for us to build a life together. You did it knowing the odds were not in your favor. That is something I could never be anything but enormously proud of. You are remarkable. Don’t you ever doubt or forget that.”
“Seems a gentleman ought to keep a lady around who says things like that to him,” Wilson said.
“You’re not meant to speak out of turn, Wilson,” Marston was quick to say. His eyes darted to Niles. “Even if what you are saying is entirely true.”
Niles smiled at Penelope. “And she let me steal some of her Cornish fairings yesterday. How could I resist keeping her?”
“I purchased a few more fairings from the stall before leaving the fair last evening.”
“I will now be sorely tempted to steal them from you.”
It was good to hear him jesting. He was in obvious pain, and losing his match must have weighed heavy on him, but he wasn’t drowning in his struggles.
“I might be willing to allow you to have some fairings, no stealing necessary. You would be paying a forfeit for them, of course.”
“A steep forfeit?” Niles probably would have smiled at her if the two men weren’t fussing with his face so much.
“I would think of something worth the exchange.”
“In other words, I wouldn’t be stealing but rather paying for the privilege of claiming my fairing crumbs.”
