Page 125 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
“How are you so good with stitching?” he asked, when no other subject came to him.
“I was a midwife’s apprentice.”
“Yeah, but it must be difficult with all the hair…” He chewed his lip uncomfortably.
Adie blinked at him. “You really don’t know a lot about women, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Why?”
“You are going to have such a shock when you first see a woman naked…”
He tilted his face towards her. “Are you volunteering?”
Adeline raised an eyebrow. “Dimitri…”
“Are we not allowed to flirt now? I thought I was getting rather good at it? I may need to use these skills of mine somewhere else one day, you know. It’s only polite to let me practise.”
At that, she laughed, a sound that hit him squarely in the chest, like it had been a long time since he heard the sound. “You may flirt,” she said. “As long as we agree nothing can come of it.”
“Fine,” he said. “Yes to flirting, no to kissing…” His fingers inched towards hers. “What about the occasional brush of the fingers?”
She pressed her tips to his. “That might be a little hard to avoid…”
He let his fingers lace into hers, softly, carefully. “Only occasionally, mind.”
“Yes, only occasionally.”
She squeezed his knuckles, and then released them. “I’m almost done,” she told him, returning to his shoulder.
“Almost a shame.”
Her fingers traced the scars on his arm as she smeared a minty-smelling paste into them. “I’m worried that these are my fault.”
He blinked. “How could theypossiblybe your fault?”
“You asked to be chained up, so I could stay with you longer. Maybe you struggled more because—”
“Don’t.” Dimitri turned round to face her properly. “Don’t do that to yourself. We don’t know why it happened. But even if itwasrelated, how other people feel about you—what they do because of you—is still on them.” He raised his hand to her cheek. “You have brought me nothing but good.”
She swallowed, tearing her gaze back to his wounds. “If you insist.”
“I am stubborn that way…”
She gave him a quick smile, finished doctoring him, and kissed him on the cheek before wishing him goodnight. Her kiss lingered, hovering far too close to his lips, and when she left, a physical ache at his centre burned hot and deep.
He wasn’t sure how things could ever return to the way they were, how he’d ever be able to stop himself from wanting to kiss her, now that he’d opened that floodgate and was lost to the crushing current.
Chapter Twenty-nine: Lord of the Manor
Dimitri recovered quickly under Adeline’s care, although she spent little time with him when it wasn’t strictly necessary, aware of the sheer number of eyes in the manor now that the guests had descended in earnest. Alexei kept bringing them into Dimitri’s room to ‘lighten his spirits’ even though Dimitri barely tolerated their presence through gritted teeth. Adeline watched him forcing a placid smile when she delivered meals, half surprised he didn’t fake an attack to force them to leave. Some obscure aunt of his stayed for hours, and Adeline, who passed by the room a few times to see if she was still there, was certain the woman didn’t stop talking for the entire duration of the visit.
Poor Dimitri had to feign sleep to get her to leave, a fact she discovered afterwards when she went in to check on him.
“I’d recover a lot more quickly if I could just be left alone in a room with you,” he admitted.
She could think of nothing to say to this, so she shoved a spoonful of soup in his mouth, read to him until he genuinely fell asleep, and only after that did she lie down for a moment at his side, savouring the warmth of him, the touch she hardly dared reach for when he was awake.
He’d started dressing himself more, likely to spare them both the agony of it, and asking Thomas to assist him in the bath or waiting for her day off. She was thankful for the release, but she missed it, too, those slivers of intimacy.
