Page 9 of Once a Gentleman
“I had a few small matters of business to attend to. My apologies for not being here to greet you this morning,” Turner said with a shrug. Kit had rarely heard an apology delivered with so little heart; admiration for such masterfully careless insincerity vied with a surge of annoyance. Good Lord, had he just been entertaining guilt and shame for his own behavior? “I hope you’ve made yourself entirely at home?”
If cold water, a cold hearth, and cold coffee constituted home, then Kit supposed he had. “I helped myself to everything available, I thank you,” he said cautiously. He could not quite bring himself to lie.
Turner stared him down for a long moment, his fingers tapping absently against his thigh. He had large hands, callused and tanned. They were hardly the hands of a gentleman, and Kit shivered as he recalled, suddenly and vividly, how tightly they had grasped his waist in the bookshop, and the heat of them around his wrists in the alley. He could all but feel their imprint now.
At last Turner crossed the room and grasped the bell-rope that hung discreetly beside the fireplace. “I think perhaps we ought to have fresh coffee, if we’re to wade through that stack of nonsense,” he said, waving a hand at the papers before Kit. He gave him a narrow-eyed look, and added, “And I’ve come home with something of an appetite, after so much walking. I hope you’ll join me in an early luncheon.”
“It would be my pleasure, I thank you, sir,” Kit said with great sincerity. Regarding the food, at any rate. Turner had obviously partaken of the same pitiful breakfast Kit had. Did he mean to apologize for it in some subtle way, by ordering luncheon? Kit had begun to suspect Turner had more understanding behind those eyes than he had at first believed, and possibly more subtlety to accompany it.
Turner nodded, and they turned to the ledgers, interrupted only when Samuel answered the bell and brought the coffee and a heaping plate of sandwiches. The service bore every sign of having been hastily washed; a few drops from that morning still stained the outside of the pot.
A full two hours passed before Turner declared himself addled from an abundance of figures, mentioned another dinner engagement, and sauntered out, leaving Kit staring at the door as it shut behind him. He very carefully didnotstare at the way his buckskins looked from the back.
