Page 56 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“A poor choice of words, I’ll admit.” He cast his gaze about, searching for—something. At last he swept his cane to the left, gesturing with it toward a wooden bench not too far away, and tucked up against the glass wall. “There,” he said. “That bench. Sit with me a moment. I’ve been all over the damned houselooking for you and my knee aches like the damned devil.”
“Hieronymus—”
“Isn’t going anywhere. Hell, if he manages to escape the box, I’ll give him run of the house—though I shudder to think how he’d manage the stairs.Sit, Phoebe.”
With a beleaguered sigh, she turned for the bench and sat with a huff at the left side, grateful that it was wide and long. It was an effort to resist the urge to snap at him when he sat directly at her side, when two more people could have fit comfortably in the space he had left open. “Did you need to sit quite so close?”
“Someone’s got to rub my damned knee, and you’re better at it.”
Phoebe fumed silently, her fingers clenching in the folds of her skirts. He had some damned nerve, soliciting her assistance when he’d made her so angry. And the worst of it was, shewantedto touch him. She’d grown accustomed to it over the past month, accustomed to him searching her out only to collapse in her lap and plead for head scratches like a needy puppy. Accustomed to that faint purr of pleasure that always seemed to hum at the very back of his throat. Accustomed to the relief that swept across his face, and the relaxing of his taut muscles, as if he had come to rely upon her for those things.
Chris set his cane aside and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Please?”
With a growl of aggravation, Phoebe set her hand upon his knee and dug the tip of her thumb into the tight flesh there.
Chris gave a heavy sigh, leaning back and draping his left arm across the back of the bench. His fingertips grazed the curls that had begun to droop in the roasting heat, toying with them absently. “There’s not much I can do at the moment,” he said, by way of explanation. “I didn’t get a good look at the man who shot me. At least, I assume it was a man. The fact is, it could bedamned near anyone.”
“Then you shouldn’t have left the house.” He’d placed himself in an even more dangerous position. Not only hindered by his injured leg, but by his healing gunshot wound.
“What sort of a life is one lived in fear? Besides, there’s every chance it’s someone from my set instead of yours. And my sort don’t take well to cowardice. It’s the same as weakness, and weakness is made to be exploited. If I thought to hide myself away, well—sooner or later, they’d come to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I live in a large house with all of the vulnerabilities of one. There’s always someone coming or going. New staff who might be bribed to leave a door unlocked or a window open. Someone paid to take a position as a member of the staff for the purposes of slipping arsenic in my breakfast.” He gave a little shake of his head. “I’m not saying it’s likely,” he said. “Most people with a vendetta wouldn’t be satisfied with just hearing I’d died. They’d want the satisfaction of doing the job themselves, seeing me suffer.”
Phoebe’s stomach curdled at the very thought.
“I told you it was possible you’d be a widow in short order some weeks ago,” he said. “Why are you angry now?”
Because when he’d told her, the danger had already passed, and he’d been confined to a bed for an indeterminate amount of time. The surgeon had assured her he would survive, and any further danger had seemed a distant thing in her mind. And in the time since—
In the time since, she’d grown accustomed to him. More than she had wished to. More than that which she had thought herself capable of.
Her breath whistled through the clench of her teeth. “I told you,” she said. “I don’t want to be a widow.”
“Hm,” he said. And then he added in a casual, suggestivetone, “Do you want to be a wife?”
And there it was, on the tip of her tongue at last.Mariticide. The killing of one’s spouse. That was the word she’d forgotten.
∞∞∞
The wretched woman ground her heel down upon Chris’ toe. “Christ,” he hissed, yanking one of her curls in a bit of petty retribution. “Haven’t I suffered enough just lately?”
“I don’t believe you have,” she said snidely, with a curl of her lip. “Besides, it hardly even counts as maiming. And you’re justfinewith maiming, aren’t you?”
“When I’m the one doing it, yes.” At least she hadn’t removed her hand from his knee, even if she’d forgotten in the flare of her anger that she’d been meant to be rubbing it. Because she liked touching him. He’d noticed it right away, though first he’d thought it was nothing more than simple curiosity. But if it had been, she’d have assuaged it well before now.
And she had just kept doing it. Any opportunity he’d given her. He was aware, generally, of the way ladies of her station were raised, how sheltered and protected they were. How any physical contact with an unrelated man, no matter how minor, was largely discouraged outside of a few very limited circumstances.
Phoebe had lived nine and twenty years in a restrictive world, and while she hadn’t gone wild with her newfound freedom, she had pushed the boundaries of acceptability. Stretched toward those intimacies she had always eschewed rather than away from them.
At the moment she was altogether too angry—because he’dalmost been killed, and then he’d made her worry for his safety when he’d left the house.
So he said, “I’m choosing now.”
“Now? What do you mean, now?” And then she gasped. “Now? You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as the plague,” he said, and the color that burst into her cheeks was startlingly vivid.
