Page 65 of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
“I’ll send Dennis to the village to see if there’s any news,” she said. “I reckon that whatever brought you here might be the sort of news that travels. He knows better than to talk about any strangers who might be sleeping in the barn.”
“Thank you,” he said sincerely. “I don’t suppose the—” His voice caught, and he broke off. “Is anyone living at my old cottage?”
She gave him a look that was equal parts soft and reproachful. “It fell down years ago, Kit.”
He swallowed. “Of course it did.” He went outside then, desperate for fresh air. He found Percy hauling buckets of cold water from the pump to fill an old tin washtub that he had set up in the barn.
“Are you going to heat that water?” Kit asked.
Percy’s cheeks turned pink. “I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
“Well, you freezing to death would be more of a bother. Dennis!” Kit fished a halfpenny from his coin purse and gave it tothe boy in exchange for his trouble, and then leaned against the barn wall.
Percy came to lean beside him. “Do you know,” he said in a confiding tone, his forehead wrinkled, “I saw that child walk past earlier with a brace of pheasants. I think these people are poachers.”
Kit laughed. “That they are. And so was I. And so was my wife. So were a lot of people who lived on your father’s land, if we wanted to make ends meet.” After the words left his mouth, he held his breath, not knowing how Percy would react.
“I wondered why you hated my father. If you were one of his tenants, that would certainly explain it,” Percy said, not without bitterness. He didn’t ask about Jenny, but he took Kit’s hand and squeezed it, as if he knew the story there wasn’t a happy one.
Once the bath was full, Kit closed the barn door to shut out the worst of the drafts. He watched in some amusement as Percy drew a bar of pure white soap from his satchel, followed by a sponge and a sheet of linen.
“What else do you have in there?” Kit asked. “A feather bed?”
“I assure you that if I had a feather bed, I would have brought it out last night. Not that I’m complaining about your friend’s hospitality,” he quickly added.
Kit didn’t pretend not to watch as Percy stripped. First, he wanted to be sure Percy wasn’t hiding any wounds—there was only so much he had been able to see by the lamplight the previous night. And second, well, he wanted to.
Percy pulled his shirt over his head and cast his eyes around, obviously looking for somewhere to put it, before finally shoving it into his satchel, unfolded. Presumably, he was used to alwayshaving a servant at hand to deal with things like clothes that needed washing. Kit wondered what Percy’s plans for the future were. If the duke were dead, what did that mean for Percy’s extortion scheme? Would Percy know how to live without fine soap and hot baths? And then Kit felt stupid for even wondering—of course Percy would figure it out. He had gone from being the pampered scion of a noble family to consorting with criminals and prizefighters. Kit knew a bone-deep longing to be around long enough to watch Percy find his feet again.
Percy pulled off his boots and buckskins and stepped into the bath.
Kit had known that Percy was strong, but it was something else to see the lean muscle that lay under his fair skin. And he had known Percy was beautiful, but it was something else to see the span of his shoulders and the curve of his arse.
Percy looked over his shoulder at Kit before lowering himself into the bath. “If you’re staying, you should come over here.”
Not needing to be told twice, Kit dragged a stool beside the tub and sat. “There something you want?” Kit was decidedly not in the mood himself, but there were stranger things than getting aroused by narrow escapes from danger.
Percy swallowed and shook his head, not meeting Kit’s eyes. “No, I just had too much of that beer and I’m maudlin. I figure having you nearby will stop me from crying into the bath as I wash my father’s blood from my hands, almost literally.”
“Sometimes you need to cry into the bath.”
“Somehow I doubt you ever do that,” Percy said, soaping up his arms. The cut Kit had dressed over a week ago was now an almost invisible pink line, soon hidden by soapsuds.
“You’d be surprised. Well, not into the bath. For me it was crying into my gin, but same principle.”
Percy slid lower in the tub, wetting his hair and working some suds through it. “Collins will be outraged that I used bath soap in my hair. He probably won’t speak to me for days and will leave bottles of hair tonic around my apartments in retaliation. Assuming, that is, that I’m not forced to flee for my life. A life of anonymous exile probably doesn’t involve much in the way of hair tonic.”
Kit could have reassured him that the duke was almost certainly dead, but that wasn’t what Percy needed to hear. “You’ll get by,” he said instead. “You’re clever and you’re strong.”
Percy gave him as incredulous a look as a man could deliver with bubbles all over his head. “I’m the opposite of strong. It’s all a facade. It’s acting.”
Kit’s heart twisted with some unspeakable, unwanted fondness. Percy was somehow still young or naive enough to think that there was any difference between being strong and acting strong. And again, Kit found himself wanting to be there when Percy figured it out, when he learned what he was worth.
As Percy struggled to wash his back, Kit wordlessly took the sponge from his hand and took over.
“My father used to let me win at chess,” Percy said as Kit ran the sponge over the nape of his neck. “I thought it was because he didn’t want me to feel bad about losing, but then I realized it was because that made the match faster.”
Kit didn’t understand at first why Percy was telling him that, why that fact mattered now, more than any other detail he could have called up about his father. But he realized that Percy wassharing with him one moment of stark disappointment, when a gesture he had thought to be one of love was revealed to be one of indifference. He had been shot by his father, who had been indifferent to him. And now he was trying to figure out how—or whether—to grieve a man who simply hadn’t cared.
