She closed her eyes and considered slipping off onto what looked like fairly soft grass. There was a big patch of it to the left here.
“Don’t faint.” He fitted his arm around her, over her shoulder.
“I’m not going to.” But maybe she would. Cold pricked all over her body. Even her lips were numb.
He turned toward her on the bench and she felt his hand on her cheek. Calloused fingers, warm and smooth, ran over her eyelids, touched her mouth. “Damn. You’re cold as ice.”
Absently, as if he’d had practice at it, he smoothed down her hair. “I won’t ask why you’re wandering around the house barefoot.”
He took her left hand and put it in her lap, palm upwards, so he could study it. “Did you get burned?”
“Burned? Oh. From the pot handle. No damage done. That bloke, though—” She swallowed the rest of what she was about to say. She didn’t talk flash anymore. Not for years now. “That man. He’s not going to be pretty when he heals up.”
“He wasn’t pretty to start with.” The Captain had turned her hand up to the light from the kitchen windows, searching it like the lines on her palm held the secrets of the universe. “Some pink maybe, from the burns you tell me you don’t have. And here we have the scrapes from last night, when you were dodging Irishmen. I cleaned those for you.” He pointed here and there. It tickled, even though he wasn’t touching at all.
“All part of my catlike retreat. Always puzzled me cats don’t seem the worse for wear more than they do. I suppose it’s all that fur.”
“I’m sure it is. And this.” He trailed a fingertip along the edge of her hand, where the old scars were. “You acquired before you met me. Looks like you put your hands through glass.”
“A reasonable guess.” They were tooth marks, actually. She remembered how she’d got those bites, and it was a bad, cold memory.
Maybe he felt her shiver. He didn’t ask again. He closed her fingers up, wrapping her hand inside of his. Then he let go. “You keep getting hurt, Jess. I’d like to put a stop to that.”
“Me, too.”
He didn’t say anything for a while after he put her hand away.
This was the Captain in a different mood. He wasn’t angry with her, which was one of those small pleasures in life you had to be careful to enjoy when they went swinging past. He’d been stiff and furious when he stomped out of the attic this morning, full of bite and sarcasm. He seemed to have gotten over that. No telling why.
The kitchen was filling up again with a twitter of women’s voices, high-pitched and excited, discussing at length and deploring in depth. They were sweeping and putting things away and cleaning crockery up. Making the world right again. Doing what women always did when the men were through rampaging. It was reassuring to hear, but she didn’t want to join them. She leaned her head back and felt him behind her. Felt his arm, strong and solid, under a layer of wool and one of linen.
She shouldn’t just relax like this, on a man’s arm. She didn’t know him well enough, and she didn’t like him, and he might be Cinq.
Though it was hard, just this minute, to make herself believe Kennett could be Cinq. She’d try again later and see if she did a better job of it.
He didn’t seem to notice she was leaning on him. He just looked up at the sky, musing like. “I get indications, Jess, that you’ve led an eventful life. Didn’t anyone ever warn you not to square up against charging madmen?” Her shoulder was against his chest, they were so close. When he spoke, she could feel his voice with her body.
“Wasn’t like I had much choice. You can’t talk to a man that drunk. He would have broken Eunice like kindling. Then he’d have torn that weeping tribulation of a girl into scraps.”
“So you waded in, armed with a saucepan.” With his arm still around her, he settled back and stretched so his boot heels dug into the gravel . . . a man at ease in his back garden, watching the last light ebb out of the flower beds and weeds. He curled his arm to pull her closer. It seemed rude to complain when he didn’t mean anything by it. He wasn’t even looking at her.
“That was a damn fool stunt,” he said. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“I know that. You did it for her. I was at the top of the kitchen stairs when I saw you heft a soup pot and go for him.” The hold around her tightened. “It took me a century to get across the kitchen. Every second I was telling myself you were strong and smart and you wouldn’t let her get hurt. I trusted you as if you were my own hands.” He sounded . . . She didn’t know what he sounded like. Like he was talking to an old friend, instead of her. “When I left this morning, I planned to come back and start prying you out of here. I’d worked out some strategies. I still thought I could scare you, for one thing.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn. I’m not finished being terrified of that last fellow.”
“Oh, you’re terrified all right. You’re quaking with fright.” Amusement burred, low in his throat. “I’m not going to evict you. Stay. You’ve earned a place here. Move in, bag and baggage. Bring your cat.”
“I might.” She should bring Kedger. That would teach him to go offering hospitality wholesale.
He’d shifted around on the bench again, making himself comfortable, and she ended up leaning against him. Where they touched, side by side, was a long strip of warmth, and the rest of her was chilly. His fingers moved idly, tapping at her arm where he had his hand wrapped around. She felt the touches land on her, one by one.
It was strangely companionable, sitting beside him, watching the night creep into the garden by inches. She let herself soak up his heat where they were sharing it. She could almost relax. It was like sitting next to a wolf. One who’d just eaten. A wolf with a full belly and his tongue lolling out. A wolf in excellent good humor.
Still a wolf, though. “I thought you’d kill that man. When you picked him up and started hitting him, I thought you’d pull out a knife.”
“Not in front of Eunice.”
“I figured that out, afterwards. Whatever you do to that man, you won’t do it in front of her. You won’t even tell her about it.” She’d learned something else about the Captain. He played a role when he was in the West End. He kept the violence inside him, secret and controlled and he didn’t bring the dangerous parts of his business home. “You never show your family what you are.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“They’d be shocked, I guess. Would you have killed him, if it’d been just me watching?” She couldn’t believe she asked him that, straight out. Probably it wasn’t wise, asking the wolf questions, even when he was in a good mood.
“I already killed a man in front of you, didn’t I?” He ran his eyes over her before he went back to admiring his garden. “I won’t make a habit of it, Jess. You’ve seen the worst of me. Most days, I’m a respectable trader. I don’t murder everybody I get angry at.”
“That’s moderate of you.” He had family inside the house, his aunt and uncle and cousins. But he was out in the evening talking with her. Maybe he didn’t have to hide what he was so much. Maybe he could say things to her he couldn’t say to the others. “Anyway, you don’t want dead men in your back garden. I mean, who would?”
“Good point.”
They could sit like this as long as nobody brought up any awkward topics of conversation. Neither of them said anything. Complicity was the word that came to mind.
The dark corners and clumped shadows under the bushes didn’t make her uneasy tonight. Nothing would dare to lurk in the dark with the Captain here. He held her in a friendly way, like they got along fine. Like they’d done this a hundred times. Like they always wandered out here into the garden whenever the weather was good and that bush over in the corner was in bloom. If it bloomed.