Page 7 of How the Earl Entices

He gestured at his arm, silently ordering her to continue. He wasn’t willing to share that piece of his story.

With an irritated huff, she rose from her seat and returned to the hutch, where she angrily poured water from a pitcher into a bowl and snatched up a hand towel. In afterthought, she bent over to retrieve a small brown jug from the lower cabinet. She carried it all back to the table. The jug came down with a thud, the bowl of water with a splash.

He bit his cheek to keep from laughing.

If he weren’t in such danger and utterly exhausted, he’d find her hostility amusing. In his normal life, society women didn’t dare show him such irritation, even when they wanted to slap him. No, they kept false smiles plastered firmly on their faces, no matter how much he irritated them, because they all hoped they might become his countess, not knowing that they didn’t have a chance. He couldn’t stand the preening lot of them.

He watched her closely as she returned to her chair and soaked the towel in the bowl. “What’s your name?”

“Apparently, it’s Captive,” she answered flippantly, wringing out the excess water. When she leaned toward him to dab at the wound to clean it, he grabbed her wrist again, silently pressing for her name. She shook her head. “You first. You’re the stranger here, not me.”

“Thomas.” He released her arm to let her continue to nurse him. “Christopher Thomas.”

His brother’s Christian name rolled easily off his tongue and without a prick of guilt at lying to her. Self-preservation. By now, there must have been a reward out for him, with notices plastered in all the posting inns and every constable and soldier in southeastern England on watch, just in case he made it out of France. He expected no less from King George and the Court of St James’s, who would certainly hang him for a traitor if they caught him.

The woman’s eyes flickered. “Christopher Thomas, is it?”

“My friends call me Kit. And you are?”

“Grace Alden.” Her eyes lowered to the wound on his arm as she began to clean it.

“Grace,” he murmured. A beautiful name and, from watching her closely as she’d moved about the cottage earlier, an apt one. Even when she’d been wielding a poker she’d revealed an innate elegance he never would have associated with a woman living in a fishing village.

She arched a brow. “Andmyfriends call me Mrs. Alden.”

Cheeky chit.But there was no husband here. A quick glance revealed a pair of boy’s boots, a small jacket, and school books. A child lived here, but there was nothing that signified a man’s presence.

“Where’s your husband, Mrs. Alden?” When she began to answer, he interrupted, “And don’t tell me that he’s due home at any moment, because you and I both know that’s a damn lie.”

She froze with the towel against his arm in a heartbeat’s pause, during which that sharp mind of hers calculated her options and weighed the best. “My husband is dead,” she answered softly. From the pained timbre in her voice, she was telling the truth.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” The swipes of the towel against the cut gentled beneath his sympathy.

She was much friendlier when she spoke of her husband, so he pressed his advantage. “Was he a sailor?”

Another pause, as if gauging how much she should reveal. “Yes.”

The hair at his nape prickled. She’d just lied to him. He could read it in the way she kept her face lowered, her eyes averted. In the way her fingers trembled when she rinsed out the cloth. But why would she lie about that?

“How did he die?” A gentleman would never have asked such a thing, but tonight he was no gentleman. And there was more to the woman in front of him than a simple fisherman’s widow. He sensed it the way old sailors felt changes in the weather. In his bones.

“He was lost at sea.” She shoved the jug across the table toward him. “You’ll want this.”

He uncorked it and sniffed. Whiskey. Judging from the sharp odor that bit his nose, not expensive single malt. He handed it back. “No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” She snatched up the bottle and poured it into his wound.

“Christ!” The pain splintered his insides. Through clenched teeth, he panted down the burn, if not the fierce pounding in his head like an iron hammer, until the sickening nausea in his stomach subsided and the sharp pain mellowed into a dull ache. But the throbbing at his temples remained strong and relentless. “Warn me next time before you do that.”

She set the jug down and shot him a look of pure vengeance. “Will you warn the next woman you attack?”

He gritted his teeth against his headache. “You were less trouble when you were armed with the poker.”

“Andyouwere less trouble when you were outside in the storm.” Her chin rose icily with all the haughtiness of an old governess. “Would you care to leave? And we can end this madness right now.”

Madness.His situation was certainly that. “I cannot.”