Page 60 of Homeless

“I am not the one who is injured. You flinched, and then you blamed it on me. Should we summon a surgeon? Is there any damage to the bones?” She pressed lower, below the cut where a bruise was already starting to stare purple through the flesh.

He shot from under her hand. “By God!” And then he winced again from the sudden movement, his own hand hovering over his ribs as he tried to brace himself against the pain and found nothing would serve. Instead, his teeth sank into his lower lip, and his eyes clenched.

“Oh. Yes, indeed, the rib may be —”

“It is not my damned rib, it is just a bruise, and you thumping on it will do no good whatsoever!”

“Well, there is no sense in swearing at me! I am only trying to… Hold still.” She wrapped her arms around him again and drew the strip snug against the cut, drawing another hiss and muffled curse from him.

“One thing I shall be bloody glad of… blast! Not so hard!” His teeth bared, and tears started at the corners of his eyes.

Elizabeth soothed the cloth over the wound before she put her arms around him again to make a second pass. “Yes, go on. What will you be glad of?”

“In a few more weeks, we can both of us pretend this never happened,” he growled. “I do not relish the eternal humiliation of you casting this up to me whenever you fancied for the next forty years.”

“Oh, well struck.” She finished the second pass and began a third. “You will be glad to hear I resent it precisely as much as you imagine. I had no ambition this morning, when I rose, to spend my evening as your surgeon.”

“We are agreed, then, and may proceed in honest ill humour and waste no more breath on civility.”

“Honest ill humour.” She drew the cloth round again. “I could not have described this marriage better had I a lifetime to do it.”

That surprised something out of him, a low grunt. In anyone less determined to be wretched, it might have grown into a laugh. The small motion of it shifted the shirt at his shoulder, and there, where she had been at such pains not to look, was the scar.

She had resolved once not to be curious about it, not to ask, but now, it seemed the least of all intimacies.

“This is old.” Her thumb had stopped beside the silver line in his skin, not upon it. “How did you come by it?”

For a while, he said nothing, and she had begun to think the silence was to be his whole answer, when he gave her another.

“I was two-and-twenty,” he said, “and very sure of myself.”

“You? I cannot credit it.”

He snorted. “A fair hit. One of the things I was surest of turned out to be the wrong end of another man’s quarrel. I came away with this. The other gentleman came away a good deal worse. I have not, since, been certain of much with the same freedom.”

“It looks like a sword cut. Or what I imagine a sword cut would look like.”

“Just so. It is the only wound I ever earned that has had the decency to stop aching.”

She had learned enough of him to hear the closed door standing just behind the open one, and she had no intention of knocking on it. “I am sorry for… well, for whatever does still ache,” she said instead.

“Do not be. I have no earthly use for your sympathy, and you would resent the spending of it inside the hour.”

“I would. Bitterly.” She took up the binding again — gentler now, though she would have denied the gentleness on the rack. “I only meant… oh, bother, I do not know what I meant. It was a great deal easier when we disliked each other, Mr Darcy. I find I have a real talent for it. Let us go back.”

“By all means.”

Then she pulled the knot tight — tighter than the wound strictly wanted — and he made a hissing sound he would probably have preferred to keep behind his teeth, and the treaty lapsed on the instant.

“Sorry. Let me loosen that a bit.” Her fingers worked at her knot again, her knuckles grazing his skin a good deal more than she would have liked. “There, is that better?”

He drew an experimental breath, and her eyes followed the movement of his bared chest as it rose and fell. “Yes, I believe I shall not expire from want of air now. Have you any other torments to bestow?”

She sat back. “No.”

“Then I suppose I must thank you.” He dropped his shirt back into place, ran a hand through his hair, and began to put himself to rights. Then he glanced at her face and stopped. “What?”

“I…” Her face fell. “No, you will mock me, and that is something I refuse to endure.”