Page 42 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

She picked up the chalk and marked the next plank because stopping would mean thinking and thinking would mean acknowledging that the space between her body and his body was three feet.

He reached past her for the chalk on the windowsill. His arm crossed in front of her face and her body jerked backward before her mind caught up. A flinch. Involuntary.

He stopped. His arm still extended. His eyes found hers.

She watched his expression simply empty, all at once, as though someone had blown out a candle behind his face. The space between them filled with everything the flinch had said.

He picked up the chalk. Turned to the next window. Marked the plank.

She wished he would say something. Silence from Kit was never empty. It held the things that hurt too much to speak.

They finished the ground floor by midafternoon. She put the hammer down and stood in the passage and looked at what they had done. The house had been open and ruined and dying. Now it was sealed and became a coffin with rooms. The light was gone from every room below the stairs. What remained came through the gaps between the boards in narrow slats, pale and sharp, slow as a sundial, and the dust motes turned in them like ash.

He sat on the stone basin ledge in the scullery and stretched his shoulders. She saw the blood before he did. His left hand, a blister had been cracked open and weeping. He hadn't bandaged it. Of course he hadn't. The man would bleed to death before he'd ask for a dressing.

She almost walked past. It would have been easy. He had not asked for help. He would not ask. She could climb the stairs and close her door and leave him to his own wounds. He had left her to hers after all. Letting her heart bleed with the truth. Alone.

But she was not Kit. She was decent.

She crossed the scullery. Took his hand. Turned it over. The blister was raw, the edges pink and angry.

"You need to clean this," she said.

"It'll keep."

"It will fester."

She dropped his hand and went to the kitchen. Filled a bowl. Found the soap and a strip of clean linen. Came back. She did all of this quickly, her movements efficient, stripped of warmth. A task. She would do the task and she would do it properly because that was who she was and it had nothing to do with him.

"Give me your hand."

He gave it to her. She cleaned the wound. Methodical. Firm. She soaped the cloth and wiped the edges of the blister, and he hissed through his teeth and she didn't stop.

"Don't be a child," she said.

"It stings."

"Good. Perhaps next time you'll wear proper gloves."

She wrapped the linen around his hand. Tucked the end. Her fingers rested on the bandage, and beneath the linen she could feel his pulse: steady, slow, patient.

And then, without warning, the memory of his hands in the tunnel rose through her like a tide—his fingers laced with hers, the weight of him, the sound he had made against her neck—and the wanting hit her so hard her vision swam. It lasted two seconds. She let go of his hand as though it had burned her and stood and picked up the bowl and walked to the kitchen.

She set the bowl on the board and gripped the edge with both hands and breathed. The wanting had come and gone and what it left behind was worse. Not warmth. Shame. The shame of wanting a man her mind could not trust.

She poured the water out. Dried her hands. Straightened her back.

Chapter sixteen

No Hiding

Audrey

The upper floor was still light. The windows here were unboarded, the October sun coming through the old glass in long rectangles that warmed the floorboards and lit the dust motes turning in the air. After the sealed darkness below, the light felt wrong.

They worked in the same silence as the day before. He lifted, she nailed at her level, he took the rest. The rhythm had not changed. Neither had the distance. She kept it at arm's length and he did not close it. Since the flinch he had been careful. He asked her to pass tools rather than reaching past her. He announced himself when he came up behind her.

The landing window went first. Then the small casement above the stairs. The light retreated room by room, the rectangles of sun narrowing and vanishing as each plank went across, and the upper floor began to close around them.