Page 36 of Baron Bolt

He gathered in the last trick with those big, careful hands. And then:

“You were right to warn me, by the by,” said Damian.

“Warn you?”

“That I might lose to a woman.” He looked up. “I was afraid the entire time.”

And he grinned.

It arrived without any warning whatsoever. A sudden, crooked, boyish tug that pulled a little against the scarring on the left and made no apology for it. Ten years came off his face. The war came off it too. The mismatched blue of his eyes lit as if someone had opened a shutter she had not known was there. It jarred. It jarred the way a shout jars a church. Nothing in the whole of their acquaintance had prepared her for the existence of that grin. Her pulse had kept its beat through deep play and deeper trouble. It tripped. It scattered. It did not properly right itself.

Her cards slid out of her fingers and lay face up on the table.

She had never once in her life dropped her cards. She did not even notice for three full seconds.

Ophelia, who kept a reply ready for every man in England and most of the women, had nothing. Not a word. She sat in the new candlelight with her lips parted, roundly defeated for the second time inside a minute.

She had gone into this marriage the way clever men bought into the Funds. Sensibly. Terms understood. Hazards weighed. The whole risk reckoned down to the last farthing. A taciturn wall of a man. A name. A roof over her and her babe’s. Safety at long odds. A cold hand, but a playable one. She had accounted for the silence, and the scars, and the granite, and every grim article of the bargain.

She had not accounted for the grin.

He gathered in the cards, unhurried, faintly and outrageously pleased with himself. The smile was already fading. The light behind his eyes was not. Ophelia understood it with the icy clarity she otherwise reserved for the turn of a deciding card. She had misjudged the stake entirely. Damian Archer was not a calculated risk.

He was the first man she had ever met who might make her lose her head.

He gathered the cards and squared the pack, her father’s soft old cards, small in his hands, set it down between them, and raised one thick brow a fraction of an inch. Which was, she now understood, how a stoic asked a question.

“Deal,” said Ophelia, recklessly.

CHAPTER 8

The second can of water went over his shoulders. Stiles stared at the wallpaper.

He was good at it. Damian had to allow that. The man could pour hot water down a ruined back. He could offer the washball at the right height. He could set warmed linen across the fire screen. All of it with his gaze fixed on a spray of painted roses two feet above his master’s head. That not-looking was a professional accomplishment. Somewhere in the valet’s training there must have been a chapter on it. How to bathe a gentleman without ever admitting he possessed a body.

Or perhaps that chapter had been written more recently. In this room. For him.

Damian leaned forward in the copper tub. Heat worked into the seam at his left shoulder, where the flesh always pulled too tight by evening. He watched the valet’s reflection ghost across the dark window. Rain ran down the glass beyond it. Soft rain. English rain. The rain he had dreamed of on the road from France. And here he sat in the middle of the dream, steaming like a pudding, while his brother’s valet handled him the way a wise man handled an unexploded shell. Light, quick, face turned well away.

“Your arm, my lord. If you would permit me.”

Damian lifted the arm. Stiles drew the sponge along it in two passes and released it as though returning borrowed property. When the sponge crossed from the sound flesh of his forearm to the puckered ridge above the elbow, the man’s breathing changed. Nothing so vulgar as a gasp. Just an undisciplined pause. The sort of pause a curate made before an indelicate word in Scripture.

Monstrous.

That was the word the pause put in the room. Stiles would never say it. He did not need to. He said it with the escaping gaze. With the great and constant labor of his averted eyes. As though looking too long at his master’s shoulder might be a sin the man would have to carry to church.

And the devil of it was, Damian could not even blame him. He had seen the thing in the looking glass himself.

Stiles wrung the sponge with his gaze pinned to the middle distance. Damian sat in hot water in his brother’s house, in his brother’s bedchamber, attended by his brother’s man, and felt loneliness settle over him like the steam. Total, familiar, and absolute.

Edward.

If Edward had lived … Deuce it! If Edward had lived, Damian would have gone to him with all of it. He would have sat with his brother. Edward would have listened to the whole impossible account with his head tipped back and one eyebrow climbing. Then he would have said something so wildly, criminally inappropriate that Damian would have laughed despite himself.

Trust you, Edward would have said. Trust you to be too pig-stubborn for a grave.

And he would have poured two brandies and made his younger brother drink one. By the bottom of the glass the cellar would have been a story instead of a burning secret. Edward had that gift. He could take a catastrophe and turn it inconsequential enough to hold.