Pleasure was not enough of a word to describe the way her stern reply coursed through him, untethered and electric. He sucked in a breath at the sensation, wanting to assuage her worry. “They heal.”
She didn’t look convinced, but opened the pot of salve, lifting it to her nose. “Bay,” she said softly before meeting his eyes. “You use this frequently.”
“I fight frequently.”
She winced at the words and he wished he could take them back. “Why?”
He didn’t reply as she spread the ointment over his torso, her movements smooth and sure, and gentle enough to make him ache in an entirely different way. When was the last time he’d been tended to?
Not for decades.
He found he did not want to go back, not now that he knew the feel of her hands on him. Her soothing touch. The way she awakened every inch of him as she cocooned them in lemon and bay.
“What is in it?” she asked. “How does it work?”
“Willow bark and bay leaf.” If anyone else had asked, Whit would have ended his reply there. But this was Hattie, and everything was different with her. “My mother used to make something similar. She called it suave de sauce. Rubbed it on her hands before bed.”
“They ached from the needlework.”
He hated how easily she understood something it had taken him years to work out. Hated the guilt that racked him. “I did what I could to bring money in, so she didn’t have to work so hard, but she didn’t want me on the streets. She paid for me to take lessons in the back room of a haberdasher off Saint Clement’s Lane. Insisted I learn to read. Some weeks, the candles cost more than the money from her work.” It was a lesson Whit had never forgotten. One he thought of every time he lit the candles in this room—more than he’d ever need, as though he could light that room for his mother if he tried hard enough. “Every time I told her I wanted to work, she would remind me that the lessons were already paid for. Used to say that if—”
He stopped.
Hattie’s touch didn’t waver. He focused on the smooth, wonderful strokes.
“She used to say that if it killed her, I’d grow up to be a gentleman.”
It was why he’d left her. How his father had kept him fighting for a dukedom he’d never been meant to inherit.
And it had killed her.
He swallowed the thought, letting the bitterness settle before he added softly, “What she would think of me now.”
Hattie was quiet for a long moment—long enough for Whit to think that she might not reply. But she did, because she always knew what to say. “I think she’d be proud of you.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” he said. His mother would have loathed his life. She would have hated the violence he lived daily, the filth of his world. And she would have found the way he’d betrayed Hattie unconscionable. “She’d have hated everything but the books.”
She smiled at the words, her touch unwavering. “There are a lot of books.”
“We couldn’t afford them.” He didn’t want to tell her that. It wasn’t her business. And somehow, he couldn’t stop talking. “She couldn’t read, but she revered them.” He cast a look around the room. “She couldn’t afford them, and I don’t even keep them in a bookcase.” Another way he’d failed his mother.
Hattie didn’t look up from her work. “Seems to me that the best way for you to honor her reverence is to read them. And these all look well-read.”
He grunted.
She smiled. “That meant you’d like to change the subject.” She looked up through her lashes at him, and her sweet smile was a welcome distraction. “I’m learning your sounds.”
Her fingers smoothed over his ribs, where a purple bruise bloomed fast and furious, and he sucked in a breath. “I don’t have to be a good student to know what that one meant.” She lifted her hand, her task complete. “May I bandage you?”
Another grunt, and she smiled, lifting the roll of linen at her side. “I’m taking that as a yes.”
“Yes,” he said.
She began to roll the strip around his body carefully, her touch a constant temptation. On the third pass, her lips parted, and her breath began to come more quickly. She spoke to the bandage. “Why would you do this? You’re rich beyond measure and have the respect of every man from the Thames to Oxford Street—and beyond. Why would