In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,55

might keep rooms at your business.”

He gave her a look. “How many proprietors sleep at their places of work?”

“I . . .” She scrunched her nose up. “I don’t know. I . . . suppose I’ve never given much thought to it.” Lila strolled around the room, pausing beside the modified clevy shelf. That shelving, usually placed over a fireplace, that he’d constructed himself out of scraps he’d recovered in the streets, was as out of place where it hung as the mismatched cups and plates and wooden carvings it held.

Shame, the same emotion to haunt him since his return from fighting in the King’s Army, found a familiar place in his belly. He was reminded all over again of how little he had, and how much more he needed. It was also why, had it not been for Maynard and Bragger, he’d not even have this place that was a palace for all that it provided him. Shelter from the constant London rain. Walls to keep out those even more desperate than he, who were all too willing and eager to stick a blade in the stomach of those sleeping in the streets, all in the name of survival.

He watched her as she touched a gloved fingertip down the wood he’d carved in a way that had given it a twisted ropelike effect. “It is lovely,” she murmured.

Hugh shifted back and forth on his feet. He’d been wrong; he’d felt exposed before. Now, her touching his things, that crude shelf he’d constructed, left him splayed open.

Lila glanced back, and he made himself still.

Her eyes widened slightly. “You made this, didn’t you?” She’d already whipped her focus back to the shelving.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t need to,” she said, not taking her gaze from the article.

Whittling had been something he’d used as a distraction during his time in the King’s Army. In between battles, to give his mind and fingers something to do, something that didn’t involve more blood on his hands, he’d find sticks or branches and carve objects out of them. And upon his return? It had been a skill he’d had no luck putting to use to earn coin. Because there’d been no money to go around to hire anyone, even the soldiers newly returned from war.

Lila picked up a small carved horse; she ran her thumb along the enormous mane that brushed the sideswept tail he’d given the imagined creature, and then she looked to the wood collection of mares and stallions settled upon the shelving.

“They’re magnificent,” she praised with such a reverent awe for something he’d done. For something that wasn’t the brute force he meted out in an arena or on a street corner, and some of the tension at her seeing his life, in this way, left him.

He dropped a shoulder into the wall and watched as she looked at his things. As she picked her way through each and every item on that shelf, she made little oohing and ahhing sounds to herself.

A grin tugged his lips up.

She stole another glance his way, this one distracted, as if she’d been so absorbed in her study that she’d forgotten his presence. “How long does it take you?”

“It depends.” On which memories were haunting him at a given time. On how desperate his need to escape. “Some longer than others.”

“This one, then?” She held a pair of small birds aloft; they fit perfectly into her palm. With their carved beaks down as if they were nestling the thick fabric of her work gloves, the pair of mourning doves looked as though they pecked at her hand.

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Hours, perhaps? When I . . . carve . . . I don’t think of much of anything. I just . . . feel the wood and focus on whatever it is that I’m creating.”

Lila stilled, but for her palm that trembled slightly and set the mourning doves shaking. As if they were creatures who’d come to life and fluttered in her hand. “It is an escape.”

Hugh instantly went tight-lipped. He’d shared more than he wished. More than he should. Something about this woman, something perilous and dangerous, made it entirely too easy to open himself up to her.

Except he needn’t have worried about more probing on her part. She’d returned her attention to his collection, exchanging out the doves for a dark wood stallion.

She was an oddity, this one.

For all the ways in which she asked intimate questions about his past