He should take three steps back and say something sensible about the wheel joint.
Amelia’s smile faded at the edges. She watched him the way she watched the accounts when she suspected the numbers were about to confess something difficult.
“Thomas,” she said.
“The wheel joint should hold through winter.”
“That,” she said, “is not what you were about to say.”
He looked at the river. It ran pewter beneath the lifting fog, quick and cold past the mill stones, carrying willow leaves and thin threads of foam. He had known this stretch of the Avon since he was six years old and small enough to be lifted to see over the sluice board. The smell was the same as it had always been. Cold, green, alive.
“No,” he said. “It was not.”
The silence was very loud.
She waited, with more patience than he deserved, for longer than he wanted to count.
“Amelia,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I am not?—”
He stopped. Started again.
“I am?—”
“A man who talks easily? No, I know.” There was no mockery in it. Only warmth, and something beneath the warmth that was steady and painfully brave. “Whatever it is, just say it. It’s just me.”
Just me.
He could have laughed.Just mewas the whole problem.
“You should not still be here,” he said, his voice rougher than he meant it. “You should have found some place where my name does not make you a target.”
“I know.”
“Walter was right. I keep?—”
The words failed him, which was just as well, because the truth was ugly and too large for the riverbank.
He looked down at her, this small beautiful woman with her inexplicable knowledge of mill ledgers, her muddy hem, her clever mouth, her green eyes too bright with things neither of them dared name. He’d thought her too strange at first, too sharp, too full of odd habits and strange speech. Then she’d gone and made herself necessary. Not like a tool or a clerk. Like breath and warmth in a hall.
“I keep failing to send you somewhere safer.”
“That’s because I don’t want to go,” she said simply.
He stepped forward. It wasn’t like he meant to. He had been not-meaning-to for weeks. His hands came up and settled at her shoulders carefully, almost formally, the way a man touches something he knows he should not claim and cannot bear to leave untouched. She went still beneath his hands, green eyes wide, but she did not step away.
“I have nothing I can offer you that is worth what it costs,” he said.
“Let me decide that.”
“You do not know the cost.”
“I know you,” she said. “That’s enough.”
He had no answer for that. His hand lifted before he gave it permission. The escaped curl lay against her cheek, damp and bright, and he touched it with the backs of his fingers as if it might burn him. It was soft. Softer than silk, softer than the down beneath a swan’s wing, though with a stubborn spring to it that suited her so well his heart wrenched inside his chest.