“Godwin says the grind is smooth.”
“Aye.”
“Says Mistress Amelia found the trouble in the ledger before any of us found it in the water.”
“She did.”
Hob nodded. “Useful woman.”
Thomas said nothing.
“Brave one too.”
The brush stilled. Cygnet turned her head. Even the horse knew better than to interrupt Hob when he had found his point and meant to club a man with it.
Hob looked toward the yard. “She trusts you.”
Thomas’s hand tightened around the brush.
Hob went on, quieter now. “More than you have trusted her. And she’s known it and given you her trust anyway.”
The words struck too cleanly to answer.
“That’s a particular kind of person, my lord,” Hob said. “The kind a man shouldn’t waste.”
Thomas put one hand flat against Cygnet’s warm neck. The mare stood steady beneath his palm, solid and unimpressed by the ruinous complications of men.
He thought of Amelia on the riverbank, drawing her veil back into place. Thought of the safe words she had handed him because he had needed them. Thought of how quickly she had understood what one witness could do.
Thought of the softness of that red curl against his fingers, of her mouth beneath his. And thought of the fact that she had understood the danger and still had not stepped away first.
He was a dolt. Not for kissing her. That would have been easier. No, he was a fool for thinking he could put things back where they had been before the mill wheel turned.
AMELIA
The reckoning arrived on a Tuesday. Or what Amelia had decided to call Tuesday, because the medieval week had saints’ days, market days, feast days, fast days, and Sundays that were not technically Sundays in the tidy little box where her brain wished to keep them, and her brain, which had survived a cross-Atlantic flight, a wedding, time travel, and being kissed beside a millrace by a man who looked as if he’d been carved out of battle smoke and bad decisions, had drawn a hard line at giving up the days of the week.
So it was Tuesday.
Three days after the kiss. Not that she was counting.
She was absolutely not counting the hours since Thomas had touched her hair as if it were something precious, then kissed her with such hunger that every practical thought she owned had gone fluttering out of her head like frightened pigeons.
She was also not standing at the upper window of the accounts room watching him in the lists.
No. Amelia was checking the north field’s drainage after last night’s rain, which was sensible and necessary, and exactly the sort of thing a woman did when she had become a person who thought about drainage, roof repairs, meal stores, candle stubs,and whether a man’s mouth had felt as devastatingly soft as she remembered.
Which it had. Unfortunately.
Down in the yard, Thomas moved through sword practice with Hob and two of the younger men. He wore linen and plain leather, no mail, no lordly show, just a sword in his hand and the kind of focus that made the whole world seem to arrange itself around him.
His dark hair was damp at the temples. His jaw was rough with stubble, and every movement looked spare and exact, as if he never wasted strength because he’d learned, in some hard school she didn’t want to imagine too closely, that wasted strength got men killed.
He parried a strike, stepped inside the younger man’s reach, and checked the blow with the flat of his blade.
The lad staggered back, red-faced and grinning, while Hob said something that made the others laugh.
Thomas didn’t laugh, and her foolish heart did a little leap, because it was now a trained dog begging scraps from a man who had spent three days calling her Mistress Amelia as if he hadn’t stood beside the Avon with her hair wound around his finger.