Page 51 of Almost a Bride
She claimed herself a widow—wouldn’t she already know how to tease him? Yet when she looked up at him, her eyes held an innocence that seemed too real. He wanted to hold her face between his hands and make her confess all her secrets, so that the puzzles surrounding her no longer drew him.
Only nine days left—and strangely it didn’t seem enough.
When she moved away from him to clear his supper dishes from the table, Spencer leaned back against the door and let a smile play on his mouth as he boldly studied her. Her nervousness obviously grew with each clatter of the dishes, each distracted glance over her shoulder at him.
“Roselyn.”
She caught a bowl before it crashed to the wooden floor.
He grinned. “Am I healing to your satisfaction?”
She nodded.
“Are you certain? Perhaps you should examine me again.”
“What is the purpose of such teasing?” she demanded, turned to face him. Red stained her cheeks, but she met his gaze coolly.
“Purpose?” he echoed, smiling as he limped forward. “Perhaps it merely gives me something to do. You keep yourself busy every moment of daylight, while I can only walk—and talk.”
She tilted her head to look up at him as he stopped before her. He had to admire the fact that she didn’t retreat.
“You do enough talking, that is true,” she said dryly. “But I don’t appreciate being used as a distraction.”
He pitched his voice lower. “But you are distracting, even in those widow’s garments. Surely you have worn them long enough.”
Her face paled into an icy stillness. “My grief is not your concern, and I will not discuss it with you.”
For a moment he stared into her eyes, glimpsing the heartache before she shuttered her emotions away from him. He thought of what she’d borne in the last year with such obvious courage.
It made him uneasy.
Roselyn climbed up to her loft as quickly as she could, and lay wide awake on her pallet. He’d said she was “distracting.”
She covered her ears with both hands and squeezed her eyes shut, but she could still hear Thornton moving about below. What could he be doing?
Reluctantly she lowered her hands and listened, finding herself barely breathing. It sounded like he was hopping about again, since the pounding of the wooden floor seemed to shake clear up to her loft. When she heard an occasional grunt of exertion, her curiosity became an itch beneath her skin.
Cautiously, she left the pallet and crept on her belly to the edge of the loft. She peered over only as much as she needed to, and saw that Thornton had blown the candle out. The room was dark with shadows, lit only by flickering firelight.
Then she saw him, and the breath seemed trapped in her lungs. He’d removed his shirt, and stood with the knee of his broken leg propped on a bench, holding his cane up like a sword. He wove and ducked and thrust, as if fighting an imaginary opponent. She could see the strain of his muscles, the perspiration on his back, and she felt as if the fire from the hearth had risen to engulf her. Occasionally he hopped away from the bench, and the vibration that moved through the loft made her feel dizzy and strange.
When he finally stopped training and began to wash himself from a basin of water, she told herself to go back to bed.
Yet she remained trapped at the edge of the loft, her wide eyes watching as he scrubbed his face and chest.
He grew unnaturally still, and his head lifted until he met her eyes. She wanted to retreat, but his gaze held hers, burning with a dark fierceness that enthralled her. An answering heat burst to life in her veins.
Without breaking their gaze, he slowly continued to wash himself, moistening the dark hair on his chest, leaving soap trails that dripped down his well-muscled arms.
The heat inside her grew overpowering, then spread down between her thighs, until she felt restless, yearning, close to forgetting everything she’d worked so hard to become.
His mesmerizing eyes were alive with awareness of what he did to her—and that was what finally brought her to her senses. Without a word, she backed away and lay down on her pallet. For a few moments longer he washed, and then there was only silence—except for the rapid beating of her heart.
~oOo~
For two days an uneasy truce lay between them, but there was still an unnamable tension that seemed to be slowly enveloping her. Roselyn had no way to fight it, no way to stop this awareness of Spencer Thornton as a man, rather than as a monster from her past.
Whenever they were together she felt his gaze like an intimate touch, and shivers spread out across her skin. His deep voice could make her jump and clatter dishes together as she cursed her clumsiness. When he smiled, she remembered his mouth so close to hers, his body touching every part of her as they lay in the grass. His gentleness had surprised her, and she would never forget his touch.
