Page 6 of Beecham’s Infirmary for the Affluent Afflicted (My Darling Malady #1)

Annie brings the thread to her mouth and snaps it between her teeth. “Here.” She stands. “Get up.”

I can already tell by the ghost of her form beneath her clothes, and the pair of black trousers she holds up—ones that aren’t my own—that this is a bad idea. I scramble for an excuse.

Anything other than, I refuse to stand before you because I am ragingly stiff in this loose pair of undergarments.

But Annie respects my wishes and drapes the pants over my chest. “They were my uncle’s. He and my mother died a few years ago in a carriage incident.” She clears her throat, as if it embarrasses her to overshare. “They were large for you, so I made some light adjustments while you slept.”

“Thank you,” I mutter. She’s beautiful. Kind. Smart. Terrifying, of course—but generous. “This isn’t the pair he… he erm?—”

Annie dissolves into a fit of laughter, already turning for the door. The richness of her voice and the very sound of her joy send me into stark panic. “They’re new, I don’t think he’d ever worn them.” Her hand goes for the knob, but an unsure sound forms at the back of my throat.

“You don’t have to go. Not if you don’t want to.”

Her fingers linger on the doorknob. But she doesn’t leave.

When her back is to me, I swing my legs from the bed and pad barefoot to the floor-length mirror, where my shoes and socks are placed at the end of the bed.

I don’t exactly know what is in the fabric she’s stitched, but it smells faintly of her, too. Of spice, or herbs… maybe soap and sweat, but most certainly something iron-rich beneath it all.

Desperate to hide my erection, I tug the trousers on; they’re still warm from her lap, and fall perfectly at my waist. Not too tight, but fitted.

They’re not loose enough to conceal my cock, however, but there’s not much I can do about that.

I smooth the material—her work is precise, as if made by someone who knows my body.

I glance into the mirror as my fingers fumble with the buttons, too busy watching the curve of her spine reflected as she lingers at the door, swaying slightly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a pair of trousers fit this way,” I say, playful accusation lacing my tone. “They’re shaped to me.”

“I’ve been doing this for a long time. Sewing tears in my own dolls since I was a child. I’m good at estimating,” she murmurs without turning. “I don’t even have to touch a client to know.”

Shame .

I reach for my undershirt folded on the wide dresser to the left of the trunk, but then I hesitate, my eyes glued to the mirror.

I must have sweated well throughout my slumber; my chest is defined, the skin over my sternum, smooth.

The veins along my collarbone are darker than I remember, like ink under the thinnest parchment.

When I drag a hand across my ribs, I expect the tenderness from fever and the nausea to return.

Instead, my flesh is mild, nothing other than the persistent growl of my belly plaguing me.

Even the fine golden hairs at my forearms seem to catch the lamplight in ways they shouldn’t.

When I look up, Annie is watching me in the mirror.

As soon as I make eye contact, she makes her way over, holding my gaze the entire time.

When she reaches me, she stands at my side and lifts her fingers to the waistband of my trousers.

They linger there, ghosting along the stitch line at my hip.

Her gaze then flickers down, assessing as she takes in the cut below my navel.

I shudder, rebuking the illness—the strange spirit, whatever it may be—that urges me to curl my arms around her.

“I did these too quickly,” she says decidedly. “I may need to take them in again.”

“How long?” I ask, desperate for a distraction.

Her eyes snap up, no longer suspicious, but transfixed at the rasp in my voice. The firelight sets them aglow. “What?”

Annie’s long, thick lashes bat at me—God, she’s close enough to devour—and my own question nearly escapes me. “Your mother. How long ago did she die?”

“Oh. Thirteen years ago.”

“And this was here?”

Her face scrunches before she scowls. “This is your way of gauging where I’m from. What I’m doing here.”

My heart skips a horrid beat. “No, I?—”

“My grandfather Shing was a dock laborer out of Guangdong for years before work became unstable. The British firms had slowly shifted their control onto the dock operations, and he was eventually released. Months passed before he was approached to be a translator.” Annie’s eyes twinkle, unseeing in the lamplight.

“His employer promised he’d work abroad for a few months, making a short stop in England before being dropped off in Singapore, where there were better chances for steady positions.

Lucrative wages. So, he, Amah, my mother, and my uncle left their home in hopes of a better one. ”

“Your family never made it to Singapore.”

“My grandfather was so eager to give them a better life, no one questioned the lack of a formal document or contract. Not that it would have mattered.” Her laugh is empty before she clears her throat, as if rehearsed to distance herself from the weight of a past she never lived.

“They got off the ship here at the docklands when my mother needed cough medicine, and were never allowed back on.”

It’s unfathomable. Detestable. “I’m so sorry, Annie.”

“It’s fine,” she replies too quickly. “It’s not mine to carry.”

But it’s obvious she does.

“And how old are you?” My voice is unintentionally rough.

“I’ll be thirty-one in November.” Annie flinches belatedly at my direct questioning in regard to her, as if she’s shocked she’d answered so quickly.

“You were young when you lost your mother. And you care for your grandmother here?”

“The shop owners offered me my mother’s position when she died and we’d run out of wages.

I go to work in the early mornings to help them set up and then come home to her.

” She doesn’t look upset, nor ungrateful.

Just pensive, as if she’s wondering where the years have gone.

As if she’s pondered her next step many nights before, yet didn’t quite know how to proceed.

“Alone?” My questioning is far too forward, but I cannot help myself.

It is the only thing I can do to keep myself from staring unabashedly at the swell of her full bottom lip, which she bites in anticipation.

Her fingers sit painstakingly still, a brush away from the dick I cannot help but think with .

Except, it’s not even that. What I feel here is much more than that.

And, to my relief, Annie Castro-Tan is far, far smarter.

“If you’re so concerned for my safety, you’d know admitting to a strange man that I live alone with my grandmother is the worst possible thing I could do.”

I crane my neck down at her. “Worse than inviting that strange man into your home?” Her mouth twists. “Worse than bringing him into your room? Inviting him to sleep in your bed?”

“Inviting you into my bed, and plopping you there because the other rooms are occupied with my dead relatives’ belongings are two very different things.”

“Having him undress for you?”

“You haven’t asked me about a father,” she challenges. “My dead grandfather.” Her fingers then curl around to the front of my waistband, her nails slipping into it—not loosening or measuring anything. Annie’s testing the fabric between us. “What is it you’re asking me, Jacques?”

I exhale, unsteady. Her knuckles graze my skin as they sink deeper, and I feel the contact a bit too sharply, as though my nerves are tuned too finely.

I don’t move, not because I can’t, but because I can’t trust myself to.

My skin flushes and prickles, like something is trying to break outward as my body awaits a command it hasn’t yet received.

As if realizing what she’s doing, she looks up, and whatever she sees in my expression makes her breath hitch.

Still, she steps closer. Quelle petite sotte.

The corner of Annie’s mouth lifts, and she teeters on her toes until her breath ghosts my jaw. I can just about taste her, feel her running through my fingers. “You understand that I am sick, don’t you? That I’ve caught whatever ails this town?”

Annie just laughs. “And I walk amongst them every day. Chat with them. Work with them. The dying are next door to our shop. It’s only a matter of time.”

She shouldn’t think that way. The mere thought of any harm coming to her grips me in rage. The thought of being responsible for it sends anguish ripping through my chest.

Swallowing, I step back. I’ve forgotten myself. My honor, my manners.

“I should leave,” I manage, but then one of her hands goes to my face, her thumb repeatedly stroking my tensed jaw until it loosens.

“You don’t want to.”

I don’t . I don’t, because she’s made me forget why I came here, the things I’m running from and the case I’m meant to be solving.

She’s made me forget the blood on the streets and the ghosts in my lungs, and because there’s something in her—stubborn, and grieving, and warm—that calls out to something deep in me.

She’s lost, too. Her uncle, her mother. She knows the pain of a family broken disassembled into nothing but empty rooms and folded clothes collecting dust.

I’ve carried absence like a second skin; my mother’s prayers the night before she left, years before I’d even begun my training.

The gaping hole she left in our home. My father’s death that feels like a lifetime ago…

showing up repeatedly to the Commissaire, begging the police there for answers.

A simple mugging, or attempted robbery, is how they classified it.

The investigation stalled once they discovered it was the brilliant private detective who often made their jobs more difficult with his unconventional methods and penchant for empathy.

My father’s name became well known; he’d submerged himself in his craft of giving people answers. Closure over arrests. And no one did the same for him.