Page 10 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)

With the sun beating on his head and six feet up on a scaffold, Theo thrust his trowel into a bucket of mortar, which gave way to the blade like thickened cream.

He pulled up a dollop and smeared the mortar across the top of the uneven wall, making sure it filled every gap.

The backs of his hands burned in spots from drying smears, but Theo didn’t mind.

Soon, his hands would be hardened against the caustic filling.

Feeling that pinching sensation brought back the years of his apprenticeship, when he was a soft-handed boy first working the mortar in the shadow of a rising cathedral, feeling like he was stirring up the very stuff that held the world together.

Before his world exploded.

A throaty woman’s voice rose among the babble of working men.

He didn’t have to look down to know to whom it belonged.

Steady in timbre, firm in tone, with a husky undercurrent that gave promise to softness.

The sound vibrated in his ears and amplified throughout his body, rippling in dangerous places.

He focused on spreading the mortar while bracing for her to throw a bolt of lightning by calling him by his first name again.

Jules’s voice joined hers and Theo’s mood hardened like the mortar under his trowel.

He couldn’t pick out the conversation, but by the jocular lift in the other man’s voice, Theo knew the mason was flirting in his swaggering way.

His grip tightened. That arrogant redhead had been a thorn in his side from the first, a boastful, skilled worker too easily distracted by the pretty novices hanging laundry outside the convent schoolhouse.

And now, by Cecile.

Theo set a stone on the spread mortar and turned, squinting against the blaze of the August sun.

Below, Jules stood right in front of Cecile, dangerously close.

He must have stepped into her path, for she tended to walk wide circles with her head down around any gathered masons.

She now held her ground but leaned back, the cords in her neck tight.

Afraid.

Realization struck him hard. Some man, at some point in her life, had physically hurt this lovely woman.

He’d suspected since he’d first noticed the scar at her temple that she tried to hide.

The fact that she’d been abused kicked up a whole barrage of questions, as well as a burn in his belly.

Right now, it made him keenly aware of Jules standing too close, gripping Cecile’s willowy waist.

“Jules!” he barked, biting back the surging, ridiculous words hands off my woman as he clanked the trowel upon the wall. “Get back to work.”

Jules didn’t flinch—or look up—but his swaggering smile stretched. Cecile’s gaze slid up to Theo’s. Through a vein of red fury, Theo read a plea in those fathomless eyes.

He leapt off the scaffolding, hitting the ground hard.

Straightening to his full height, he glared at the dirty, hairy-knuckled hand splayed upon Cecile’s waist. Gripped by the urge to seize the mason by the scruff and launch him bodily against the wall they were building, he took a few strides until the stink of Jules’s sweat filled his nose.

“You have work to do.” Grabbing a handful of the fool’s smock, Theo yanked him away from Cecile and then pulled him around so they stood nose-to-nose. “Get back to it.”

Jules’s bloodshot eyes shot flames. “I’ll get back to it when I damn well please.”

Though Theo’s hard-earned survival lessons screamed Mind your business, keep your head down, don’t start any trouble, his fist had its own mind.

It headed toward Jules’s jaw with a blow that sent the mason reeling.

The punch having landed, Theo shook his hand, bones aching, as Jules tumbled over a wheelbarrow and fell hard on his tailbone.

Damn, Theo should have known better, and yet, hadn’t this confrontation been inevitable? Hadn’t the antagonism been building between them since the first day they’d met?

Didn’t a lady like Cecile deserve to be protected from grabby, greedy fools?

It took the sprawled mason a few seconds, but he came to his feet enraged.

Jules’s fist aimed for Theo’s jaw but Theo anticipated it.

He turned so his shoulder took the impact.

Recovering, he lunged, throwing his weight into the mason’s gut, forcing the air out of Jules’s lungs and driving the fool to the ground.

Theo straddled him and struck several blows.

Dust billowed up as Jules bucked free his legs, clamped them around one of Theo’s thighs, and rolled Theo over in a move that would have impressed Theo, if he weren’t the one who’d lost the upper hand.

Jules’s shadow loomed over him, his arm raised. Theo took a punch and returned two, then lurched up to throw off his opponent. The mason tumbled to the side and hit the dirt hard.

Theo surged to his feet and stood over the mason, fists ready. Jules raised his arms, palms open, then coughed blood-strewn spittle onto the ground.

When Theo saw the blood, his better sense resurged. Beating Jules to a pulp would feel damn good, but he had his position as an indentured servant and overseer to consider—and his workers were watching the melee with sharp eyes.

This had to end now.

“The only thing in your hands should be a trowel and a bucket,” Theo barked, straightening as he loosened his fists. “Keep your hands off her.”

Through squinting eyes, Jules looked from him to Cecile and then back to him, setting loose a laugh that launched more streaked spittle.

Cecile hadn’t moved an inch, Theo noticed, except to go pale and shrink into herself.

He realized he must look like a monster to her, covered in stone dust, streaked with blood.

Stepping away from Jules, Theo strode toward Cecile. Her eyes widened as she took a shaky step back.

He stopped in his tracks. “I apologize for my insolent worker.” He wanted to add, Cecile, the name lurching to his mouth, but he forced himself to choose formality since every man on the site was watching. “That won’t happen again.”

She straightened a few inches, laboring to relax her terrified expression into a stony mask he knew too well.

And yet he’d caught her off guard in inky twilight the other night, when she’d gazed at the children he’d brought in for laborers.

Her eyes, many shades of brown and black, had swirled with feelings she’d held in check.

“I…I thank you, sir.” She lowered her voice and her gaze. “It seems you have a habit of intervening in other people’s trouble.”

More than you will ever know. “That mason will keep hands to himself from now on,” he promised. “I’ll see to it.”

Her lashes fluttered as her attention shifted to his jaw. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing.” He swiped his mouth.

She frowned and looked over at Jules, still on the ground, head down, arms slung over his knees. “Should I tend to—”

“No.” He imagined Cecile taking care of the mason, and Jules in his brutish rebellion reaching around and probing the soft curves of her backside. Theo would have to punch the man a lot harder—and maybe punch himself, too, for wishing he was holding her like that.

He forced the thought away. “That man—” he flung a hand toward Jules “—has taken worse beatings. He’ll be fine. Is there a matter you wanted to discuss with me?”

“No…. I just came by to see how Etienne is doing.” She blew air out between her lips, the breeze making a slip of silken tress fly up. “I’ve been neglecting him.”

“He’s probably in the woods. I sent him to collect firewood for the lime ricks.

” It hadn’t passed Theo’s notice that Etienne was most sullen just after Theo’s morning conference with his mother.

Theo preferred to send the boy away to brood in private, rather than yell at him.

“It’s good your son wasn’t here,” he added.

“He’d have come to your rescue, and Jules would not have spared him because of his youth. ”

“I appreciate you keeping Etienne out of such melees.” She frowned. “Perhaps, going forward, I’ll stay away from the site altogether.”

“If you’d like. But you didn’t start this, and most of my men know their manners. As for the tussle between us…” He gestured to Jules, still sitting, slapping the dust from his mason’s smock. “That was a long time coming.”

“The blood on both your faces suggests it was more than a tussle.”

“The fight is over. Watch.”

He swiveled on a heel and took a few steps until he towered over Jules. “No more work for you today.”

Jules leaned back on his hands and squinted up, one eye swelling fast. “Are you firing me, Monsieur Overseer?”

Theo frowned. “Are you going to bother the women anymore?”

“Yeah,” Jules retorted, giving him a bloody smile. “Just not the ones around here.”

Damn fool. Pushing his luck, even in defeat.

Theo recognized the type. Back in France, when he’d finally become a master mason, he’d had to discipline more than one young apprentice.

This Jules was like a wolf pup—he needed to feel teeth in his neck before he’d fall back in with the rest of the pack.

“How badly you behave when you’re not in my sight,” Theo said to the grinning mason, “is someone else’s fight. Now stand up.”

Theo thrust out his hand, urging Jules to take it. Jules eyed the outstretched arm, tilted his head, and took a long time to think about it. Theo was about to pull his arm back when Jules seized Theo’s forearm.

With a lunge, the mason was on his feet. The flames in his eyes had dimmed, but his gaze still danced with bravado.

Jules tapped his swollen eye. “Nice right hook you got there, Overseer.”

Theo accepted the backhanded compliment and met it in kind. “That leg twist of yours knocked the breath out of me.”

“Learned it in the back alleys of a port town in Brittany.” Jules tested his jaw in the cup of his hand. “Where’d you learn how to fight? Was it in the streets of Guéret…or during your time in prison?”