Page 6 of The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery #1)

6

Lucy had her back turned to Thorne when he said his good nights, grinding seeds into a fine powder.

“I hope we didn’t disturb you and your daughter earlier,” she said. Putting down the pestle, she took a step away from the counter and flexed her fingers, which often cramped after hours spent grinding dried herbs and seeds.

When Thorne did not answer right away, Lucy glanced over her shoulder at him. His large frame took up most of the doorway, letting in only a spear or two of light from the lamp in the corridor behind him. He’d brought the tang of a winter’s night in with him, and it mixed with the homey scent of fenugreek and wool, tickling the back of her throat.

“No.” When he spoke softly, his voice was the sound of shifting pebbles. There must have been some laryngeal damage earlier in his life. Coupled with his bent nose and scar, Lucy had a good idea of Mr. Thorne’s occupation before becoming a “bookkeeper.”

“Your hands are clenched.”

She turned to face him.

Thorne lifted his arms slightly and stared at his hands as though just noticing them.

“It’s the cold,” he said.

“Would you like me to look?” she asked without thought.

Why?

He’d been about to leave, which would have been sensible. Lucy would have finished work and perhaps found a few hours of sleep, which also would have been sensible.

Instead, she stood here willing him to step into the room.

Not sensible at all.

Turning up the wick for more light, Lucy kept herself from moving toward Thorne as he tentatively made his way across the room, hesitation in his steps as though he feared the floor couldn’t hold him.

The floors would hold, but crossing them meant stepping over the line into a certain familiarity. That knowledge crept up her spine with sharp claws of anticipation.

He came to a stop two feet from her, barely within the circle of light, and held out his hands.

Lucy understood well enough. The next step was hers. She was giddy with exhaustion, but her apothecary training demanded she see beneath his gloves.

For treatment, of course, not for seduction.

“I don’t know as I can pull those gloves off you,” she said in a brusque tone. “Do it yourself while I turn up the lights.”

He made no sound while he complied, and Lucy lit another lamp while calculating how much lamp oil they had left with one part of her brain and running through a list of cures with another part.

“They are ugly,” he said.

“They tell a story,” she replied.

Now she was presented with them; Lucy took each of his hands in hers and turned them over and over beneath the bright light of her examination lamp.

They were a conundrum, was what they were.

The men who came to the shop had skin as hard as stone, calloused until yellowed and seemingly impenetrable. The tips of Thorne’s fingers were rounded and his palms smooth, hinting at a life free of manual labor—other than the labor of boxing, of course.

Lucy held his left hand up and examined the side, the angle of his smallest finger unnatural where he’d fractured his metacarpal, perhaps more than once. Not only his knuckles, but the joints in his fingers between the middle and proximal phalanges were swollen, and he’d broken the right wrist at some point as well.

A nearly imperceptible shudder went through him when she ran her finger up the side of his hand. Lucy kept her eyes stuck on her own hands, not daring to peer up and see whatever expression he wore.

She didn’t think he liked her much, but Lucy always knew when a man wanted her.

It kept her safe, that knowledge, because most men were not to be trusted.

“Hurts in the damp and the cold, does it?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

“Helpful when you want to know if it’s going to rain,” he said.

“Hmmm.” She let go of his hands easily enough and went over to a cabinet, stepping on a low stool to reach the ingredients she needed.

Despite her back being turned to him, Lucy knew exactly where he stood in the room and that his gaze was trained between her shoulder blades.

Her heart beat double-time now, and a sweet sting of awareness rose beneath her skin, a flush of need blooming in her chest. A low thrum of excitement pulsed between Lucy’s thighs, and for a moment she was dizzy. Here she was, blood afire with the simple touch of his hands to hers.

Oh, but she was unnatural.

Duncan had been right.

Lucy didn’t care so much right now. The hour was late, and she was so cold. The warmth of touch, she craved it like some men craved opium or some women craved gin. If Thorne saw through her ruse of treatment and guessed at the need behind it, she hoped he would only pity rather than despise her.

—

“I believe that turmeric will help ease some of the swelling about your joints. There’s a powder you can put in your food, but it is expensive. I will give you the root, instead. Slice a thin piece every night, let it set in boiling water for ten minutes, and drink.”

As though he were any other customer, Lucy wrapped the brown tuber in a scrap of paper.

“Now, in this jar is an ointment of capsaicin.” She held up a squat glass jar filled with a cloudy pinkish substance. “You must be careful when you apply, for it stings the eyes and mouth something terrible if you are clumsy.”

Her right eyebrow was more pointed than her left.

Thorne cleared his throat of the tickle left by the dusty smell of the turmeric while Lucy peered at his misshapen hand.

As she spoke, he concentrated on this second flaw in Lucy’s otherwise perfect face, unable to say why, exactly, it was so important to him. Perhaps because a second flaw allowed for the existence of a third.

The more flaws, the less attractive he would find her. If Thorne could look at Lucy and see only her flaws, he could let down his guard. At the thought, his shoulders fell, and his head dropped an inch, which meant he caught the faintest hint of lavender water coming from her scalp.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Yes?”

Thorne had no idea what Lucy just said. It took all his concentration to keep from showing any sign of arousal at the sight of her forefinger dipping into the ointment and then gently circling his knuckles, one at a time. The hair on his forearms straightened along with his cock as she lightly traced a line of sensation up the back of one finger and down the next, rubbing ever so softly over and over in the space between his fingers.

Imagining his body as carved from stone kept him from trembling when she slowly twined her fingers with his and then pulled away. The ointment made their skin slippery, and everywhere she touched him it burned. The combination of pain and relief as Lucy rubbed her fingers against his made it hard to breathe.

The room around them—the long table filled with dried herbs and jars of oil and alcohol, the shelves stacked with books and piles of parchment, tins of supplies and chemical equipment, the whitewashed walls now yellowed—disappeared until nothing existed except the two of them in a circle of warm light.

Thorne could not take another moment of this torture—the eroticism of her tender touch and the beatific expression on her face, eyes cast down at their entwined hands, bottom lip tucked between her crooked front teeth as she mapped out the tendons and ligaments that held his aching bones together.

As Lucy strengthened her touch, Thorne took back some control, stroking his thumb across the fleshy pad of her palm beneath her thumb. At her gasp, his cock jerked, and an answering buzz of desire woke at the base of his spine.

Her gaze snapped up to meet his, and Lucy’s eyes were dilated, puddles of ink spilled into the blue sea of her irises. His own must be as well, and the ache of pleasure denied pooled in his belly.

She’d paused, her hands still clasping his, her face upturned so that all he had to do was lower his head an inch or two and their lips would meet. Thorne drew the spicy ointment and the smoky scent of lust deep into his lungs, letting his head drop slowly, slowly down toward hers.

Against his thumb, Lucy’s pulse sped, an animal trapped beneath a blanket of satiny skin.

Her breath tasted of peppermint tea, and their lips hovered a mere fraction of an inch from the consummation of a kiss. Every muscle in his body had clenched, and his own blood pounded so hard he supposed it could be heard in the next room. When her lips opened slightly, he marveled at the perfect shape of her—

Damn it.

Thorne jerked his head up and stepped away.

“My thanks, Miss Peterson.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Thorne.”

Casting her eyes downward, Lucy took two steps back and, with trembling fingers, reached for a rag to clean the ointment from her skin. Thorne cleared his throat and executed a small bow, though he knew she wasn’t looking.

For the rest of the night and well into the next morning, his hands burned until the cold no longer touched them and all he could feel was a relentless heat.