Page 53 of How To Tempt A Bodyguard

"Since you discovered who I really am." She paused. "I expected you to look at me differently."

"I do look at you differently."

"How?"

He reached between them and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. The gesture was tender. Intimate. The kind of touch that happened between people who'd learned each other's bodies in the dark.

"Before, I thought you were brave," he said. "Now I know you're bloody terrifying."

She laughed. "Terrifying?"

"You've built an empire. You've saved hundreds of women. You've got half the powerful men in England afraid of your shadow, even if they don't know your name." His thumb traced her cheekbone. "And you still blush when I praise you."

"I do not blush."

"You're blushing right now."

She was. She could feel the heat in her cheeks, spreading down her neck. Ten days of sharing a bed, and he could still make her flush like a girl at her first assembly.

And what about you? The words hovered at the edge of her lips. What do you feel when you touch me like this? When you watch me in the dark? When you say my name?

But she couldn't make herself ask. She who had stared down magistrates and never flinched. She who had negotiated with madams and landlords and corrupt officials without a tremor in her voice.

This man and his rough tenderness had found the one door she couldn't walk through.

"Where are we stopping tonight?" she asked instead.

"Somewhere safe." He withdrew his hand. "Friends of mine. From before."

"Before Sylvia?"

"Before everything."

She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes. He rarely spoke of the fighting pits. She knew the broad strokes from his file, but files were just facts. They didn't capture the weight of lived experience.

"Will they help us?"

"Jack would hide me from the devil himself." A faint smile. "And his wife Nell makes the best meat pies in Yorkshire."

"You trust them."

"With my life." He met her eyes. "And yours."

That meant something, coming from him. Matthew trusted almost no one. The fact that he was bringing her to these people, letting her into a part of his past he kept locked away…

She almost reached for his hand but withdrew.

"Then I trust them too."

The house appeared as the sun dipped towards the horizon. A modest stone cottage at the edge of a village, if a dozen houses warranted a village. Smoke curled from the chimney. A vegetable garden sprawled beside the front door, and chickens pecked at the dirt path leading to the gate.

Matthew's posture changed as they approached. The tension he carried in his shoulders eased. His jaw unclenched. He looked, Florence realised, like a man coming home.

"This is it," he said.

Before the carriage had fully stopped, the cottage door burst open and a small body hurtled across the yard.

"Uncle Matty!"