No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (11 page)

“You should.”

No. She did not wish to like him.

Too late.

“Then why not lean on me?”

“I don’t require help.”

She peered up at him and saw something in the set of his jaw, in the firm line of his lips. Something familiar.

How many times had she said such a thing to those who offered her aid? She’d spent so much time alone, she immediately resisted the idea that someone might offer help without expecting some form of payment.

Or, worse, making themselves a part of her life.

“I see,” she said, softly.

There was a long moment as the words fell between them before he said quietly, “Sometimes, I think you do see me.”

He took her hand, and she stilled at the touch. He looked down at her. “Do I have to pay for this, as well?”

The words were a reminder of their deal, of how they were at odds. But the touch felt nothing like odds. The slide of his warm, rough skin against her own felt like pleasure. Pleasure she did not wish to acknowledge, but that she could not deny.

“No,” she said, a cold wind sending a shiver through her. “No charge for this.”

He did not reply, as they returned to the carriage. They found a quiet camaraderie in the darkness—something that would no doubt be chased away by daylight, when they would remember their past and their present. And the future, so clearly cast in stone.

And so she did not speak.

Not as they emerged from the alley, turning back toward his coach, nor when the driver leapt down from his box and came to assist them, nor when they were closed into the quiet, dark space, too confined not to touch—knees brushing against knees—and too proud to acknowledge the touch.

She did not speak when they arrived at his town house, and he leapt down to the cold, dark London street and said, “Come inside.”

There was no need for words as she followed him.

“T
he history of our acquaintance is rather too stained with violence, Your Grace,” Mara said when they were inside the library where she’d first revealed herself and her reason for reappearing. Where she’d drugged him for the second time.

He stripped off his topcoat to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “And whose fault is that?” he asked, the words gentler than she would have imagined they might be.

Gentle.

It was strange that the word seemed to so suddenly define this man who was known to much of London as a brutal force, all unyielding muscle and indestructible bone.

But with her, he was somehow hard angles and soft touch.

He hissed his discomfort as he peeled the shirt from his arm, shucking it over his head and across the room, revealing the clean, straight wound above a wide swath of darkened skin—black with a swirling, geometric design. Mara’s gaze flew to that cuff. To its twin on the opposite arm. Ink. She’d seen it before, but never on someone like him.

Never on an aristocrat.

He’d fetched himself hot water and linens with a skill that suggested that it was not the first time he’d returned to this empty house and mended himself, and he sat in the chair by the fire he’d stoked when they’d entered the room, dropping cloth into the steaming water.

His movement unstuck her, and Mara went to him where he stood by the fire.

“Sit,” she said softly, dipping a length of linen into the water as he folded into one of the chairs by the hearth. She wrung the scalding liquid from the cloth before setting to the task of cleaning his wound.

He allowed it, which should have surprised her. Should have surprised them both.

He was quiet for long minutes, and she forced herself to look only at his wound, at the straight slash of torn flesh that served as a reminder of the gruesome violence she might have suffered. From which he had rescued her.

Her mind raced, obsessed with not touching him anywhere but there, on the spot just above the wide, black swath of skin—as though the darkness inside him had seeped to the surface in beautiful patterns, so wicked and incongruous with his past. With the duke he should have been.

The darkness she’d had a hand in making.

She tried not to breathe too heavily, even as the tang of him—clove and thyme mixed with something unidentifiable and yet thoroughly Temple—teased at her senses, daring her to breathe him in.

Instead, she focused on healing him with soft strokes, cleaning his arm of dried blood and stemming the flow of fresh. She watched the linen cloth move from his skin to the now pink-tinged bowl and back again, refusing to look elsewhere.

Refusing to catalog the other scars that littered his torso. The wicked hills and valleys of his chest. The dark whorls of hair that made her fingers itch to touch him in another, much more dangerous way.

“You needn’t tend to me,” he said, the words soft in the quiet, dark room.

“Of course I must,” she replied, not looking up at him. Knowing he was looking down at her. “If not for me—”

His hand captured hers, pressing it against his now clean chest, and she could feel the spring of his chest hair against her wrist. “Mara,” he said, the name coming foreign, as though it was another’s.

This man, this place was not for her.

She twisted her hand in his grip, and he released her, letting her return to her ministrations as though he’d never had her in his grasp to begin with. “Tend to me then.”

“It needs stitching,” she said.

His brows rose. “You’ve knowledge of wounds needing stitching?”

She’d stitched dozens of wounds in her life. More than she could count. Too many when she was still a child. But she said none of those things. “I do. And this one needs it.”

“I suppose it will cost me?”

The words were a surprise. The reminder of their agreement. For a moment, she’d allowed herself to pretend they were different people. In a different place.

Silly girl.

Nothing had changed that night. He was still out for vengeance and she was still out for money. And the longer they both remembered it, the better.

She took a breath, steeled herself. “I shall give you a bargain.”

One black brow rose. “Name your price.”

“Two pounds.” She disliked the words on her lips.

Something flashed in his eyes. Boredom? No. It was gone before she could take the time to identify it, and he was already opening a small compartment in the table at his elbow and removed a needle and thread. “Stitch it, then.”

It occurred to her that only a man who was regularly wounded would have a needle and thread at arm’s length. Her gaze skittered over his chest, tracking a score of scars in various stages of healing. More.

How much pain had he suffered over the last twelve years?

She ignored the question, instead moving to the sideboard and pouring two fingers of whiskey in a glass. When she returned to him, he shook his head. “I won’t drink that.”

She cut him a look. “I did not drug it.”

He inclined his head. “Nevertheless, I prefer to be sure.”

“It wasn’t for you, anyway,” she said, dropping the needle into the glass before cutting a long piece of thread.

“That’s a waste of good whiskey.”

“It will make the stitches less painful.”

“Bollocks.”

She lifted one shoulder and said, “The woman who taught me to sew a wound learned it from men in battle. Seems reasonable.”

“Men in battle no doubt wanted the bottle nearby.”

She ignored the words and threaded the needle carefully, before returning her attention to his wound. “It shall hurt.”

“Despite the addition of my excellent scotch?”

She inserted the needle. “You tell me.”

He hissed at the sting. “Dammit.”

She raised a brow at him. “Shall I pour you a drink now?”

“No. I’d rather have your weapon visible.”

Her lips twitched. She would not be amused. She would not like him. He was foe, not friend.

She completed the stitching quickly and with experienced precision. As she snipped the final length of string, he reached into the drawer once more and extracted a pot of liniment from within. She opened it to a waft of thyme and clove—familiar. “This is why you smell as you do.”

He raised a wry brow. “You’ve noticed my scent?”

Her cheeks warmed at the words, to her great dismay. “It’s impossible to miss,” she defended. Still, she brought the pot to her nose, inhaling, the scent sending a tight thread of awareness through her. She dipped a finger in the pot and spread it across the enflamed skin around his wound, taking care not to hurt him before folding a piece of clean linen carefully and securing it with a long strip of the cloth.

Once finished, she cleared her throat, said the first thing that came to her. “You shall have a wicked scar.”

“Neither the first, nor the last,” he said.

“But the one for which I am responsible,” she replied. He chuckled at that, and she couldn’t help but look up, meeting his black gaze. “You think it is amusing?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I think it is interesting that you claim the one scar that has nothing to do with you.”

Her eyes went wide. “But the others do?”

He tilted his head, watching her carefully. “Each one, earned in a fight. Bouts I would not have fought were I not . . .” He hesitated, and she wondered how he would finish the sentence.

Were I not ruined.

Were I not destroyed.

Were I not disowned.

“ . . . Temple,” he finished simply.

Temple.
The name he had assumed only after she’d run. After he’d been exorcised from family and Society and God knew what else. The name that had no bearing on the life he’d had. The one where he’d been William Harrow, Marquess of Chapin. Heir to the dukedom of Lamont.

All-powerful.

Until she’d stripped him of that power.

She looked at him then, cataloging his scars. The map of white and pink lines that ended in week-old bruises, the hallmarks of his profession.

Except it was not a profession.

He was wealthy and titled and with or without her death on his head, he was not required to fight. And still he did.

Temple.
The fighter
.

She’d made him. Perhaps that was why it seemed so right to tend to him now.

Who had tended to him the other times?

Because she could not allow herself to ask that, she asked instead, “Why Temple?”

He inhaled at the question, the hand of his good arm flexing into a fist, then back. “What do you mean?”

“Why choose that name?”

One side of his mouth kicked up. “I’m built like one.”

It was a flippant, practiced answer. Years of telling truth from lies told her it was the latter, but she did not press him to say more. Instead, her gaze tracked down one massive arm to the place where the wide black band of ink stood stark against his skin.

“And the ink?”

“Tattoos.”

Her hand moved of its own volition, fingers inching toward him before she realized that she was overstepping her bounds. She stopped a hairsbreadth from him.

“Go ahead,” he said, his voice low.

She looked up to him, but his gaze was on the band. On her fingers. “I shouldn’t,” she said, and the words unstuck her. She snatched her hand back.

“You want to.” He flexed his arm, the muscle making the ink shift as though it breathed. “It will not hurt.”

The room was not warm—the fire was new and it was winter outside the walls of the home—but still his arm was burning with heat. She ran her fingertips across the elaborate markings, all curving lines and dark space, amazed by the smoothness of his skin. “How?” she asked.

“A small needle and a large pot of ink,” he said.

“Who did it?” she met his black gaze.

His flickered away, back to where her fingers slid across smooth skin. Comfortable now. “One of the girls in the club.”

Her fingers stilled. “She is very skilled.”

He shifted beneath her touch. “She is. And thankfully has a steady hand.”

Is she your lover?
Mara wanted to ask. Except she didn’t want the answer. Didn’t want to want it.

She didn’t want to think of a beautiful woman leaning over him with her keen sense of artistry and her wicked needle. Did not want to think of what happened later, after the needle had pricked his skin a thousand times. More. “Did it hurt?”

“No more than a fight on any given night.”

Pain was his currency, after all. She didn’t care for that thought, either.

“It’s my turn,” he said, and she returned her attention to him as he qualified. “To ask questions.”

The words broke the spell between them, and she let her hand fall away from his arm. “What kind of questions?” As though she didn’t know.

As though she hadn’t known for years that there would come a point when she had to answer them.

She wished he would put on a shirt.

No, she didn’t
.

Except, if he was to press her into telling him about that night, ages ago, when she’d made a dozen life-altering mistakes, perhaps it would be best if he were fully clothed. If he were not so close. If he were not so suddenly compelling.

It was not sudden.

“How is it that you know so much about tending wounds?”

It was not the question she expected, and so she was blindsided by the images that came in response. Blood and screams. Knives and piles of red-stained linens. Her mother’s last gasp of breath and Kit’s tears and her father’s cold, brutal face, revealing nothing. Not emotion. Not guilt.

Certainly not remorse.

She looked down at her hands, the fingers now twisted together, a confusing tangle of cold skin, and she considered her words, finally settling on: “Twelve years has afforded me much opportunity to tend any number of wounds.”

He did not reply, and the silence stretched for an eternity before he slipped a finger beneath her chin and urged her to meet his serious black gaze. “The truth, now.”

She tried to ignore the way the simple touch shattered her concentration. “You think you know me well enough to see when I am lying?”

He did not speak for a long while, the tips of his fingers stroking across her cheek to her temple, then around the curve of her ear, reminding her of the way he’d whispered and kissed at that place in the dressmaker’s shop. She caught her breath as those wicked fingers slid down the column of her neck, resting on the place where her pulse threatened to thunder from beneath her skin.