She looked to him, then snapped her attention back to the wall. “That was different. You were wounded!”
His eyes darkened. “Before that,” he said, knowing he had her when her cheeks went red. He would give his entire fortune to know what had happened that night. But he would not simply hand her what she wanted. On principle.
And therein lay the challenge with her.
Between them. Exhilarating even as it made him mad.
“Do you not manage a home for boys?”
She exhaled in a little frustrated puff and stared at the ceiling. “It is not the same.”
“It is precisely the same.”
“They are aged three through eleven!” she insisted.
He smirked. “So, they are smaller.”
She lifted her hands wide in the universal signal for frustration. She was quiet for a long moment, before she said, “I did not thank you for giving them time today.”
A thread of pleasure went through him at the words—something akin to pride. He ignored it. “You needn’t thank me.”
“Nevertheless.” She looked down at the floor, her shoulders straight. “They enjoyed their time with you immensely.”
The small acknowledgment was an enormous concession in the battle they waged. He could not resist moving toward her, walking her backward, across the floor of his rooms. He knew it would unsettle her, but he couldn’t seem to care. When he was a foot or so from her, he lowered his voice. “And what of you? Did you enjoy it?”
Her cheeks flamed. “No.”
He smiled at the instant lie. “Not even the bit where I kissed you?”
“Certainly not.”
He came closer, pushing her back, drawn to the heat of her. Finally catching her in his arms, loving the way she gasped at his touch, loving the way the silk of her dress, warm from her body, brushed against his bare chest. He slid his hand down her arm, finding her hand, lifting it to the strap that hung from the ceiling above her.
She knew precisely what to do, grasping the leather strip as he repeated the movement with the other hand until she stood long and lush, arms extended overhead, like a sacrifice. Like a gift.
She could release it at any time. Deny him the moment. But she didn’t, instead staring up at him, daring him with her beautiful gaze to come closer. To touch her more. To tempt her.
He took the dare, cupping her cheek in his hand, spreading his thumb across the high arc of it. Loving the softness of the skin there even as he told himself he did not notice it. “No?”
“No,” she exhaled, and the sound of her breath turned him hard as a rock.
He looked down at her, her dress cut scandalously low, her breasts straining at the fabric because of her position, and he at once praised and cursed Hebert for doing his bidding.
Mara Lowe was the most tempting thing he’d ever seen.
But strangely, it wasn’t her face or her body or the perfect breasts that rose and fell in an unsettled rhythm that convinced him of the fact. It was the way she faced him head-on. It was the way she refused to cow to him. The way she refused to fear him. The way she met him partway.
The way she saw him.
He was no killer, and she was the only person in the world who had always believed it. The only person who had ever known it to be true.
He lifted her chin, exposing the long column of her neck, and pressed a long, lingering kiss to the pulse beneath her chin, then to its mate at the place where neck met shoulder. “Are you sure you didn’t enjoy it?”
The words teased at her warm skin, and she shook her head in a broken movement, swaying against the strap, holding tight to combat the way the caress impacted her. “Quite,” she replied, the breath shuddering out of her, as he moved on, kissing the slope of her breast, once, twice, a third time—until he reached the edge of her dress, and slid a single finger between silk and skin, barely able to tell the two apart, until he reached the pebbled flesh that ached for him.
For which he ached.
He pulled the silk down, and spoke to her. “Even now?”
One hand fell from its mooring, coming to rest on his shoulders. Her bare skin against his. He could feel the want in them. “Even now.”
It was a taunt. A challenge.
One he did not refuse. He set his lips to her breast, loving the little cry that escaped her as he worried that sacred skin, sucking low and soft until the cry became a moan in the dark room. He could not stop himself from pulling her closer, lifting her from her feet, wrapping her legs about his waist, worshipping her there in that room that rarely knew pleasure and too often knew pain.
And then she’d released the strap altogether, her weight in his arms and her fingers in his hair, holding him tight against her, encouraging his caress, begging him for more, urging him to give her everything he could.
He was hard and aching, loving the way she directed him. The way she took her pleasure with abandon. He wanted to give her everything for which she asked.
He pressed her to the wall of the room, his hands everywhere, pulling them up, higher and higher, his fingertips sliding against stocking and then glorious smooth skin, tracking the curve of her thigh up . . . up until he could feel the heat of her. Wicked, promising warmth guarded by perfect, soft curls. A promise he could not wait to uncover. To explore.
He paused there, lifting his lips to find her eyes.
She gasped. “Yes.”
He’d never in his life heard such a glorious word. Never received such coveted permission.
“Say it again,” he said. To be certain.
“Yes.” The word coursed through him, her fingers tight in his hair.
He would give anything for a night with this woman.
But had he already done so?
The icy thought tore him from her, placing distance between them. Hating her all over again even as he felt nothing near hate. Nothing so cold. “Tell me,” he shoved his fingers through his hair, trying to erase the memory of hers. “Did we do this? Were we—”
Lovers.
For a moment, he thought she would answer him. He thought he saw it there. Sympathy. Worse. Pity.
Fuck.
He didn’t want her pity. She’d stolen that night from him, and she refused to give it back.
And then the emotion was gone from her gaze, and he knew what she was about to say.
He raised his voice before she could speak. “Tell me!”
“You know the cost of that information.”
Vaguely, it occurred to him in that in another place, at another time, he would find this woman perfect in every way. There was something strong and firm and fearless about her.
The same something that had drugged him on their first meeting. And their second. The same something that had sent her fleeing into the darkness the prior evening.
The same something that had set him up to be a murderer twelve years ago.
The same something that would no doubt attempt to thwart him again.
But it was this place. This time.
And he had never been so infuriated in his whole life. “I will give you this, Mrs. MacIntyre, if the orphanage fails, you’ve a tremendous career as a whore.”
She stilled like a doe on the hunt for a half second, before she moved, her hand flying fast and true and landing with remarkable precision on his cheek, stinging with her anger and his shame.
He didn’t dodge or duck or feint. He took the slap as his due, feeling a dozen times an ass. He shouldn’t have said it. He’d never said anything so insulting to a woman before. The apology was nearly on his lips when a bell rang above the door leading to the ring. She lowered her hand, the only sign of the blow the slight increase in her breath and the way her words shook in her throat. “What is that?”
What were they doing?
He turned away, refus
ing to touch the place where a furious red mark no doubt blossomed. “My opponent is ready. We shall continue this after the bout.”
She inhaled, and he hated the way the soft sound filled the room almost as much as he hated the way she said, “I hope he wins.”
He returned to the table, lifting the wax, molding it into two long strips. “I’m sure you do. But he won’t.” He inserted first one strip, then the second, into his mouth, and he did not hide the way he molded the wax along the edge of his teeth, daring her to look away.
She watched the coarse movements for a long moment before firing her own parting shot. “Good luck, Your Grace.”
Chapter 10
The unmitigated gall.
The unmitigated ass.
He’d called her a whore.
With the insidious arrogance that came of being a wealthy, unencumbered man. A duke. He’d suggested that the idea that she provide him the information he required for a price made her a trollop.
If she’d been a man, the word wouldn’t have occurred to him. If she’d been a man, he never would have said it.
If you treat me like a whore, you pay me like one.
So, she’d used the word first. This was different. He’d turned her inside out with his touch. He’d tempted her. He’d made her like him.
And then he’d called her a whore.
He deserved an immense setting down. The great, unbeatable Temple deserved to be beaten. By her.
Seething, a masked Mara followed the guard to whom she’d been assigned through a winding, curving passageway that kept her from view of the club’s members. She was too angry to care where they were going or what came next—too lost in her mental evisceration of Temple.
Until her guide waved her into a new space and closed the door behind her, leaving her alone in a sea of people. Of women. Surprise coursed through her. Women did not belong in a men’s club. In a casino.
Her gaze threaded through the room, across the collection of chattering women. Recognizing several. A marchioness. Two countesses. An Italian duchess known for her scandals.
Surprise warred with curiosity as Mara considered the rest of the women—all of whom were dressed in stunning silks and satins, some masked, most chattering as though they were at a ladies’ tea.
These weren’t simply women. They were aristocrats.
And it was only once she’d recovered from that discovery that she noticed what she should have noticed the moment she’d been shepherded into the room, like a lamb to slaughter.
One entire length of the long, narrow, extraordinarily dark room was a window—a great shaded window that looked out on a roomful of men, all dressed for evening, clustered in a horseshoe of a crowd, at once not moving and in constant motion—shouting and laughing and enjoying themselves, vibrating with energy like leaves on a thriving oak in the heat of summer. The throngs of men surrounded a great empty space, blocked by rope and covered in sawdust, of which the women were afforded a perfect, unobstructed view.
The ring.
Mara moved closer to the glass, unable to stop herself from reaching out to touch it, amazed by the way the room glowed.
Thankfully, it occurred to her just in time that the men would see her if she came too close to the window. She stopped, pulling her hand back, even as she could not understand why not one of the men beyond seemed at all interested in the window or the ladies inside the small, dark room.
Were they so used to women watching the fights that they weren’t scandalized by the women’s presence? That they didn’t yearn to control them? To keep them at bay? What kind of place was this?
What kind of perfect, wondrous place?
“They won’t see you,” said a lady nearby, drawing Mara’s attention to her serious blue gaze, large and unsettling behind thick spectacles. “It’s not a window. It’s a mirror.”
“A mirror.” There was nothing mirrorlike about this window.
Mara’s confusion must have shown, as the woman continued, “We can see them . . . but they only see themselves.”
As if on cue, a gentleman crossed in front of the ring, close enough to the window to touch, before pausing for a moment and turning to face Mara. She leaned forward as he did the same on the other side, lifting his chin to fluff his cravat.
She waved a hand in front of his long, pale face.
He bared his teeth.
She dropped her hand.
He lifted one gloved finger, scrubbing it back and forth over the crooked, tea-and-tobacco-stained grimace before turning and walking away.
A collection of women nearby laughed uproariously. “Well. No doubt Lord Houndswell would be terribly embarrassed to know we have all witnessed the remains of his dinner.” The woman smiled at Mara. “Do you believe it now?”
Mara grinned. “This must provide you hours of entertainment.”
“When there isn’t a fight to do the job,” another woman replied. “Look! Drake’s entered the ring.”
The chatter inside the room dimmed as the women turned their attention to the young man climbing through the ropes into the sawdust-covered space where two others waited—the Marquess of Bourne and another pure aristocrat, pale and unnerved.
The crowd at the far end of the ring parted to reveal a large steel door, and the air in the room seemed to change, to grow thick with anticipation.
“Any minute now,” a feminine sigh came from several yards away, and the entire room—on both sides of the window—seemed to still, waiting.
They were waiting for Temple.
And Mara found that she, too, was waiting.
Even though she hated him.
And then he was there, filling the doorway as though it were cut to his size, broad and tall and big as a house, bare from the waist up, wearing only those scandalous tattoos and buckskin breeches fitted to his massive thighs, and the long linen strips she’d wrapped along the hills and valleys of his knuckles and around the muscles of his thumb and wrist, as she tried not to notice his hands. Tried not to remember how they felt on her skin. Tried to remember that he was a weapon.
And when he’d kissed her, she’d remembered the truth of all of it. He was a weapon, spreading desire through her body, like bullets. Wounding her with want.
“He’s the biggest, most beautiful brute of a man,” another woman sighed, and Mara went still, forcing herself not to look. Not to care that there was admiration and something more in the tone—something like experience.
“Too bad he’s never shown interest in you, Harriet,” another said, calling forth a symphony of laughter from the rest.
Forcing herself not to care that the experience in the lady’s words was a lie.
And then he was moving toward them, and it might have been her mind playing tricks, but it seemed like he was looking right at her, as though the magic window were a mirror for everyone in the room but him.
As though he knew himself well enough to never have to see his reflection ever again.
He was through the ropes then, and Bourne—now dwarfed by Temple—moved to Mr. Drake, saying words that Mara couldn’t hear. Drake lifted his arms wide and the marquess smoothed his palms down his sides, patting the fabric of his breeches in a clinical, if rather shocking movement.
Mara could not keep quiet. “What are they doing?”
A lady came to her side. “Checking for weapons. The fighters are allowed a second to make sure that the bout is a fair one.”
“Temple would never cheat,” Mara said, the words drawing the attention of the women around her before she could hold them back. Heat flooded her cheeks as she looked from one to the next, finally settling on the woman who had spoken, uncommonly tall and blond, brown eyes glittering near gold in the reflection of the brightly lit ring.
“No,” the lady said. “He wouldn’t.”
There. There was the e
xperience that Mara had misheard earlier. This woman knew him.
She was beautiful enough for it.
They were no doubt beautiful together, matched only in height—with everything else perfectly contrasted to each other. She imagined this woman’s long arms wrapped around his neck, her long fingers threaded through his dark hair. His massive hands at her waist. Possessing her. Loving her.
And she hated him all over again, but now for another, more confusing reason.
A long whistle sounded from the other end of the room, “What I wouldn’t give to be Drake’s second right now!”
Mara’s attention returned to the ring, where the well-dressed aristocrat approached Temple, awkwardly indicating that he, too, should raise his arms. He did, the muscles of his chest and abdomen rippling with the movement, and Mara’s mouth went dry at the image he made, waiting for the man to check his person for weapons, smirk on his lips, as though he had the devil himself on his side, and therefore had no need of trickery.
She imagined his arms high above his head, caught in the scandalous strap that hung from his ceiling, where she’d held herself still, the cool leather biting into her palms, a contrast with his heat. With his touch. With his kiss.
But she hated him.
“Go on, man! Touch him!”
“Take him in hand!”
“Make sure to check all the nooks and crannies!”
The ladies were competing for bawdiest encouragement now, laughing and crying out as the aristocrat in the ring checked the Duke of Lamont with a speed born of fear or embarrassment or both.
“Not so quickly!”
“Or so soft!”
“I’d bet my fortune that Temple likes a firm hand!”
“Don’t you mean your husband’s fortune?” came the retort, and the redhead at the window turned to the room, a wide grin on her pretty face.
“What the earl doesn’t know shan’t hurt him. Look at the size of him!”
“Ten quid says he’s that big all over.”
No Good Duke Goes Unpunished Page 17