He couldn’t help but interrupt her. “You think that leaving me unconscious on the floor of my library assuaged my anger?”
“I covered you with a blanket,” she defended herself.
“Silly me. Of course, that resolves everything.”
She sighed, her strange, compelling gaze meeting his. “I did not mean for it to go the way it did.”
“And yet you packed an excess of laudanum for the journey to my home.”
“Well, you’re a bit larger than most men—I had to be prepared with an excess dosage. And you’d taken my knife.”
He raised a brow. “Your sharp tongue will not endear you to me.”
She mirrored his expression. “A pity, as I was doing such a good job of it beforehand.”
A laugh threatened, and he quashed it. He would not be amused by her.
She was toxic. Toxic was not amusing.
She pressed on. “I do not deny that I deserve a modicum of your anger, but I will not be strong-armed.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that word with me. Need I remind you that for the duration of our acquaintance only one of us has drugged the other? Twice?”
A red wash appeared on her cheeks. Guilt? Impossible. “Nevertheless, it seems an apt description of how you might behave with me, Your Grace.”
He wished she’d stop calling him that. He hated the honorific—the way it scraped up his spine, reminding him of all the years he’d longed for it. The years he couldn’t have it, even though it was his by right.
Even though he deserved it.
Of course, he hadn’t known that.
He hadn’t killed her.
The realization remained a shock.
He hadn’t known. All those years—he’d lived with the idea that he might have been a killer. All those years.
She’d stolen them from him.
A wave of anger washed through him, hot and uncomfortable. Vengeance had never been his nourishment, and now, even as he could not resist it, he tasted the bitterness of it on his tongue.
He snapped his attention to her. “What happened?”
Her eyes went wide. “I beg your pardon?”
“Twelve years ago, at Whitefawn. On the eve of your wedding. What happened?”
She hesitated. “You don’t remember?”
“I was quite drugged. So, no, in fact, I don’t remember.”
Not for lack of trying. He’d played the evening over and over in his head, hundreds of times, thousands. He remembered scotch. He remembered wanting a woman. Reaching for one. He couldn’t picture a face, but he remembered strange eyes and auburn curls and pretty curves and laughter that was half innocence, half sin.
And those eyes. No one could forget those eyes. “I remember you were with me.”
She nodded, and pink scored her cheeks again.
He’d known it. It was one of the things he’d never doubted. He’d been young and full of liquor and had never met a woman he couldn’t seduce. Of course he’d been with her.
And, suddenly, he wanted to know everything. He moved closer, noting the way she stiffened, pressing back against the door. “And before you set me up—before you faked your death and ran like a coward—we were alone?”
She swallowed, and he couldn’t help but watch the muscles of her throat, the way the muscles there betrayed her nerves. Her guilt. “Yes.”
She looked down at her skirts. Smoothed them. He noticed she wasn’t wearing gloves—same as the prior evening. As in his dream. But now, in the light of day, he saw the marks of work on them: blunt, clean nails; sun-worn skin; and a ghost of a scar on her left hand, just pale enough to have been long healed.
He did not like that scar.
And he did not like that he’d noticed it.
“For how long?”
“Not long.”
He exhaled a humorless laugh at that. “Long enough.”
Her gaze flew to his, wide and open and filled with . . . something. “Long enough for what?”
“Long enough for you to incapacitate me.”
She exhaled, and he knew she’d hidden something from him. He considered her for a long moment, wishing he were in the ring. There, he saw his opponents’ vulnerability, open and raw. There, he knew where to strike.
Here, in this strange building, in this strange battle with this strange woman, things were not so easy.
“Tell me one thing. Did you know who I was?” For some reason, it mattered.
Her eyes met his, and there was truth in them, for once. “No.”
Of course she hadn’t. So what had she done? What had happened in that pretty yellow bedchamber all those years ago?
Dammit.
He understood combat enough to know that she wouldn’t tell him. And he understood it enough to know that if he showed his interest, she held the power.
And he’d be damned if he gave her any more power.
Today was his. He changed tack.
“You shouldn’t have returned. But since you did, your mistake is my reward. And the world will know the truth about us both.”