The words were out before she had a chance to think on them. Before she—or he, if he were honest—realized what they might evoke. Curiosity. Frustration. More. He stopped just short of the pool of light where she stood, unable to hide her face. “Have I done that before?” he asked, the words coming harsher than he intended. Filled with more meaning than he expected.
She looked down at her feet. He followed the gaze, taking in her stockinged toes. When she did not answer, he pressed further. “I woke naked that morning. Naked and covered in someone else’s blood. A damn lot of it,” he said, though the blood didn’t seem to matter so very much. He stepped into the light. “Not your blood.”
She shook her head, finally looking up at him. “Not mine.”
“Whose?”
“Pig’s blood.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t mean—”
Dammit. He didn’t want apologies. He wanted the truth. “Enough. Where were my clothes?”
She shook her head again. “I don’t know. I gave them to—”
“To your brother, no doubt. But why?”
“We—I—” She hesitated. “I thought that if you were naked, it would postpone your looking for me. It would give me more time to get away.”
“Is that it?” He was horrified to discover that the explanation disappointed him. What had he been expecting? That she’d confess a deep, abiding attraction to him?
Perhaps.
No. Goddammit. She was trouble.
He didn’t know what he wanted from this woman any longer. “I was naked, Mara. I remember your hair, down. Your body above me.” She blushed in the candlelight, and then he knew precisely what he wanted. He stepped up, crowding her on the little round platform, but somehow—by the grace of something far more divine than either of them deserved—not touching her. “Did we—”
“Excusez moi, Your Grace.”
He did not hesitate, did not move. Did not look back. “A moment, Hebert.”
The Frenchwoman knew better than to linger.
He snaked an arm around Mara’s waist, hating himself for the weakness in the movement. He pulled her close, her breasts pressed tight against his chest, as their torsos met. Their thighs.
She gasped, but there was no fear in the sound.
Dear God, she wasn’t afraid of him. When was the last time he’d held a woman who did not fear him?
The last time he’d held her.
“Did we, Mara?” He spoke in a low whisper at her ear, his lips close enough to brush the soft curve of it, the warm skin. He couldn’t resist taking that lobe in his mouth, worrying it with his teeth until she shivered with pleasure.
Not fear.
“Did we fuck?”
She stiffened at the word, hot and wicked at the sensitive skin of her neck, and a thread of guilt shot through him even as he refused to acknowledge it. Even as he refused to feel regret insulting her.
Not that he needed to.
The woman fought her own battles. She turned her own head then, and matched him measure for measure, pressing her soft lips to his ear, kissing once, twice, softly, before biting the lobe and sending a river of desire through him. Good Lord, he wanted this woman like he’d never wanted anything in his life. Even as he knew she was poison.
Even as she proved it, lifting her lips from him, making him desperate for their return, and saying, “If I tell you, will you forgive the debt?”
She was the most skilled opponent he’d ever faced.
Because in that moment, he actually considered doing it. Forgiving it all and letting her run. And perhaps he would have, if she could have restored his memory.
But she’d taken that, too.
“Oh, Mara,” he said, releasing her in a slow slide, fury and something startlingly close to disappointment threading through him. He harnessed one and ignored the other. “Nothing you could say will make me forgive.”
He spun off the little platform, calling for Hebert as he retreated into the darkness.
The modiste entered again, a pile of satin and lace in her hands, and approached Mara. “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plait,” she said, indicating that Mara should put the dress on. Mara hesitated, but Temple saw the way she eyed the frock as though she hadn’t eaten for days and there, in the Frenchwoman’s hands, was food.
Once she was headfirst inside it, her arms swimming through fabric to find egress, he caught his breath and his sanity and looked to the dressmaker. “I don’t want her in another’s clothes. I want everything made. By you.”
Madame Hebert gave Temple a quick look. “Of course. The dress is for style. You indicated a desire to approve the collection.”
Mara gave a yelp of disagreement at that, her head finally poking out into the light. “It is not enough that you humiliate me by remaining in attendance as I am fitted? You must choose the gown as well?”
Hebert was already adjusting the fall of the gown and fastening it up the back, affording Temple a view of Mara in the mauve concoction, slightly too tight in the bodice and slightly too loose in the waist, but a gown nonetheless.