“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.
“The 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—”