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.