“You didn’t run?”
The words surprised her from the memory. “Running would have made it worse.”
“The beating.”
“I could have taken it. It was not the first time he punished us. Nor would it be the last.” She hesitated. “But my mother decided she’d had enough.”
“What did she do?”
“She went at him. With a knife.”
He sucked in a long breath. “Christ.”
Mara had played the scene over again and again, nearly every day since it happened. Her beautiful mother, an avenging queen, placing herself between her children and their father.
Refusing to let him at them.
“He laughed at her,” Mara said, hating the softness in the words. Hating the way they made her sound like the child she had been. She swallowed. Met his gaze again. “He was too strong for her.”
“He turned the knife on her.”
Another wound, blossoming with blood. This time, unlucky. “The doctors came, but there was nothing to be done. She was dead the moment he struck the blow. It was only a matter of time.”
“Christ,” he said again, this time reaching for her, pulling her tight against his broad, strong chest. Speaking into her hair. “And you had to live with him.”
Until he offered me to another man, and I had no choice but to run.
She kept those words to herself, in part because she did not wish to remind him that he disliked her. That she was the reason his life had taken such a turn. She liked the comfort and strength of him too well.
A lie of omission.
She pressed her face into the warm smoothness of him, inhaling the scent of him, thyme and clove, letting herself have this moment, however fleeting, before she was faced once more with the world. And she said the words she’d never uttered. “If I hadn’t broken that statue . . .”
His hand came to her chin then, long blunt fingers lifting her face to the light. To his gaze. “Mara,” he said, the name still foreign to her ears after a decade without it. “It is not your sin.”
She knew it, even if she did not believe it. “I paid for it, nonetheless.” One corner of his mouth twitched in the threat of a smile, and she read the irony there. “Paying debts that do not belong to you. You would know a great deal about that.”
“Not as much as you would think,” he said, his thumb sliding like hot silk across her cheek, back and forth, the stroke at once calming and unsettling.
He watched the movement, and she took the opportunity to study him, his broken nose, the scar beneath one eye, the other that had split his lower lip. For a long moment, she forgot their conversation, her thoughts lost in that steady promise of his touch.
When he spoke, she saw the words curving on his lips. “I thought it was my debt.”
He did not meet her gaze, not even when she whispered his name—that name that he’d taken when he’d become a new man, forged from exile and doubt.
“I thought I killed you,” he said, simply. As though he were discussing something thoroughly inconsequential. The morning paper. The weather. He cleared his throat, and his hand fell away from her cheek. “I did not, however.”
The loss of his touch was immense.
I’m sorry , she wanted to say.
Instead, she lifted her own hand to his cheek, the shadow of his beard tickling her palm. Tempting it. He met her gaze then, and she saw the regret in his eyes, tinged with confusion and frustration and, yes . . . anger, so well concealed that she would have missed it if she weren’t looking so closely.
“I never meant to hurt you.” She paused, her gaze flickering over his shoulder to the mirror where the women had watched the fight. “It never occurred to me that you would suffer.”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. The idea that her actions would have no consequences for him was pure idiocy. She kept talking, as if her words could keep the past at bay. “But, when I heard them . . . when they watched you . . .”
“Who?” he asked.
She nodded in the direction of the mirror. “The women. I hated the way they spoke of you,” she said, her fingers sliding away from his chin, down his chest, tracing the hills and valleys of his muscles beneath the linen. “I hated the way they looked at you.”
“Are you jealous?”
She was, but that wasn’t what she meant. “I hate the way their eyes devour you—like you’re an animal. A treat. Something to be consumed. Something less than . . . what you are.”
He captured her hand and pulled it from him, and she hated the loss. “I don’t need your pity.”
Her eyes went wide. “Pity?” How could he possibly think that this emotion—this wicked, unsettling feeling that coursed through her and upended everything she thought she knew—was pity ?
It was nothing so simple as that.
“I wish it were pity,” she said, extracting her hand from his grip. Returning it to his torso, where the muscles of his abdomen stirred and stiffened, drawing her touch. “If it were pity, perhaps I could avoid it.”
“What, then?” he said, so low and dark that it made her feel as though this enormous room were the smallest she’d ever been in. Quiet and secluded.
She shook her head, every inch of her aware of him. Every ounce of her desperate for his touch. For his forgiveness. For him. “I don’t know. You make me feel—”
She stopped, unable to put the emotion into words.
His hand came to her neck, fingers sliding along the pulse there, brushing just barely, as though she might flee if he weren’t careful. “What?”
Her fingers moved of their own volition, threading into his hair, glorying in the softness of it. He stopped the caress with his good hand, pushing her back to the ropes, fisting her fingers around one thick cord—first one hand, then the other. When he was finished, he tilted her face to his. “What do I make you feel, Mara?”
After their sparring in the ring, all of London thought her his mysterious mistress. Was it not the thinking that made it so? Did it matter that it was in name only? Did it matter that she wanted him in more than farce? That she wanted him in truth? Hands and lips and body and . . .
She hesitated over the completion of the sentence. Over its meaning.
Over the way it would ruin her more thoroughly than any punishment Temple himself could mete out.
But the match had started, and she knew it was futile to fight.
Especially as she wished him to win.
She clutched the ropes, her mooring in his tempest. “You make me feel . . .” She paused, and his lips found hers in the hesitation, his kiss more gentle than ever before, tongue stroking with delicate, devastating force.
He pulled away before she could have her fill. “Go on,” he whispered, not touching her and somehow destroying her. Holding her over a wide abyss, with only the ropes of his ring to keep her sane.
“You make me hot and somehow cold.”
He rewarded the words with a long, lovely, worshipping kiss at the base of her neck. “What do you feel now?”
“Hot,” she answered, even as a shiver threaded through her. “Cold. I don’t know.”
He smiled against her skin, and she adored his lips curving against her. “What else?”
“When you look at me, you make me feel like I am the only woman in the world.”
His gaze was on the edge of her borrowed dress, where the bodice seemed brutally tight. He slid a finger along the simple line of fabric, barely touching her skin, making her wish the whole thing was gone. And then he tugged on the little white ribbon that fastened at the front, slowly tugging at the crisscrossing tie down her bodice until he gave her what she wished, the fabric coming loose. Instinctively, she released the ropes, moved to catch it. To hold it to her.