Not even if she could. “I won’t.”
He hated her; she could see it in his eyes. “I need money.”
Always money. It was always paramount. She shook her head. “I don’t have anything for you.”
“That’s a lie,” he said, coming toward her. “You’re hiding it from me.”
She shook her head, telling him the truth. “I haven’t anything for you.” Everything she had was for the orphanage. And the rest . . . it was for Temple.
She had no room for this man.
“You owe me. For what I suffered. For what I still suffer.”
She shook her head. “I don’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to convince myself that what I did was right. Thinking that I hurt you. That I made you.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t. Boys grow. Men make choices. And you should count yourself lucky that I do not scream until half of London comes running and finds you.”
He stilled. “You wouldn’t.”
She thought of Temple, still and wounded on the table in his rooms at the Angel. Thought of the way her chest had ached and her heart had pounded and she’d been terrified that he would not wake.
A centimeter left or right, and Kit would have killed the man she loved.
“I would not hesitate.”
His anger overflowed. “So you are his whore, after all.”
If only it were that easy. She stood firm in her place, refusing to cower.
When he saw her strength, his voice became a high-pitched whine. “You also made mistakes, you know.”
“And I pay for them every day.”
“I see that. With your pretty silk dress and your coat lined in fur and your mask made of gold,” he said. “What a hardship.”
He seemed to have forgotten what was to come for her. How she would assume the mantle of punishment for his crimes. “I have paid for it every day since I left. And more since I returned. You are lucky I have taken the brunt of the punishment for our sins. And for yours alone.”
“I don’t require your protection.”
“No,” she snapped. “You require my money.” He stiffened at the words. She knew that she had no choice but to drive the point home. “I should turn you over to him. You nearly killed him.”
“I wish I had.”
She shook her head. “Why? He never hurt us. He was innocent in all of this.” He was the only one.
“Innocent?” Kit spat, “He ruined you.”
“We ruined him!” she cried.
“He deserved it!” Kit’s voice rose to a fevered pitch. “And the rest of them took every penny I owned!”
Twenty-six and still a child. “Every penny of mine, as well, brother.” He stilled. “They did not force you to wager.”
“They did not stop me, either. They deserve what they received.”
“No. They don’t. He didn’t.”
“He’s turned you against me—me, who kept your secrets all these years. And now you choose him over me.”
By God, she did. She chose Temple over all else.
But it didn’t mean she could have him.
She was sorry for Kit in that moment, sorry that he’d lived the life he had—that they hadn’t been able to protect each other. To support each other. And she mourned him, that laughing, loving boy he’d been, who’d found her a pint of pig’s blood and sent the maids across the grounds of Whitefawn Abbey to ensure that she and Temple would be seen before she faked her own ruin.
Before she ruined a man who had never deserved it.
She shivered in the night, running her silk gloves over her arms, unable to keep the cold at bay, perhaps because it was coming from within. And there, wracked with sorrow, she reached into her reticule and extracted the only money she had. The last of her stash, designed to get her to Yorkshire. To start again.
She gave her brother the coins. “Here. Enough to get you out of Britain.” He sneered at the paltry amount, and she hated him all the more. “You are welcome not to take it.”
Kit was quiet for a long moment before he said, “So that’s it then?”
She swallowed back her tears, tired of this life she lived, of the way she’d had to run and hide for so long. Of the way she’d lived in the shadow of her past.
There was a part of her that thought the money might buy her freedom. It might send Kit away and give her a chance at something else. Something more.
Temple.
“That’s it.”
He disappeared into the darkness, the way he’d come.
Guilt flared, but not for Kit. Not for his future. She’d given him money and a chance at a new life. And, in doing so, she’d stolen Temple’s retribution.
Somehow, that was worse than all the rest.
She had betrayed him.
And it did feel like a betrayal, even as she stood outside the place where he planned to take his revenge. Even as she knew that she should loathe him and wish him ill for making his revenge somehow paramount, even as he treated her with kindness she’d never received from another.
If this was love, she wanted none of it.
Long after her brother left, Mara sat on a low wooden bench, feeling more alone than she ever had in her life. Tonight she would lose her brother, the orphanage, and this life she’d built for herself. Margaret MacIntyre would join Mara Lowe, exiled from Society. From the world she knew.
But none of that seemed to matter. Instead, all she could think was that tonight, she would lose Temple.
She would give him the life for which he’d been born—the highborn wife, the aristocratic children, the perfect legacy. She would give him the life that he had always wanted. Of which he’d dreamed.
But she would lose him.
And it would have to be enough.
S he was beautiful.
Temple stood in the darkness, watching her as she sat straight and true on a low wooden bench carved from a single tree trunk, looking as though she’d lost her dearest friend.
And perhaps she had.
After all, in the moment she’d given Christopher Lowe the scraps from her reticule and sent him from England, she’d lost the brother she’d loved, and the only person who knew her story.
A story for which Temple would raze London.
He should loathe her. He should be furious that she’d helped Lowe escape. That she’d sent him running into the night instead of turning him over. The man had tried to kill him.
And yet, as he watched her, cold and alone in the Leighton gardens, he couldn’t loathe her. Because somehow, in all of this madness, he understood her.
He could see it in the way she held herself, stiff and unmoving, lost in her thoughts and the past. In the way she owned every one of her actions. In the way that she had never once cowed from him since that dark night that had changed both their lives.
She thought she deserved the sadness. The loneliness. She thought she’d brought it upon herself.
Just as he had.
Christ. He didn’t simply understand her.
He loved her. The words came like a blow, surprising and strong, and true. He loved her.
All of her, somehow—the girl who had ruined him and somehow, at the same time, set him free, and the woman who stood before him now, strong as steel and everything he’d ever wanted.
All those years, he’d imagined the life he might have had. The wife. The children. The legacy. All those years, he’d imagined being a part of the aristocracy, powerful and entitled and unquestioned.