No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (6 page)

“Young men,” Mara said, gaining their attention. “I believe I spoke in proper English, did I not?”

Daniel stepped forward, a small, sharp chin jutting in Temple’s direction. “Who’s he?”

“No one for you to worry about,” Mara assured him.

The boys seemed skeptical.
Smart boys.

Matthew tilted his head, considering Temple. “He’s very big.”

“Strong, too,” another pointed out.

Daniel nodded, and Temple noticed that the boy’s gaze tracked the scar high on his cheek. “Is he ’ere to take us? For work?”

Years of practice kept Temple from revealing his surprise at the question, a split second before understanding rocketed through him. The building was an orphanage. He supposed he should have seen that earlier, but orphanages tended to conjure visions of miserable boys in long lines for bowls of steaming grey mush. Not battalions of screaming warriors chasing after pigs.

“Of course not. No one is taking you.”

Daniel turned his attention to her. “Who is he, then?”

Temple raised a brow, wondering just how she’d reply to that. It wasn’t as though she could tell the truth.

She met Temple’s gaze, firm and fierce. “He’s here to exact his revenge.”

A dozen little mouths gaped. Temple resisted the urge to join them. Daniel spoke again. “Revenge for what?”

“A lie I told.”

Christ. She was fearless.

“Lying is a sin,” little George pointed out.

Mara smiled a little, secret smile. “Indeed it is. And if you do it, men like this will come and punish you.”

Like that, she’d turned him into a villain again. Temple scowled as a roomful of round, wide eyes turned on him. He spoke then. “So you see, boys . . . I’ve business with Mrs. MacIntyre.”

“She didn’t mean to lie,” Daniel defended her.

Temple was certain that Mrs. MacIntyre had absolutely meant to lie, but when he looked to the boy, he couldn’t resist saying, “Nonetheless, she did.”

“She must’ve had a good reason. Didn’t you?” A sea of young faces looked to Mara.

Something sparkled in her gaze. Humor? She found this situation amusing? “I did indeed, Henry, which is why I fully intend to make a deal with our guest.”

Over his rotting corpse. There would be no deals. “Perhaps we should discuss the reason,
Mrs. MacIntyre
.”

She tilted her head, refusing to cower. “Perhaps,” she said, sounding as though she meant the absolute opposite.

It seemed to be enough for most of the boys, but Daniel’s gaze narrowed. “We should stay. Just to be safe,” and, for a moment, Temple saw something eerily familiar in the boy.

Mistrust.

Suspicion.

Strength.

“That’s very kind of you, Daniel,” Mara said, moving to usher the boys through a door on one side of the foyer, “but I assure you, I shall be quite fine.”

And she would be. Temple had no doubt.

Neither did most of the boys, it seemed, who went, as though there had been no pig stealing or chasing or sparring or vaulting through the air or anything else—all except Daniel, who didn’t seem sure, but allowed himself to be filed from the room, looking over his shoulder the whole way, assessing Temple with serious dark eyes.

It had been a long time since someone had so fearlessly faced him.

The boy was loyal to Mara.

Temple was almost impressed, until he remembered the woman in question was a demon and deserved no such loyalty.

When she closed the door firmly behind the pack of boys, he rocked back on one heel. “Mrs.
MacIntyre
?”

At the pointed question, she darted her attention to the wide-eyed maid, still frozen in place at the door. “That will be all, Alice. Please tell Cook that the boys are ready for breakfast. And send tea to the receiving room for our guest.”

Temple raised a brow. “Even if I were a man who drank tea, I know better than to ingest anything you offer me. Ever again.” He looked quickly to Alice. “No offense, Alice.”

Mara’s cheeks went red. Good. She should be embarrassed. She could have killed him with her reckless behavior.

“Thank you, Alice.” The girl couldn’t have been happier to leave the room.

When she did, Temple spoke. “Mrs. MacIntyre?”

She met him head on. “Yes.”

“What happened to Mr. MacIntyre?”

“He was a soldier,” she said simply, “killed in action.”

He raised a brow. “Where?”

She narrowed her gaze. “Most people are not rude enough to ask.”

“I lack breeding.”

She scowled. “The Battle of Nsamankow, if you must know.”

“Well done. Obscure enough that no one could trace him.” He looked around the foyer. “And respectable enough to land you here.”

She changed the subject. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“Not enough arsenic in the scotch?”

“It wasn’t arsenic,” she snapped before lowering her voice. “It was laudanum.”

“So you admit you drugged me.”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“And, to confirm, it was not the first time?” When she did not reply, he added, “The first time you drugged me and ran, that is.”

She exhaled a little huff of irritation before coming forward and taking his arm, ushering him toward the room into which the pig had fled. Her touch was firm and somehow warm even through the wool of his jacket, and he had a fleeting memory of his dream—of her fingers trailing through the drop of wax on his sleeve.

She was unsettling.

No doubt because she was a danger to his life. Both literally and figuratively.

She shut the door, closing them into a clean, unassuming receiving room. A small iron stove stood in the far corner of the space, a fire burning happily inside, warming the piglet who had narrowly escaped certain death only minutes earlier and now appeared to be asleep. On a cushion.

The woman had a pig on a cushion
.
Named Lavender.

If he hadn’t spent his last several conscious hours in a state of surprise, he would have thought the animal strange. Instead, he turned to face the pig’s owner, who was pressed against the door of the room.

“I did not exactly
run
,” she qualified. “I left you my address. I practically—no. I
definitely
invited you to come after me.”

He raised a brow. “How magnanimous of you.”

“If you hadn’t been so angry—” she began.

He couldn’t help but interrupt her. “You think that leaving me unconscious on the floor of my library assuaged my anger?”

“I covered you with a blanket,” she defended herself.

“Silly me. Of course, that resolves everything.”

She sighed, her strange, compelling gaze meeting his. “I did not mean for it to go the way it did.”

“And yet you packed an excess of laudanum for the journey to my home.”

“Well, you’re a bit larger than most men—I had to be prepared with an excess dosage. And you’d taken my knife.”

He raised a brow. “Your sharp tongue will not endear you to me.”

She mirrored his expression. “A pity, as I was doing such a good job of it beforehand.”

A laugh threatened, and he quashed it. He would not be amused by her.

She was toxic. Toxic was not amusing.

She pressed on. “I do not deny that I deserve a modicum of your anger, but I will not be strong-armed.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that word with me. Need I remind you that for the duration of our acquaintance only one of us has drugged the other? Twice?”

A red wash appeared on her cheeks. Guilt? Impossible. “Nevertheless, it seems an apt description of how you might behave with me, Your Grace.”

He wished she’d stop calling him that. He hated the honorific—the way it scraped up his spine, reminding him of all the years he’d longed for it. The years he couldn’t have it, even though it was his by right.

Even though he deserved it.

Of course, he hadn’t known that.

He hadn’t killed her.

The realization remained a shock.

He hadn’t known. All those years—he’d lived with the idea that he might have been a killer. All those years.

She’d stolen them from him.

A wave of anger washed through him, hot and uncomfortable. Vengeance had never been his nourishment, and now, even as he could not resist it, he tasted the bitterness of it on his tongue.

He snapped his attention to her. “What happened?”

Her eyes went wide. “I beg your pardon?”

“Twelve years ago, at Whitefawn. On the eve of your wedding. What happened?”

She hesitated. “You don’t remember?”

“I was quite drugged. So, no, in fact, I don’t remember.”

Not for lack of trying. He’d played the evening over and over in his head, hundreds of times, thousands. He remembered scotch. He remembered wanting a woman. Reaching for one. He couldn’t picture a face, but he remembered strange eyes and auburn curls and pretty curves and laughter that was half innocence, half sin.

And those eyes. No one could forget those eyes. “I remember you were with me.”

She nodded, and pink scored her cheeks again.

He’d known it. It was one of the things he’d never doubted. He’d been young and full of liquor and had never met a woman he couldn’t seduce. Of course he’d been with her.

And, suddenly, he wanted to know everything. He moved closer, noting the way she stiffened, pressing back against the door. “And before you set me up—before you faked your death and ran like a coward—we were alone?”

She swallowed, and he couldn’t help but watch the muscles of her throat, the way the muscles there betrayed her nerves. Her guilt. “Yes.”

She looked down at her skirts. Smoothed them. He noticed she wasn’t wearing gloves—same as the prior evening. As in his dream. But now, in the light of day, he saw the marks of work on them: blunt, clean nails; sun-worn skin; and a ghost of a scar on her left hand, just pale enough to have been long healed.

He did not like that scar.

And he did not like that he’d noticed it.

“For how long?”

“Not long.”

He exhaled a humorless laugh at that. “Long enough.”

Her gaze flew to his, wide and open and filled with . . . something
.
“Long enough for what?”

“Long enough for you to incapacitate me.”

She exhaled, and he knew she’d hidden something from him. He considered her for a long moment, wishing he were in the ring. There, he saw his opponents’ vulnerability, open and raw. There, he knew where to strike.

Here, in this strange building, in this strange battle with this strange woman, things were not so easy.

“Tell me one thing. Did you know who I was?” For some reason, it mattered.

Her eyes met his, and there was truth in them, for once. “No.”

Of course she hadn’t. So what had she done? What had happened in that pretty yellow bedchamber all those years ago?

Dammit.

He understood combat enough to know that she wouldn’t tell him. And he understood it enough to know that if he showed his interest, she held the power.

And he’d be damned if he gave her any more power.

Today was his. He changed tack.

“You shouldn’t have returned. But since you did, your mistake is my reward. And the world will know the truth about us both.”

M
ara was never so grateful in her life as she was the moment he shifted the conversation away from that long-ago night, and back to the matter at hand. She could handle him here. Now. Angry.

But the moment the present clouded over with past, she lost her nerve, uncertain of how to proceed with this enormous brute of a man and the years that had passed since the last time she’d seen him.

She resisted the thought and returned her attention to the matter at hand. “Then you are ready to negotiate?” Pretending not to be overwhelmed by him, she returned to her desk. Sat. “I shall draft the letter to the
News
today, assuming you are ready to clear the debts in question.”

He laughed. “Surely, you did not think it would be so easy.”

“I would not say easy.” It would not be easy. She’d written the letter a hundred times in her head. A dozen on paper. For years. And it never got easier. “I would say quick, however. Surely that is of interest.”

He raised a brow. “I’ve waited twelve years for this. Neither ease nor quickness is paramount.”

She asked the question despite knowing the answer. “Then what is?”

“Retribution.”

She huffed a little laugh to cover the way the words unnerved her. “What do you plan to do? Parade me through the streets? Tarred and feathered?”

“The image is not entirely unpleasant.” He smiled then, and she imagined he’d smiled that particular smile a hundred times in his club. In his ring. “I do plan to parade you through London. But not tarred and feathered.”

Her brows rose. “What, then?”

“Painted. And primped.”

She shook her head. “They won’t have me.”

“Not like the wealthy heiress you once were, no.”

They’d barely accepted her then. She’d been a threat to everything they were. Everything they had. The pretty young daughter of a wealthy working man. She might have been rich enough, but she’d never been good enough for them.

“They won’t have me in their company.”

“They shall do what I say. You see, I am a duke. And, if I remember correctly, while killer dukes are not favored by the doyennes of the
ton
, those of us who have not committed murder tend to be well received.” He leaned closer. “Ladies like the idea of dukes.” The words were more breath than sound, and Mara resisted the urge to touch the exposed skin of her neck, to at once rub them away and to keep them there. “And you are mine to do with as I please.”

Her brows knit together at the words. At the way they spread through her, hot and threatening. “And what is that, precisely?”

“Precisely, whatever I desire.”

She stiffened. “I shan’t be your mistress.”

“First, you are in no position to make such demands. And second, I don’t recall offering to have you.”

She went hot with embarrassment. “Then what?”