Something flashed in his gaze. “As are you.”

For the first time in a dozen years, she felt so. This man made her feel it, somehow. This man, who should have been her enemy. Who likely remained her enemy. Who no doubt wanted her destroyed for all the things she’d done. All the sins she’d committed.

And who, somehow, saw her for all she was.

“I thought you would die.”

He smiled. “You wouldn’t have it. I did not dare disappoint.”

She tried to match his smile. Failed. Instead, thinking of another patient. Another death.

He saw it on her face. Had to have. “Tell me.”

And suddenly, she wanted him to know.

“I couldn’t save her,” she whispered.

He didn’t move. “Who?”

“My mother.”

His brow furrowed. “Your mother died when you were a child.”

“I was twelve.”

“A child,” he repeated.

She looked down between him, at her silly silk slippers, peeping out from beneath her plain borrowed frock, toes nearly touching his bare ones.

So close.

“I was old enough to know that she was going to die.”

“She contracted a fever,” he said, and she heard the consolation in his words. You couldn’t have known. There was nothing to be done. A dozen people had said the words to her. A hundred.

They’d all believed the same story.

Except she hadn’t had a fever.

Or, rather, she had . . . but not the way her father told the story. It hadn’t come with sickness. It had come with infection. With a wound that would not heal.

And she had been in terrible pain.

Temple’s hand moved, lifting her chin, raising her gaze to his. All warmth and strength, huge and rough. And honest.

She looked up at him, into those eyes, dark as midnight and with its focus. “He killed her,” she whispered.

“Who killed her?”

“My father.” Even now, years later, it was hard to label him as such. Hard to think of him that way.

Temple shook his head, and she knew what he was thinking. It was impossible. A husband did not kill a wife.

“He did not like it when Kit and I went against his wishes, and she did all she could to protect us. That day . . .” she hesitated, not wanting to say more but unable to stop herself. Lost in the memory. “He’d purchased a new bust. From Greece or Rome or Persia—I cannot remember.

“Kit and I were running through the house, and I tripped on my skirts.” She laughed without humor, lost in the memory. “I had just been allowed to wear long skirts. I was so proud of myself. So grown up. I tumbled into the statue, which was perched atop a table on the upper landing of the house,” she said, and Temple inhaled sharply, as though he could see what was coming. What she had been unable to see as a child.

She shrugged. “It toppled over the banister. Fell two stories to the floor of the entryway.”

She could see it now, the way it lay broken and unrecognizable what seemed like a mile below. “He was furious. Came charging up the stairs, met me on the landing.”

“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.

But he was there, guiding one arm from the woolen dress, then the other.

And she let him. When he was finished, he said only, “Take the ropes.”

She turned herself over to him, grasping the ropes once more.

The dress was caught on her breasts, threatening to fall. He watched the way it held there, tenuous, and she wondered if he might be able to remove it with her gaze.

He ran a finger beneath the wool, gently, perfectly, and it pooled at her feet. She gasped.

“Cold?” he asked.

“No.” Hot as the sun.

He bent his head, taking the tip of one breast in his mouth, chemise and all, worrying it through the fabric, leaving it wet and aching for more. For him. He lifted his head, meeting her gaze.

“What else, Mara?” he asked. “What else do I make you feel?”

“You make me wish it was all different,” she said.

He rewarded the confession by sending her chemise to the floor, leaving her in nothing but her woolen stockings and those silly silken slippers that had matched the gown she’d worn the night she’d arrived, but had no place here. Now. He watched her for a long moment, drinking her in, keeping her warm, even as he blew a stream of cool air across the tip of her breast.

She sighed her pleasure, and he lifted his head, finding her. Seeing her. Just as she saw him. The way he desired her. The way he craved her. And when he ran the back of his hand across his lips like a starving man, she went weak-kneed, grateful for the strength of the ropes behind her.

“You make me wish I were different,” she confessed. You make me wish I were more.

He shook his head. “It’s strange; I don’t wish that at all.”

The words brought a cacophony of thought, too tangled for understanding. All she wanted was to say the right thing—the thing that would bring him closer to her. That would give her what she wanted. What she ached for.