She placed her hands on her hips, facing Temple. “Turn around.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“I did not give you permission to humiliate me.”
“Nevertheless, I purchased it,” he said, easing back onto the settee. “Relax. Hebert has impeccable taste. Let her drape you in silks and satins, and let me pay for it.”
“You think three pounds makes me malleable?”
“I do not pretend to think you shall ever be malleable. But I expect you to honor our arrangement. Your word.” He paused. “And think—when all is said and done, you’ll have a dozen new frocks.”
“A gentleman would allow me my modesty.”
“I have been labeled a scoundrel more often than not.”
It was her turn to raise a brow. “I do believe that over the course of our acquaintance, I shall call you much, much worse.”
He did laugh then. A warm, rich promise in the dim light. A sound she should not have liked so much. “No doubt.” His voice lowered. “Surely you’re strong enough to suffer my presence while you’re in your underclothes. You’ve a chaperone, even.”
The man was infuriating. Utterly, completely infuriating. And she wanted to hit him. No. That was too easy. She wanted to addle him. To best him in this battle of wits . . . in this game of words that he no doubt won any time he played. Because it wasn’t enough that Temple was strong in the ring. He had to be strong out of the ring as well—not agile simply with bones and sinew, but with thought and word.
She’d spent a lifetime under men’s control. When she was a child, her father had made it impossible for her to live as she liked, dictating her every deed with his army of spying servants and cloying nannies and treasonous governesses. He’d been ready to sell her off to a man three times her age who would have no doubt been just as domineering, and so she’d run.
But even when she’d run, even as she’d found a life in the wilds of Yorkshire and then in the sullied streets of London, she’d never escaped the specter of those men. She’d never been able to shake off their control—and they did control her, even as they didn’t know it. They overpowered her with fear—fear of being discovered and forced back into that life she’d so desperately wanted to escape. Fear of losing herself. Fear of losing everything for which she had worked.
Everything for which she had fought.
Everything she had risked.
And now, even as she promised herself she would get what it was she wanted, she could not escape the feeling that this man was another in a long line of men who wielded power like a weapon. Yes, he wished retribution, and perhaps it was his due. And yes, she might have agreed to his demands and turned herself over to him, and yes, she would honor her word and their agreement, but she would have to face herself when all was said and done.
And she would be damned if she would fear him, too.
He was smug, and self-important, and she badly wished to give him a dressing-down.
Even if it meant she would be the one dressing down.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have said the words. Perhaps she should have held them back. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been so very irritated with him, she would have. Perhaps if she had known what would come once he heard the words . . . she would have held her tongue.
But it didn’t matter. Because instead of not saying them, she turned away, marched back to that golden pool of light, and took her place on the platform there before facing him once more, and allowing the modiste access to the buttons and fastenings on her dress.
She stared, unblinking, into the darkness, where she imagined a look of arrogant triumph spread across his face, and said them anyway.
“I suppose it shouldn’t matter. After all, it is not the first time you’ve seen my underclothes.”
E verything froze. She couldn’t have said what he thought she’d said. She couldn’t have meant what he thought she meant.
Except she clearly did, for the smug look on her face, the dancing sparkle in her knowing gaze, as though she had been waiting a lifetime to set him on his heels.
And perhaps she had.
He snapped forward in his seat, both feet firmly on the ground, the residual glow from the candles casting him in light. “What did you say?”
She raised a brow, and he knew she was mocking him. “Is there a problem with your hearing, Your Grace?”
She was the most disastrous, damaging, difficult woman he’d ever know. She made him want to upturn the dainty, velvet furniture in this utterly feminine place, and tear the clothes from his back in irritation.
He was about to stand and intimidate her into repeating herself—into explaining herself—when the fastenings of her dress came loose, and the frock fell to her feet in a remarkable, fluid swoosh, leaving her standing there in her pale wool chemise, unadorned corset, and little else.
And then he couldn’t move at all.
Goddammit.
The Frenchwoman circled Mara, considering her for a long moment while Temple attempted to find his speech.
Hebert found hers first. “She will require lingerie as well.”
Temple disagreed. Mara did not require undergarments at all. In fact, he’d prefer she never wore another stitch of unmentionables again.
Or anything else, for that matter.
Good Lord.
She was perfect.
She was also lying.
For if he had seen her in her underclothes—in anything close to the things she wore now—he would remember.
He would remember the slope of her breasts, the spray of freckles across them, the way they curved in pretty, plump rounds topped with . . . he couldn’t see, but he knew that her nipples were very likely as gloriously well-formed as the rest of her breasts.
He would remember those breasts.
Wouldn’t he?
It is not the first time you’ve seen me in my underclothes.
He closed his eyes against the frustration that flared—the recollection that would not come. There had been a woman, one he’d thought was more muse than memory. More piecemeal than not.
Wide smile. Strange, intoxicating eyes.
“Is it red?”
The modiste’s words were like gunfire in the dark, quiet room. They startled Mara as well. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your hair,” Hebert replied. “Candlelight plays tricks on the eye. But it is red, no?”
Mara shook her head. “It’s brown.”
A silken waterfall of auburn curls.
“It’s auburn,” Temple said.
“You do not seem the kind of man to notice the difference,” she said, refusing to look at him, her eyes instead tracking the slender Frenchwoman now kneeling at her feet.
“I notice more than you could imagine.”
That hair had flickered in his memory for twelve years. There had been countless points when he’d decided it wasn’t real. In his darkest moments, he’d thought he’d fabricated it. Her. Something good to remember of that night.
But she’d been real.
He’d known Mara was the key to that night. That she remembered more than he did. That she was his only chance at piecing together his fall. But it had never occurred to him that she’d been with him for longer than it took to destroy him.
Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps it was a lie. Perhaps she’d drugged him and left him to distract the world while she ran from God knew what to God knew where, and those teasing words were her latest attempt at torture.
It wasn’t a lie.