She met his eyes. “Why?”
He nodded to his hand. “How much to wrap it for me?”
She watched the movement. “Twenty pounds.”
He shook his head. “Try again.”
“Five.”
He wanted her close, despite the fact that he shouldn’t want any such thing. And he could afford it. “Done.”
She approached, removing her cloak to reveal the mauve dress Madame Hebert had promised him. She was beautiful in it, with skin like porcelain. His heart pounded as she came closer, pausing an arm’s length from him and extracting that little black book that she carried everywhere. “Five,” she repeated, marking the amount in her register. “And ten for the evening. As always.”
Reminding him that she had her own reasons for being here.
She returned the book to its place and reached for his hand. No gloves. Again. Skin against skin, this time. Heat against heat.
He was paying for it.
Perhaps if he remembered that, it would help him forget her. The feel of her. The smell of her, lemons in winter. The taste of her.
She resumed his ritual, careful to wrap the linen about his wrist and around his thumb, keeping the long strips flat and firm against his skin. “You’re very good at that,” he said, his voice unfamiliar even to him. She did that to him. She made him feel unfamiliar.
“I have wrapped broken bones. I assume it’s a similar principle.”
Again, a little snippet of Mara, of where she’d been. Of who she’d been. Enough to make him want to ask a dozen questions she wouldn’t answer. So he settled on: “It is.”
Her fingers were soft and sure on his hands, making him ache for them in other places. Her head bowed over her handiwork, and he stared down at the top of her head, into auburn curls that he itched to touch. He wondered what her hair would look like spread in wide waves across his pillow. Across the floor of this room. Across his bare chest. Across hers.
His gaze moved to her shoulders, to the way they rose and fell with each breath, as though she labored far more intensely than she did.
He recognized that breath. Experienced it himself.
She wanted him.
She tucked the end of the linen gently into the rest of the wrap, and he tested the binds, impressed.
Another thing she did expertly.
He turned away from her, lifted the other length of linen. Passed it to her and held out his free hand. Watched her repeat her ministrations in silence, muscles aching as he tensed beneath her touch, desperate for more of it. Desperate to touch her in return.
Christ, he needed another stretch.
That wasn’t all he needed.
But it was all he was getting. He extracted a mask from a nearby drawer. “Put that on.”
She hesitated. “Why?”
“You will have your first moment before London tonight.”
She froze, and he did not like the way it made him feel. “Masked?”
“I don’t want you seen yet.”
I don’t want it to be over.
“Tonight,” she repeated.
“After the fight.”
“If you don’t lose, you mean.”
“Even if I lose, Mara.”
“If you aren’t brutalized and left for dead. That’s the goal, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t correct her. “All right; if I don’t lose.” He inclined his head. “But I won’t lose.”
“What is your plan?” she asked.
“You’ll see The Fallen Angel. Many women would kill for the opportunity.”
She lifted her chin, proudly. “Not I.”
“You’ll enjoy it.”
“I doubt it.”
Her obstinacy made him smile, and to hide it, he pulled his shirt off, yanking it over his shoulders, baring his chest to her. She immediately looked away, playing the prim and proper miss perfectly.
He laughed. “I am not naked,” he replied, smoothing the waist of his trousers and pretending to inspect a long-healed scar on one of his arms while watching her. “You have seen it before, have you not?”
She looked to him, then snapped her attention back to the wall. “That was different. You were wounded!”
His eyes darkened. “Before that,” he said, knowing he had her when her cheeks went red. He would give his entire fortune to know what had happened that night. But he would not simply hand her what she wanted. On principle.
And therein lay the challenge with her.
Between them. Exhilarating even as it made him mad.
“Do you not manage a home for boys?”
She exhaled in a little frustrated puff and stared at the ceiling. “It is not the same.”
“It is precisely the same.”
“They are aged three through eleven!” she insisted.
He smirked. “So, they are smaller.”
She lifted her hands wide in the universal signal for frustration. She was quiet for a long moment, before she said, “I did not thank you for giving them time today.”
A thread of pleasure went through him at the words—something akin to pride. He ignored it. “You needn’t thank me.”
“Nevertheless.” She looked down at the floor, her shoulders straight. “They enjoyed their time with you immensely.”
The small acknowledgment was an enormous concession in the battle they waged. He could not resist moving toward her, walking her backward, across the floor of his rooms. He knew it would unsettle her, but he couldn’t seem to care. When he was a foot or so from her, he lowered his voice. “And what of you? Did you enjoy it?”
Her cheeks flamed. “No.”
He smiled at the instant lie. “Not even the bit where I kissed you?”
“Certainly not.”
He came closer, pushing her back, drawn to the heat of her. Finally catching her in his arms, loving the way she gasped at his touch, loving the way the silk of her dress, warm from her body, brushed against his bare chest. He slid his hand down her arm, finding her hand, lifting it to the strap that hung from the ceiling above her.
She knew precisely what to do, grasping the leather strip as he repeated the movement with the other hand until she stood long and lush, arms extended overhead, like a sacrifice. Like a gift.
She could release it at any time. Deny him the moment. But she didn’t, instead staring up at him, daring him with her beautiful gaze to come closer. To touch her more. To tempt her.
He took the dare, cupping her cheek in his hand, spreading his thumb across the high arc of it. Loving the softness of the skin there even as he told himself he did not notice it. “No?”
“No,” she exhaled, and the sound of her breath turned him hard as a rock.
He looked down at her, her dress cut scandalously low, her breasts straining at the fabric because of her position, and he at once praised and cursed Hebert for doing his bidding.
Mara Lowe was the most tempting thing he’d ever seen.
But strangely, it wasn’t her face or her body or the perfect breasts that rose and fell in an unsettled rhythm that convinced him of the fact. It was the way she faced him head-on. It was the way she refused to cow to him. The way she refused to fear him. The way she met him partway.
The way she saw him.
He was no killer, and she was the only person in the world who had always believed it. The only person who had ever known it to be true.
He lifted her chin, exposing the long column of her neck, and pressed a long, lingering kiss to the pulse beneath her chin, then to its mate at the place where neck met shoulder. “Are you sure you didn’t enjoy it?”