All-powerful.
Until she’d stripped him of that power.
She looked at him then, cataloging his scars. The map of white and pink lines that ended in week-old bruises, the hallmarks of his profession.
Except it was not a profession.
He was wealthy and titled and with or without her death on his head, he was not required to fight. And still he did.
Temple. The fighter .
She’d made him. Perhaps that was why it seemed so right to tend to him now.
Who had tended to him the other times?
Because she could not allow herself to ask that, she asked instead, “Why Temple?”
He inhaled at the question, the hand of his good arm flexing into a fist, then back. “What do you mean?”
“Why choose that name?”
One side of his mouth kicked up. “I’m built like one.”
It was a flippant, practiced answer. Years of telling truth from lies told her it was the latter, but she did not press him to say more. Instead, her gaze tracked down one massive arm to the place where the wide black band of ink stood stark against his skin.
“And the ink?”
“Tattoos.”
Her hand moved of its own volition, fingers inching toward him before she realized that she was overstepping her bounds. She stopped a hairsbreadth from him.
“Go ahead,” he said, his voice low.
She looked up to him, but his gaze was on the band. On her fingers. “I shouldn’t,” she said, and the words unstuck her. She snatched her hand back.
“You want to.” He flexed his arm, the muscle making the ink shift as though it breathed. “It will not hurt.”
The room was not warm—the fire was new and it was winter outside the walls of the home—but still his arm was burning with heat. She ran her fingertips across the elaborate markings, all curving lines and dark space, amazed by the smoothness of his skin. “How?” she asked.
“A small needle and a large pot of ink,” he said.
“Who did it?” she met his black gaze.
His flickered away, back to where her fingers slid across smooth skin. Comfortable now. “One of the girls in the club.”
Her fingers stilled. “She is very skilled.”
He shifted beneath her touch. “She is. And thankfully has a steady hand.”
Is she your lover? Mara wanted to ask. Except she didn’t want the answer. Didn’t want to want it.
She didn’t want to think of a beautiful woman leaning over him with her keen sense of artistry and her wicked needle. Did not want to think of what happened later, after the needle had pricked his skin a thousand times. More. “Did it hurt?”
“No more than a fight on any given night.”
Pain was his currency, after all. She didn’t care for that thought, either.
“It’s my turn,” he said, and she returned her attention to him as he qualified. “To ask questions.”
The words broke the spell between them, and she let her hand fall away from his arm. “What kind of questions?” As though she didn’t know.
As though she hadn’t known for years that there would come a point when she had to answer them.
She wished he would put on a shirt.
No, she didn’t .
Except, if he was to press her into telling him about that night, ages ago, when she’d made a dozen life-altering mistakes, perhaps it would be best if he were fully clothed. If he were not so close. If he were not so suddenly compelling.
It was not sudden.
“How is it that you know so much about tending wounds?”
It was not the question she expected, and so she was blindsided by the images that came in response. Blood and screams. Knives and piles of red-stained linens. Her mother’s last gasp of breath and Kit’s tears and her father’s cold, brutal face, revealing nothing. Not emotion. Not guilt.
Certainly not remorse.
She looked down at her hands, the fingers now twisted together, a confusing tangle of cold skin, and she considered her words, finally settling on: “Twelve years has afforded me much opportunity to tend any number of wounds.”
He did not reply, and the silence stretched for an eternity before he slipped a finger beneath her chin and urged her to meet his serious black gaze. “The truth, now.”
She tried to ignore the way the simple touch shattered her concentration. “You think you know me well enough to see when I am lying?”
He did not speak for a long while, the tips of his fingers stroking across her cheek to her temple, then around the curve of her ear, reminding her of the way he’d whispered and kissed at that place in the dressmaker’s shop. She caught her breath as those wicked fingers slid down the column of her neck, resting on the place where her pulse threatened to thunder from beneath her skin.
And through it all, she kept her gaze on his, refusing to be the first to look away. Refusing to let him win, even when he closed in on her, tilting her face up and to the side, until her lips were parting at the promise of the caress he threatened.
The caress she found she wanted more than anything.
He almost gave it to her, his lips stroking once, twice, featherlight, across hers, until every inch of her ached for the touch to come firmer. To deliver on the whisper of a promise.
She sighed against his lips, and a dark, wicked sound rolled in his throat, sending a thrill through her. Had he growled? How scandalous. How wonderful.
But he didn’t kiss her properly. Instead, he spoke, wretched man. “I have spent a lifetime watching men lie, Mara. Gentlemen and scoundrels. I’ve become a tremendous judge of truth.”
She swallowed, feeling his fingers at her throat. “And I suppose you never lie?”
He watched her for a long moment. “I lie all the time. I’m the worst kind of scoundrel.”
Now, as she hovered on the edge of the caress with which he teased, she believed it. He was a scoundrel. Worse.
But it did not stop her from wondering what it would be like to tell him the truth. To unload it like a bricklayer into a perfect little pile right at his feet. All of it.
And if she did? If she told him everything—all she’d done, and why? If she laid herself bare and let him judge her for her good deeds as well as her sins?
“Tell me the truth.” The words were a caress. A temptation. “Who have you healed, Mara?” and the echo of patience in them—as though he would wait an eternity for the answer—was enough to make her ache to tell him.
Nothing you could say would make me forgive.
His words from earlier echoed through her, a threat and a promise. A warning not to give herself over to him.
He wanted his retribution, and she was the means to that end.
She’d best remember that.
Truth was a strange, ethereal thing—so few ever used it, and it was so often only noticeable in the lies one told.
“No one of consequence,” she said, “I am simply good with a needle, as well.”
“I would pay you for the truth,” he said, and even as the words came gentle, like a caress, they stung, harsh and unpleasant. This was the game they played.
She shook her head. “It’s not for sale.”
He was not through. She could see it in his gaze. And so she did the only thing she could think to distract him. She came up on her toes, and kissed him.
Chapter 7
I f he’d been asked to wager everything he owned on what would happen in that room that evening, he might have laid it on his kissing her.
He’d wanted to kiss her from the moment he’d taken her in his arms in that alleyway.