Sarah MacLean - No Good Duke Goes Unpunished

She hesitated. He wouldn’t like it.

“What did you agree to?” he pressed. She heard the irritation in his tone. The frustration.

“What do you think I agreed to?”

“You sold yourself.”

If only it had been so simple. “I told him I would show myself. Return him to society.”

He considered the words, and for a moment, she thought he might protest. But she had forgotten that desperate men turned mercenary. “And I get my money back?”

She heard the pronouns. Hated them. “It’s not only your money.”

He scoffed. “What was yours was minimal.”

“What was the orphanage’s was enough to run the place for a year. Maybe longer.”

“I’ve a great deal to worry about, Mara. I’m not about to worry over your whelps, too.”

“They’re children! They rely upon me for everything!”

He sighed, clearly through with her. “Did you get my money back or not?”

It did not matter to him that she would lose everything. This life she’d built. This place that had kept her safe. Given her purpose. He didn’t care, as long as his money was returned.

And so she did what she was so good at.

She lied.

“Not.”

Fury crossed his handsome face. “You made a deal with the devil and you get nothing in return? What good are you? What good was this?” His lips twisted in irritation as he paced the room. “You’ve ruined everything!”

Her gaze narrowed on her brother. “I did what had to be done. He isn’t going to fight you, Kit. Now, at least, he will leave you alone.”

Kit turned and tossed a chair out of the way, the furniture crashing against the wall and splintering into a dozen pieces. Mara stilled.

The anger was familiar.

In all senses of the word.

She stepped behind her desk, pressing her knuckles to the desktop, hiding the shaking of her hands.

She was losing control of the situation.

Perhaps she deserved it. Perhaps this was what happened to women who tried to take fate into their own hands. She’d done just that, changed her future. Changed her life. Lived it for twelve years.

But now it was time to let Kit live his. “This is the deal we struck. Your only chance at honor is my agreeing to admit what I did. I brought the man to my room. I drugged him. I bloodied the damn sheets.” She shook her head. “ I ran. It is I who require forgiveness. I who can give him retribution. And he knows it.”

“And what of me?”

“He is not interested in you.”

Christopher went to the window and looked out on the cold November afternoon. He was quiet for a long moment before whispering, “He should be. He doesn’t know what I could do.”

The sun sinking into the western sky turned his brown locks gold, and Mara recalled a long-ago afternoon at their childhood home in Bristol, Kit laughing and running along the edge of a little pond near their house, pulling a new toy boat behind him.

He’d tripped on a tree root and fallen, releasing the string attached to the boat to catch himself, and the high wind had carried the boat out to the middle of the pond, where it promptly capsized and sank.

They’d been beaten for their transgressions, then sent to bed without supper—Kit, because he hadn’t seen fit to rescue the boat, which had cost their father money, and Mara, because she’d had the gall to remind their father that neither of his children was able to swim.

It was not the first time Kit had been unlucky, nor was it the first time she had tried to protect him from their father’s scorn.

It was also not the last.

But today, she was not protecting him. Today, she was protecting something much more important. And she did not trust him to be a part of her plan. “You remain free of this.”

“And if I don’t?”

She opened the door to the room with a quick snap, indicating that she was done with the conversation. “You haven’t a choice.”

He turned to face her, and for a moment the light played tricks with her. For a moment, he looked like their father. “You in the hands of the Killer Duke? He and his club have taken everything I own. I’m supposed to simply allow it? What of my money?”

Not what of you . Not what of my sister.

The omission should not have surprised her, and yet it did. But she held back her surprise and lifted her chin. “Money isn’t everything.”

“Oh, Mara,” he said, sounding older and wiser than she’d ever heard him. “Of course it is.”

The lesson of their father, burned into them.

He met her gaze. “I am not free of this. And now, neither are you.”

Truth at last.

Hours later, Lavender on a cushion at her feet, Mara was attempting to focus on her work when Lydia Baker stepped into her small office and said, “I’m tired of pretending as though I have not noticed.”

Mara attempted surprise, turning wide eyes on her closest friend. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do not pretend to misunderstand me,” Lydia said, seating herself in a small wooden chair on the opposite side of Mara’s escritoire, and patted her lap to get Lavender’s attention. The piglet raised her head, considered the human, and decided to remain on her pillow. “That pig doesn’t like me.”

Mara grasped at the change in topic. “That pig spent half the morning running from a dozen maniacal boys.”

“Better than a farmer with an axe.” Lydia narrowed her gaze on the beast.

Lavender sighed.

Mara laughed.

Lydia returned her attention to Mara. “For seven years, we’ve worked side by side, and I’ve never once asked you about your past.”

Mara sat back in her chair. “A fact for which I am ever grateful.”

Lydia raised a blond brow and waved one deceivingly delicate hand in the air. “If it had only been the man who visited this afternoon, I might have ignored it. But combined with this morning’s visitor, I’m through with not asking. Dukes change everything.”

No doubt that was the understatement of the century.

Lydia leaned forward, tapping the edge of the letter in her hand on the desk with perfect rhythm. “I may work at an orphanage, Margaret, but I am not completely unaware of the world beyond the door. The enormous man who arrived at the crack of dawn was the Duke of Lamont.” She paused, then qualified, “The Killer Duke of Lamont.”

Lord, she was coming to hate that moniker.

“He’s not a killer.” The words were out before Mara could stop them—before she could realize that they were a tacit admission that she knew the man in question.

She pressed her lips together in a thin line as Lydia’s eyes went wide with interest. “Isn’t he?”

Mara considered her next words carefully. She settled on “No.”

Lydia waited for Mara to continue for a long moment, her blond curls wild and unruly, barely contained by the two dozen pins shoved into the nest. When Mara said nothing more, her first employee and the closest thing she could call a friend sat back in her own chair, crossed her legs, rested her hands in her lap, and said, “He wasn’t here to deliver a child.”

It was not unheard of for men of the aristocracy to arrive toting their illegitimate sons. “No.”

Lydia nodded. “He was not here to retrieve one.”

Mara set her pen into its holder. “No.”

“And he was not here to make a generous, exorbitantly summed donation to the orphanage.”

One side of Mara’s mouth kicked up. “No.”

Lydia cocked her head. “Do you think you might convince him to do so?”

Mara laughed. “He is not in a generous spirit when I am near, sadly.”

“Ah. So he was not here for anything relating to the orphanage.”