Sarah MacLean - No Good Duke Goes Unpunished

Not that he needed to.

The woman fought her own battles. She turned her own head then, and matched him measure for measure, pressing her soft lips to his ear, kissing once, twice, softly, before biting the lobe and sending a river of desire through him. Good Lord, he wanted this woman like he’d never wanted anything in his life. Even as he knew she was poison.

Even as she proved it, lifting her lips from him, making him desperate for their return, and saying, “If I tell you, will you forgive the debt?”

She was the most skilled opponent he’d ever faced.

Because in that moment, he actually considered doing it. Forgiving it all and letting her run. And perhaps he would have, if she could have restored his memory.

But she’d taken that, too.

“Oh, Mara,” he said, releasing her in a slow slide, fury and something startlingly close to disappointment threading through him. He harnessed one and ignored the other. “Nothing you could say will make me forgive.”

He spun off the little platform, calling for Hebert as he retreated into the darkness.

The modiste entered again, a pile of satin and lace in her hands, and approached Mara. “ Mademoiselle, s’il vous plait ,” she said, indicating that Mara should put the dress on. Mara hesitated, but Temple saw the way she eyed the frock as though she hadn’t eaten for days and there, in the Frenchwoman’s hands, was food.

Once she was headfirst inside it, her arms swimming through fabric to find egress, he caught his breath and his sanity and looked to the dressmaker. “I don’t want her in another’s clothes. I want everything made. By you.”

Madame Hebert gave Temple a quick look. “Of course. The dress is for style. You indicated a desire to approve the collection.”

Mara gave a yelp of disagreement at that, her head finally poking out into the light. “It is not enough that you humiliate me by remaining in attendance as I am fitted? You must choose the gown as well?”

Hebert was already adjusting the fall of the gown and fastening it up the back, affording Temple a view of Mara in the mauve concoction, slightly too tight in the bodice and slightly too loose in the waist, but a gown nonetheless.

He’d never put much credence into the idea that frocks could make a woman more beautiful. Women were women; if they were attractive, they were attractive no matter what they wore. And if they weren’t, well . . . fabric was not magic.

And yet this gown seemed to be magic with its beautiful lines and the way it shimmered in the candlelight and the way the color offset her pretty pale skin and played with the reds in her hair and the blues and greens in her eyes.

Hell. He sounded like a damn woman.

The point was, this was the Mara he’d never known—the one he’d not had a chance to formally meet. The one who had been raised wealthy as sin, with all of London at her feet. The one who had been set to be Duchess of Lamont.

And damned if she didn’t look remarkably like a duchess in that dress.

Too much like a duchess.

Too much like a lady.

Too much like something Temple wanted to reach out and—

No.

“The bodice should be cut lower.”

“ Mais non , Your Grace,” the dressmaker protested. “The bodice is perfect. Look at the way it reveals without revealing.”

She was right, of course. The bodice was the most perfect part of the dress, cut beautifully, just low enough to tantalize without being too obvious. He’d noticed it the moment Mara had put it on—the way it displayed those pretty, freckled breasts to their very best advantage. The way it made him want to catalog every one of those little blemishes.

It was perfect.

But he didn’t want perfect.

He wanted ruinous.

“Lower.”

The dressmaker looked at Mara, then, and Temple willed her to protest. To fight the demand. To insist the cut of the dress be left as is.

Then he would have felt better about his decision.

It was as though she knew that, of course. Knew that he wished her to fight. Because instead, she stood straight, her head bowed in obedience he knew held no honesty, and said nothing.

Leaving him feeling twenty times the ass.

“How long?” he barked the question at the modiste.

“Three days.”

He nodded. Three days would work well. “She requires a mask, as well.”

“Why? Isn’t the goal to unmask me?” Mara answered for the dressmaker, her tone betraying her pique at being left out of the conversation. “Why hide me?”

He met her eyes then. She was a poplar, and he was a storm. She would not break. Admiration flared, and he hid it. She’d ruined him. She’d stolen from him.

“You are hidden until I choose to reveal you.”

She stiffened. “Fair enough.” She paused for a moment as the dressmaker unfastened the dress, and he gritted his teeth as it came loose, grateful that she caught it to her chest before revealing herself to him once more. “Tell me, Your Grace, am I to undress forever in your presence now?”

The room was hot and cloying, and he itched for a fight. And he didn’t think he could bear seeing her in her underclothes again.

He inclined his head. “I shall give you privacy, with pleasure.” He headed for the front of the shop, stopping before he pushed through the curtains to add, “But when I return, you had best be prepared to tell me the truth about that night. I shan’t let you out of my sight until you do. It is not negotiable.”

He did not wait for her answer before entering the storefront, with its walls filled with bolts of fabric and frippery. He took a deep breath in the dimly lit space, running his hand along the edge of a long glass case, waiting for an acknowledgment that he could return.

That she was once more clothed.

That Pandora’s box was once more closed.

He reached into a basket at the top of the case, and he extracted a long, dark feather, worrying it with his fingers, wondering at its softness. He wondered what it would look like in her hair. Against her skin.

In her fingers against his.

He dropped the feather as though it had burned him, and spun back toward the dressing room to find Madame Hebert standing in the entryway. “Green,” she said.

He didn’t care what color she wore. He didn’t plan to give her enough attention to notice.

And still he said, “I want the mauve as well. The one she tried.”

Years of practice kept Madame Hebert from showing her thoughts. “The lady should be in green more than anything else.”

For a moment he wondered at that, imagining Mara in green. In satins and lace and lingerie—in finely spun chemises and boned corsets and clocked silk stockings that went all the way to the floor.

He would pay good money to see her legs.

Perhaps he had seen them.

With that, frustration flared once more. He was irritated by the idea of her keeping secrets from him. Secrets that were as much his as they were hers.

“Put her in whatever color you like. I care not.” He moved to push past the Frenchwoman. “But send the mauve, too.”

“Temple,” The name on Hebert’s lips stopped him, and when he turned back, one hand on the curtains, she said, “I’ve dressed dozens of your women.”

“The Angel’s women.” For some reason, the qualifier felt necessary.

She did not argue. “This one is not like the others.”

It was a colossal understatement. “She is not.”

“Clothes,” the Frenchwoman continued. “They have a power that is undeniable. They can change everything.”

It was rubbish, but he was not in the mood to argue with a modiste on her field of expertise, so he allowed her to finish.

“Be certain you wish for what you ask.”