Sarah MacLean - No Good Duke Goes Unpunished

She smiled then, small and unexpected. “I have made up for it by treating Lavender very well.”

“So I was to have ruined you.” He paused. “But I didn’t.”

She ignored the words. “I also never expected you to sleep so long. I drugged you to keep you in the room long enough for the maids to notice. I’d been careful to make sure we were seen by two of them.” She met his eyes. “But I swear, I thought you would be up and escaped before anyone found you.”

“You’d thought of everything.”

“I overdid it.” He heard the regret in the words as she paused as the orchestra stopped playing, instantly releasing his hands. Wondered if it was regret for her actions, for their repercussions, or for now—for the revenge he had promised her.

Wondered if it was for herself, or for him.

He did not have a chance to ask, as she stepped backward, colliding with another masked man, who took the moment to have a good look at her. “If it isn’t the fighter from The Fallen Angel,” he leered.

“Find someone else to admire,” Temple said, darkly.

“Come now, Temple,” the man lifted his mask, revealing himself to be Oliver Densmore, king of idiot fops, the man who had offered for Mara as she’d stood in the ring of the Angel. “Surely we can make an arrangement. You can’t keep her forever.” He turned to Mara. “I’ll pay you double. Triple.”

Temple’s good hand fisted, but she spoke before he could strike. “You cannot afford me, sir.”

Densmore cackled and returned his mask to his face. “You would be worth the trouble, I think.” He tugged on one of Mara’s auburn curls, and was gone into the crowd, leaving Temple seething with anger. She’d protected herself.

Because she could not trust him to protect her.

Because he had vowed to do just the opposite.

As though the run-in had never happened, Mara returned to the conversation. “I know you don’t wish to hear this, but I think it’s worth telling you nonetheless. I really am sorry.”

“You are ignoring him.”

She paused. “The man? It’s best, don’t you think?”

“No.” He thought it was best for Densmore to lie facedown in a ditch somewhere. Right now he wanted to chase the man through the crowd and put him there.

She considered him, her beautiful eyes clear and honest through the mask. “He treated me like a lady of the evening.”

“Precisely.”

She tilted her head. “Is that not the point?”

Christ, he felt like an ass. He couldn’t do this to her.

“At any rate,” she continued, unaware of his riotous thoughts. “I am sorry.”

And now she was apologizing to him, as though he hadn’t given her a dozen reasons to hate him. A hundred of them.

“It’s nowhere near a decent excuse,” she pressed on, “but I was a child and I made mistakes, and had I known then . . .”

She trailed off. I wouldn’t have done it.

No, he might not want to hear the apology, but he most definitely wished to hear that she would take it all back if she could. That she’d give him back his life. He couldn’t help himself. “If you had known then . . . ?”

Her voice grew soft, and it was as though it were just the two of them in that ballroom, surrounded by half of London. “I would not have used you, but I still would have approached you that night. And I still would have run.”

He should have been angry. Should have felt vindicated. Her words should have chased away all his doubts about his plans for the evening. But they didn’t. “Why?”

She looked to the wall of doors, opening out onto the Leighton House gardens, several left slightly ajar to allow the stifling air in the ballroom out. “Why, which?”

He followed her, as if on a string. “Why approach me?”

She smiled, quiet and small. “You were handsome. And in the gardens, you were irreverent. And I liked you. And somehow, in all of this, I still rather do.”

Like was the most innocuous, tepid of words. It did nothing to describe how she should feel for him. And it did absolutely nothing to describe how he felt for her.

He couldn’t stop himself. “Why run?”

Tell me the truth, he willed. Trust me.

Not that she should.

“Because I was afraid your father was like mine.”

The words came like a blow, quick and in his blind spot, the kind that made a man see wild stars. Bright and painful, like truth.

She’d been sixteen, and set to marry a man three times her age. A man whose last three wives had met unfortunate fates. A man who counted her bastard of a father among his closest friends.

A man whose son was an inveterate womanizer, even at eighteen.

“I would never have let him hurt you,” he said. She turned at that, her eyes liquid.

He would have protected her from the moment he met her. He would have hated his father for having her.

“I didn’t know that,” she said softly, the words filled with regret.

She’d been terrified. But more than that, she’d been strong.

She’d chosen a life in the unknown over a life with a man who might well have been her father’s second.

Temple had been collateral damage.

She was frozen, all long limbs and grace, poised at the edge of the ballroom, staring at the doors, leading into blackness, and the metaphor was not lost on him. It was another time. Another threat. Another moment that had revealed too much of Mara Lowe. And she was no longer afraid of the darkness beyond.

She had lived twelve years in the darkness.

Just as he had.

Christ. It did not matter how they had come to be here. How different their paths had been.

They were the same.

He reached for her, her name soft on his lips, not knowing what came next. Not knowing what he would say or do. Knowing only that he wanted to touch her. His fingers slid over her silk-clad wrist even as she pulled away from him, already in smooth, graceful motion.

Already heading to the doors.

He let her go.

It was bitterly cold, and she wished she’d thought to fetch her cloak before escaping the stifling ballroom, but she couldn’t very well head back inside.

She wrapped her arms tight across her chest, telling herself she’d been colder and worse off. It was true. She was comfortable with cold. She understood it. Was able to combat it.

What she could not combat was his warmth.

I would never have let him hurt you .

She took a deep breath and hurried down the steps from the stone colonnade to the dark gardens of Leighton House, disappearing into the landscape, thanking Heaven for the shadows. Leaning back against a large oak, she stared up at the stars, wondering how she had come to be here, in this place, in this dress, with this man.

A man against whom fate had pitted her.

With whom she was intertwined.

Forever.

Tears threatened as she heaved great, cloudy breaths in the fading light from the ballroom, as she wondered what would come next. She wished he would go ahead and unmask her and be done with it, so she could hate him and blame him and get on with her life.

So she could get on without him.

How had he become so very vital to her in so short a time? How had he changed so much? How had he come to say such things to her, to be so kind and gentle when they’d started their recent acquaintance with his vowing to destroy her? How had she come to trust him?

How did he remain the only person she would betray?

As if summoned by the traitorous thought, her brother stepped from the blackness. “This is fortuitous.”

Mara took a step back, away from him. “How did you know I was here?”

“I followed you from the orphanage. I saw him fetch you,” Kit said, eyes wild, face unshaven. “You make a handsome couple.”