And he had. She was safe.
“Thank you,” she said to his chest, one hand falling to his arm, causing him to stiffen and hiss in pain.
She sat up immediately, her hand dropping to his thigh. “Your arm.”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” There was a deep slice in the fabric of his topcoat, and she pulled at the fabric to find a similar cut in the lawn shirt beneath, and in his skin.
“He hurt you.” The buttons of his coat had burst in the fight, no doubt scattered somewhere on the dark cobblestones, and she pulled one lapel aside. “Take it off,” she said, as she started to unravel his cravat, to get at the collar of his shirt. “You need treatment.”
He caught her hand in his. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” she protested, guilt threading through her. “I shouldn’t have run.”
He stilled, his gaze finding hers. “What?”
“If I hadn’t run . . .” She’d hurt him.
As ever.
“No.” She ignored him, pulling her hands free, working at his cravat once more.
He stopped her again, one hand coming up to catch her cheek, his hands warm and sure. “Don’t say it. Don’t think it. This wasn’t your fault.”
She met his black gaze. “You’re hurt.”
One side of his mouth kicked up. “I was itching for a fight.”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t what this was.”
“I wouldn’t be so certain,” he teased before growing serious. “Those men were beasts. And you—” He stopped, but not before the words reminded them both of who he was.
Of who they were, together.
But now, it was her turn to care for him. “We must get you inside,” she said, standing, reaching down to help him up.
He ignored her hand, coming to his feet in a single, smooth motion. Once at his full height, he paused for a moment, and she imagined that he was weak from the pain of the wound. She moved to tuck herself under his good arm.
“Lean on me.”
He barked a laugh in the darkness. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Aside from the possibility of my crushing you?”
She smiled. “I am stronger than I seem.”
He looked down at her. “I think that is first truth you’ve told me.”
The words sent a thread of something indefinable through her. Something exciting and unsettling and half a dozen other things. “I shall take that as a compliment.”
“You should.”
No. She did not wish to like him.
Too late.
“Then why not lean on me?”
“I don’t require help.”
She peered up at him and saw something in the set of his jaw, in the firm line of his lips. Something familiar.
How many times had she said such a thing to those who offered her aid? She’d spent so much time alone, she immediately resisted the idea that someone might offer help without expecting some form of payment.
Or, worse, making themselves a part of her life.
“I see,” she said, softly.
There was a long moment as the words fell between them before he said quietly, “Sometimes, I think you do see me.”
He took her hand, and she stilled at the touch. He looked down at her. “Do I have to pay for this, as well?”
The words were a reminder of their deal, of how they were at odds. But the touch felt nothing like odds. The slide of his warm, rough skin against her own felt like pleasure. Pleasure she did not wish to acknowledge, but that she could not deny.
“No,” she said, a cold wind sending a shiver through her. “No charge for this.”
He did not reply, as they returned to the carriage. They found a quiet camaraderie in the darkness—something that would no doubt be chased away by daylight, when they would remember their past and their present. And the future, so clearly cast in stone.
And so she did not speak.
Not as they emerged from the alley, turning back toward his coach, nor when the driver leapt down from his box and came to assist them, nor when they were closed into the quiet, dark space, too confined not to touch—knees brushing against knees—and too proud to acknowledge the touch.
She did not speak when they arrived at his town house, and he leapt down to the cold, dark London street and said, “Come inside.”
There was no need for words as she followed him.
“The history of our acquaintance is rather too stained with violence, Your Grace,” Mara said when they were inside the library where she’d first revealed herself and her reason for reappearing. Where she’d drugged him for the second time.
He stripped off his topcoat to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “And whose fault is that?” he asked, the words gentler than she would have imagined they might be.
Gentle.
It was strange that the word seemed to so suddenly define this man who was known to much of London as a brutal force, all unyielding muscle and indestructible bone.
But with her, he was somehow hard angles and soft touch.
He hissed his discomfort as he peeled the shirt from his arm, shucking it over his head and across the room, revealing the clean, straight wound above a wide swath of darkened skin—black with a swirling, geometric design. Mara’s gaze flew to that cuff. To its twin on the opposite arm. Ink. She’d seen it before, but never on someone like him.
Never on an aristocrat.
He’d fetched himself hot water and linens with a skill that suggested that it was not the first time he’d returned to this empty house and mended himself, and he sat in the chair by the fire he’d stoked when they’d entered the room, dropping cloth into the steaming water.
His movement unstuck her, and Mara went to him where he stood by the fire.
“Sit,” she said softly, dipping a length of linen into the water as he folded into one of the chairs by the hearth. She wrung the scalding liquid from the cloth before setting to the task of cleaning his wound.
He allowed it, which should have surprised her. Should have surprised them both.
He was quiet for long minutes, and she forced herself to look only at his wound, at the straight slash of torn flesh that served as a reminder of the gruesome violence she might have suffered. From which he had rescued her.
Her mind raced, obsessed with not touching him anywhere but there, on the spot just above the wide, black swath of skin—as though the darkness inside him had seeped to the surface in beautiful patterns, so wicked and incongruous with his past. With the duke he should have been.
The darkness she’d had a hand in making.
She tried not to breathe too heavily, even as the tang of him—clove and thyme mixed with something unidentifiable and yet thoroughly Temple—teased at her senses, daring her to breathe him in.
Instead, she focused on healing him with soft strokes, cleaning his arm of dried blood and stemming the flow of fresh. She watched the linen cloth move from his skin to the now pink-tinged bowl and back again, refusing to look elsewhere.
Refusing to catalog the other scars that littered his torso. The wicked hills and valleys of his chest. The dark whorls of hair that made her fingers itch to touch him in another, much more dangerous way.
“You needn’t tend to me,” he said, the words soft in the quiet, dark room.
“Of course I must,” she replied, not looking up at him. Knowing he was looking down at her. “If not for me—”
His hand captured hers, pressing it against his now clean chest, and she could feel the spring of his chest hair against her wrist. “Mara,” he said, the name coming foreign, as though it was another’s.
This man, this place was not for her.
She twisted her hand in his grip, and he released her, letting her return to her ministrations as though he’d never had her in his grasp to begin with. “Tend to me then.”