“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.”

“It needs stitching,” she said.

His brows rose. “You’ve knowledge of wounds needing stitching?”

She’d stitched dozens of wounds in her life. More than she could count. Too many when she was still a child. But she said none of those things. “I do. And this one needs it.”

“I suppose it will cost me?”

The words were a surprise. The reminder of their agreement. For a moment, she’d allowed herself to pretend they were different people. In a different place.

Silly girl.

Nothing had changed that night. He was still out for vengeance and she was still out for money. And the longer they both remembered it, the better.

She took a breath, steeled herself. “I shall give you a bargain.”

One black brow rose. “Name your price.”

“Two pounds.” She disliked the words on her lips.

Something flashed in his eyes. Boredom? No. It was gone before she could take the time to identify it, and he was already opening a small compartment in the table at his elbow and removed a needle and thread. “Stitch it, then.”

It occurred to her that only a man who was regularly wounded would have a needle and thread at arm’s length. Her gaze skittered over his chest, tracking a score of scars in various stages of healing. More.

How much pain had he suffered over the last twelve years?

She ignored the question, instead moving to the sideboard and pouring two fingers of whiskey in a glass. When she returned to him, he shook his head. “I won’t drink that.”

She cut him a look. “I did not drug it.”

He inclined his head. “Nevertheless, I prefer to be sure.”

“It wasn’t for you, anyway,” she said, dropping the needle into the glass before cutting a long piece of thread.

“That’s a waste of good whiskey.”

“It will make the stitches less painful.”

“Bollocks.”

She lifted one shoulder and said, “The woman who taught me to sew a wound learned it from men in battle. Seems reasonable.”

“Men in battle no doubt wanted the bottle nearby.”

She ignored the words and threaded the needle carefully, before returning her attention to his wound. “It shall hurt.”

“Despite the addition of my excellent scotch?”

She inserted the needle. “You tell me.”

He hissed at the sting. “Dammit.”

She raised a brow at him. “Shall I pour you a drink now?”

“No. I’d rather have your weapon visible.”

Her lips twitched. She would not be amused. She would not like him. He was foe, not friend.

She completed the stitching quickly and with experienced precision. As she snipped the final length of string, he reached into the drawer once more and extracted a pot of liniment from within. She opened it to a waft of thyme and clove—familiar. “This is why you smell as you do.”

He raised a wry brow. “You’ve noticed my scent?”

Her cheeks warmed at the words, to her great dismay. “It’s impossible to miss,” she defended. Still, she brought the pot to her nose, inhaling, the scent sending a tight thread of awareness through her. She dipped a finger in the pot and spread it across the enflamed skin around his wound, taking care not to hurt him before folding a piece of clean linen carefully and securing it with a long strip of the cloth.

Once finished, she cleared her throat, said the first thing that came to her. “You shall have a wicked scar.”

“Neither the first, nor the last,” he said.

“But the one for which I am responsible,” she replied. He chuckled at that, and she couldn’t help but look up, meeting his black gaze. “You think it is amusing?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I think it is interesting that you claim the one scar that has nothing to do with you.”

Her eyes went wide. “But the others do?”

He tilted his head, watching her carefully. “Each one, earned in a fight. Bouts I would not have fought were I not . . .” He hesitated, and she wondered how he would finish the sentence.

Were I not ruined.

Were I not destroyed.

Were I not disowned.

“ . . . Temple,” he finished simply.

Temple. The name he had assumed only after she’d run. After he’d been exorcised from family and Society and God knew what else. The name that had no bearing on the life he’d had. The one where he’d been William Harrow, Marquess of Chapin. Heir to the dukedom of Lamont.

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.