“Say it.” Not a request.
“I am Mara Lowe.”
It couldn’t be true.
“You’re dead.”
She shook her head, auburn gleaming red in the light. “I am alive.”
Everything in him stilled. Everything that had simmered for so many years. Everything that he had resisted and loathed and feared. It all went quiet.
Until it roared like Hell itself.
He turned to unlock the door to his flat, needing something to keep him from his anger. The iron locks moved beneath his strength, clicking and sliding, punctuating his harsh breath.
“Your Grace?”
The question brought him back to the world. Your Grace. The title to which he had been born. The title he had ignored for years. His, once more. Bestowed by the one who had stripped him of it.
His Grace, the Duke of Lamont.
He opened the door wide and turned back to face her, this woman who had changed his life. Who had ruined his life.
“Mara Lowe.” The name came out harsh and mangled and coated in history.
She nodded.
He laughed, a single, harsh syllable in the darkness. It was all he could do. Her brow furrowed in confusion. He gave her a quick, mocking bow. “My apologies. You see, it is not every day a killer meets a past kill.”
She raised her chin. “You didn’t kill me.”
The words were soft and strong and filled with a courage he might have admired. A courage he should have hated.
He hadn’t killed her. Emotion came, hard and angry. Relief. Fury. Confusion. A dozen others.
Dear God.
What in hell had happened?
He stepped aside, waving toward the dark hallway beyond the threshold. “In.” Again, not a request.
She hesitated, eyes wide, and for a moment, he thought she would run.
But she didn’t.
Stupid girl. She should have run.
Her skirts brushed against his boots as she moved past him, the touch reminding him that she was flesh and blood.
And alive.
Alive, and his.
Chapter 2
As the door closed, clicking locks punctuating the quiet darkness of his home, it occurred to Mara that this could well be the biggest mistake she’d made in her life.
Which was saying something, considering the fact that two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she’d absconded from her planned wedding to a duke, leaving his son to face false accusations of her murder.
His son, who was no doubt considering turning those false accusations into truth.
His son, who had every right to unleash his fury.
His son, with whom she stood now in an unsettlingly narrow hallway. Alone. In the dead of night. Mara’s heart raced in the confined space, every inch of her screaming to flee.
But she couldn’t. Her brother had made it impossible. Fate had turned. Desperation had brought her here, and it was time she faced her past.
It was time she faced him.
Steeling herself, she turned to do just that, trying to ignore the way his enormous form—taller and broader than any man she’d ever known—loomed in the darkness, blocking her exit.
He was already moving past her, leading the way up a flight of stairs.
She hesitated, casting a look back at the door. She could disappear again. Exile Mara Lowe once more. She had lost herself once before; she could do it again.
She could run.
And lose everything she had. Everything she was. Everything for which she had worked so hard.
“You wouldn’t go ten yards without my catching you,” he said.
There was that, as well.
She looked up at him, watching her from above, his face cast in light for the first time that evening. Twelve years had changed him, and not in the ordinary way—from a boy of eighteen to a man of thirty. Soft, perfect skin had given way to weathered angles and dark stubble.
More than that, his eyes held no hint of the laughter they’d held that night, a lifetime ago. They remained black as midnight, but now they held its secrets.
Of course he would catch her if she ran. That was why she was here, wasn’t it? To be caught. To reveal herself.
Mara Lowe.
It had been more than a decade since she’d said the name aloud. She’d been Margaret MacIntyre since the moment she’d left that night. But now, she was Mara again, the only way to save the one thing that mattered to her. The thing that gave her purpose.
She had no choice but to be Mara.
The thought propelled her upstairs, into a room that was part-library, part-study, and all male. As he lit the candles throughout, a golden glow spread over furniture large and leathered in heavy dark colors.
He was already crouching to light a fire in the hearth when she entered. It was so incongruous—the great duke setting a fire—that she couldn’t help herself. “You don’t have servants?”
He stood, brushing his hands on his massive thighs. “A woman comes in the mornings to clean.”
“But no others?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No one wants to sleep in the same house as the Killer Duke.” There was no anger in the words. No sadness. Just truth.
He moved to pour himself a scotch, but did not offer her one. Nor did he offer her a seat when he folded himself into a large leather chair. He took a long pull of amber liquid and crossed ankle over knee, letting the glass dangle from his grip as he watched her, black eyes taking her in, watching, seeing everything.
She folded her hands to control their trembling, and met his gaze. Two could play at this. Twelve years away from money and power and the aristocracy made for a strong will.
A will they shared.
The thought whispered through her on a thread of guilt. She’d chosen this life. Chosen to change everything. He hadn’t. He’d been a casualty of a child’s stupid, silly plan.
I am sorry.
It was true, after all. She’d never meant for that charming young man—all muscle and grace and wide, smiling mouth—to become an unwitting victim in her escape.
Not that she’d tried to save him.
She ignored the thought. It was too late for apologies. She’d made her bed; now she would lie in it.
He drank again, lids shuttering his gaze, as though she could miss the way he stared at her. As though she didn’t feel it right to her toes.
It was a battle. He would not speak first, which left it to her to begin the conversation.
A losing move.
She would not lose to him.
So she waited, trying not to fidget. Trying not jump from her skin with every crack of the logs in the fireplace. Trying not to go mad under the weight of the silence.
Apparently, he was not interested in losing, either.
She narrowed her gaze on his.
She waited until she could wait no longer, and then told him the truth. “I don’t like being here any more than you like having me.”
The words turned him to stone for a moment, and she bit her tongue, afraid to speak. Afraid to make things worse.
He laughed again—the laugh she’d heard earlier, outside—devoid of humor, a graveled expulsion that sounded more like pain than pleasure. “Amazing. Until this moment, I actually had allowed for the possibility that you have been a victim of fate as well.”
“Aren’t we all victims of fate?”
And she had been. She did not pretend that she had not been a willing participant in everything that had happened all those years ago . . . but had she known how it would change her . . . what it would do to her . . .
She stopped the lie from completing.
She would have done it anyway. She didn’t have a choice then. Just as she had no choice
tonight.
There were moments that changed one’s life. And paths that came without a fork in the road.
“You are alive and well, Miss Lowe.”
The man was a duke, powerful and wealthy, with all of London at his feet if he wanted it. She lifted her chin at the accusation in his tone. “As are you, Your Grace.”
His eyes went dark. “That is debatable.” He leaned back in his chair. “So it appears that fate was not my attacker, after all. You were.”
When he’d caught her outside, before he’d known why she was there and who she was, there had been warmth in his voice—a hint of heaviness that she’d been drawn to, even as she’d known better.
That warmth was gone now, replaced with cold calm—a calm by which she was not fooled. A calm she would wager shielded a terrible storm.
“I didn’t attack you.”
Fact, even if it was not entirely truth.
He did not release her gaze. “A liar through and through, I see.”
She lifted her chin. “I never lied.”
“No? You made the world believe you were dead.”
“The world believed what it wished.”
His black gaze narrowed. “You disappeared, and left it to draw its own conclusions.”
His free hand—the one that did not grip his scotch in an approximation of casualness—betrayed his ire, fingers twitching with barely contained energy. She noticed the movement, recognizing it from the boys she’d met on the streets. There was always something that betrayed their frustration. Their anger. Their plans.
But this was no boy.
She was not a fool—twelve years had taught her a hundred lessons in safety and self-preservation, and for a moment, regret gave way to nerves and she considered fleeing again—running from this man and this place and this choice she’d made.
The choice that would both save the life she had built and tear it down.
The choice that would force her to face her past, and place her future in this man’s hands.
She watched those fingers move.
I never meant for you to be hurt. She wanted to say it, but he wouldn’t believe her. She knew that. This was not about his forgiveness or his understanding. This was about her future. And the fact that he held its key.
“I disappeared, yes. And I cannot erase that. But I am here now.”
“And we get to it, finally. Why?”
So many reasons.
She resisted the thought. There was only one reason. Only one that mattered.
“Money.” It was true. And also false.
His brows rose in surprise. “I confess I would not have expected such honesty.”
She lifted one shoulder in a little shrug. “I find that lies overcomplicate.”
He exhaled on a long breath. “You are here to plead your brother’s case.”
She ignored the flood of anger that came with the words. “I am.”
“He is in debt to his eyeballs.”
With her money.
“I’m told you can change that.”
“Can is not will.”
She took a breath, threw herself into the fray. “I know he can’t beat you. I know the fight with the great Temple is a phantom. That you always win. Which, I assume, is why you haven’t accepted one of his dozen challenges. Frankly, I’m rather happy you haven’t. You’ve given me room to negotiate.”
It was hard to believe his dark eyes could grow darker. “You are in contact with him.”
She stilled, considering the miscalculated reveal of information.
He gave her no time. “How long have you been in contact with him?”
She hesitated a second too long. Less. Enough for him to shoot from his chair and stalk her across the room, pressing her back, far and fast enough to send her tripping over her skirts.
One massive arm shot out. Caught her, the corded strength like steel across her back. Pulled her to him; she was caged against him. “For how long?” He paused, but before she could answer, he added, “You don’t have to tell me. I can smell the guilt on you.”
She put her hands to his chest, feeling the wall of iron muscle there. Pushed. The effort was futile. He would not move until he was ready.
“You and your idiot brother concocted an idiot plan, and you disappeared.” He was so close. Too close. “Maybe not idiot. Maybe genius. After all, everyone thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.” There was fury in the words, fury and something else. Something she could not help but wish to assuage.
“That was never the plan.”
He ignored the words. “But here you are, twelve years later, flesh and blood. Hale and healthy.” The words were soft, a whisper of sound at her ear. “I should make good on our past. On my reputation.”
She heard the anger in his words. Felt it in his touch. Later, she would marvel at her own courage when she looked up at him and said, “Perhaps you should. But you won’t.”
He released her, so quickly that she stumbled back as he turned away, pacing the length of the room, reminding her of a tiger she’d seen once in a traveling show, caged and frustrated. It occurred to her that she would gladly trade the wild beast for the Duke of Lamont in that moment.
Untamed, himself.
When he finally turned back, he said, “I wouldn’t be so certain. Twelve years marked as a killer change a man.”
She shook her head, holding his black gaze. “You are not a killer.”
“You’re the only one who knew that.”
The words were quiet and rife with emotion. Mara recognized fury and shock and surprise, but it was the accusation that unsettled her. It wasn’t possible that he’d thought himself her killer.
It wasn’t possible that he’d believed the gossip. The speculation.
Was it?
She should say something. But what? What did one say to the man falsely accused of one’s murder?
“Would it help if I apologized?”
He narrowed his gaze on her. “Do you feel remorse?”
She would not change it. Not for the world. “I am sorry that you were caught in the fray.”
“Do you regret your actions?”
She met his eyes. “Do you wish the truth? Or a platitude?”
“You could not imagine the things I wish.”
She could, no doubt. “I understand that you are angry.”
The words seemed to call to him, and he came toward her, glass still in hand, stalking her backward, across the too-small room. “You understand, do you?”
It had been the wrong thing to say. She skirted around an ottoman, holding her hands up, as though she could stop him, searching for the right thing.
He did not wait for her to find it. “You understand what it is to have lost everything?”
Yes.
“You understand what it is to have lost my name?”
She did, rather. But she knew better than to say it.
He pressed on. “To have lost my title, my land, my life?”
“But you didn’t lose all that . . . you’re still a duke. The Duke of Lamont,” she said, the words—things she’d told herself for years—coming quick and defensive. “The land is still yours. The money. You’ve tripled the holdings of the dukedom.”
His eyes went wide. “How do you know that?”
“I pay attention.”
“Why?”
“Why have you never returned to the estate?”
“What good would it have done if I returned?”
“You might have been reminded that you haven’t lost so very much.” The words were out before she could stop them. Before she realized how inciting they were. She scurried backward, putting a high-backed chair between them and peeking around it. “I did not mean—”
“Of course you did.” He starte
d around the chair toward her.
She moved counter to him, keeping the furniture between them. Attempted to calm the beast. “You are angry.”
He shook his head. “Angry does not even begin to describe the depths of my emotion.”
She nodded, skipping backward across the room once more. “Fair enough. Furious.”
He advanced. “That’s closer.”
“Irate.”
“That, too.”
She looked behind her, saw the sideboard looming. This wasn’t a very large room, after all. “Livid.”
“And that.”
She felt the hard oak at her back. Trapped again. “I can repair it,” she said, desperate to regain the upper hand. “What’s broken.” He stopped, and for a moment, she had his full attention. “If I am not dead, you are not”—a killer—“what they say you are.” He did not reply, and she rushed to fill the silence. “That’s why I’m here. I shall come forward. Show myself to Society. I shall prove you’re not what they say you are.”
He set his glass on the sideboard. “You shall.”
She released a breath she had not known she was holding. He was not as unforgiving as she had imagined he might be. She nodded. “Yes, I will. I will tell everyone—”
“You shall tell them the truth.”
She hesitated at the words, hating them, the way they threatened. And still she nodded. “I shall tell them the truth.” It would be the most difficult thing she’d ever done, but she would do it.
She hadn’t a choice.
It would ruin her, but it might be enough to save what was important.
She had one chance to negotiate with Temple. She had to do it correctly. “On one condition.”
He laughed. A great, booming guffaw of laughter. Her brow furrowed at the noise. She did not like the sound, especially not when it ended with a wicked, humorless smile. “You think to barter with me?” He was close enough to touch. “You think tonight has put me in a negotiating frame of mind?”
“I disappeared once before. I can do it again.” The threat did not endear her to him.
“I will find you.” The words were so serious, so honest, that she did not doubt him.
Still, she soldiered on. “Perhaps, but I’ve hidden for twelve years, and I’ve become quite good at it. And even if you did find me, the aristocracy shan’t simply take your word for it that I am alive. You need me as a willing participant in this play.”