“He has one he uses, as well.” Temple. It wasn’t hard to think of him that way. Big as one, and as unmoving.
Had he always been unmoving? She hadn’t known him when they were young, but his reputation had preceded him—and no one had ever called him cold. A rake, a rogue, a scoundrel, certainly. But never cold. Never angry.
She’d done that to him.
Kit ran a hand through already disheveled brown locks, and Mara recognized the weariness in him. Two years younger, her brother had been filled with life as a child, eager for excitement, and ready with a plan.
And then she’d run, ruining Temple and leaving Kit to pick up the pieces of their unbearably foolish evening. And he’d changed. They’d traded secret letters for years, until she’d resurfaced, hidden in plain sight, Mrs. MacIntyre, widowed proprietress of the MacIntyre Home for Boys.
But he’d been different. Colder. Harsher.
Never speaking of the life she’d left him to. Of the man she’d left him with.
And then he’d gone and lost all her money.
She noted the hunch of his shoulders and the hollows in his cheeks and the scuff on his normally pristine black boots, and she recognized that he at least understood their predicament. Her predicament. She let out a little sigh. “Kit . . .”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he snapped. “I’m not a boy anymore.”
“I know.” It was all she could think to say.
“You shouldn’t have gone to see him. Do you know what they call him?”
She raised her brows. “They call him that because of me.”
“It doesn’t mean he hasn’t come to deserve it. I don’t want you near him again.”
Too late.
“You don’t want?” she said, suddenly irrevocably irritated. “You haven’t a choice. The man holds all our money and all the cards. And I’ve done what I can to save the home.”
Kit scowled. “It’s always the home. Always the boys.”
Of course it was. They were the important part. They were what she’d done right. They were her good.
But it wasn’t worth fighting Kit. “How did you even know he was here?”
He narrowed his gaze on her. “Do you think I am an idiot? I pay the whore in the street good money to look out for you.”
“To look out for me? Or to keep track of me?”
“She saw the Killer Duke. Sent word to me.”
Anger flared at the idea that her brother would spy on her. “I don’t need protection.”
“Of course you do. You always have.”
She bit back the retort—that she’d faced more demons than he had, for years. Alone. And returned to the matter at hand. “Kit—” She stopped. Reframed. “Christopher, I went to him because we needed it. You . . .” She hesitated, not knowing quite how to say the words. Spreading her hands wide, she tried again. “You lost everything.”
Christopher pushed his fingers through his hair once more, the move violent and unsettling. “You think I don’t know that? Christ, Mara!” His tone was raised, and she was instantly, keenly aware of where they were—of the name he’d used. She looked to the door, confirming it was closed.
He did not care. “Of course I know it! I lost everything he left me.”
Everything of hers as well. Scraped together and stupidly entrusted to his keeping. But all that was nothing compared to the funds that had been set aside to run the orphanage. Every cent the men had left with their sons.
He’d told her his bank would protect the funds. Grow them, perhaps. But she was a woman and without proof of her marriage or her husband’s death, and so her brother had made the deposits.
Her brother, who couldn’t stop gaming.
Anger flared, even as she wished it wouldn’t. Even as she wished she were sixteen again, able to comfort her younger, gentler, sweeter brother, without hating the man he’d become. Without judging his transgressions.
“You don’t know what it was like to live in his shadow,” he said.
Their father. The man who had unwittingly set them all on this path. Rich as Croesus and never satisfied. He’d always wanted more. Always better. He’d wanted a son smarter and bolder and braver and cleverer.
He’d wanted a duchess for a daughter.
And he’d received neither.
Kit laughed, bitterly. “He’s no doubt watching from his perch in Hell, devastatingly disappointed.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t own us any longer.”
Her brother’s gaze met hers. “Of course he does. Without him, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have run. I wouldn’t have gamed. I wouldn’t have lost.” He raised a long arm, pointed in the direction of the street. “You wouldn’t live among waifs and whores—” He stopped. Took a breath. “Why did you go to him?”
“He holds our debt.”
Kit’s gaze narrowed. “What did he say?”
She hesitated. He wouldn’t like it.
“What did you agree to?” he pressed. She heard the irritation in his tone. The frustration.
“What do you think I agreed to?”
“You sold yourself.”
If only it had been so simple. “I told him I would show myself. Return him to society.”
He considered the words, and for a moment, she thought he might protest. But she had forgotten that desperate men turned mercenary. “And I get my money back?”
She heard the pronouns. Hated them. “It’s not only your money.”
He scoffed. “What was yours was minimal.”
“What was the orphanage’s was enough to run the place for a year. Maybe longer.”
“I’ve a great deal to worry about, Mara. I’m not about to worry over your whelps, too.”
“They’re children! They rely upon me for everything!”
He sighed, clearly through with her. “Did you get my money back or not?”
It did not matter to him that she would lose everything. This life she’d built. This place that had kept her safe. Given her purpose. He didn’t care, as long as his money was returned.
And so she did what she was so good at.
She lied.
“Not.”
Fury crossed his handsome face. “You made a deal with the devil and you get nothing in return? What good are you? What good was this?” His lips twisted in irritation as he paced the room. “You’ve ruined everything!”
Her gaze narrowed on her brother. “I did what had to be done. He isn’t going to fight you, Kit. Now, at least, he will leave you alone.”
Kit turned and tossed a chair out of the way, the furniture crashing against the wall and splintering into a dozen pieces. Mara stilled.
The anger was familiar.
In all senses of the word.
She stepped behind her desk, pressing her knuckles to the desktop, hiding the shaking of her hands.
She was losing control of the situation.
Perhaps she deserved it. Perhaps this was what happened to women who tried to take fate into their own hands. She’d done just that, changed her future. Changed her life. Lived it for twelve years.
But now it was time to let Kit live his. “This is the deal we struck. Your only chance at honor is my agreeing to admit what I did. I brought the man to my room. I drugged him. I bloodied the damn sheets.” She shook her head. “I ran. It is I who require forgiveness. I who can give him retribution. And he knows it.”
“And what of me?”
“He is not interested in you.”
Christopher went to the window and looked out on the cold November afternoon. He was quiet for a long moment before whispering, “He should be. He doesn’t know what I could do.”
The sun sinking into the western sky turned his brown locks gold, and Mara recalled a long-ago afternoon at their c
hildhood home in Bristol, Kit laughing and running along the edge of a little pond near their house, pulling a new toy boat behind him.
He’d tripped on a tree root and fallen, releasing the string attached to the boat to catch himself, and the high wind had carried the boat out to the middle of the pond, where it promptly capsized and sank.
They’d been beaten for their transgressions, then sent to bed without supper—Kit, because he hadn’t seen fit to rescue the boat, which had cost their father money, and Mara, because she’d had the gall to remind their father that neither of his children was able to swim.
It was not the first time Kit had been unlucky, nor was it the first time she had tried to protect him from their father’s scorn.
It was also not the last.
But today, she was not protecting him. Today, she was protecting something much more important. And she did not trust him to be a part of her plan. “You remain free of this.”
“And if I don’t?”
She opened the door to the room with a quick snap, indicating that she was done with the conversation. “You haven’t a choice.”
He turned to face her, and for a moment the light played tricks with her. For a moment, he looked like their father. “You in the hands of the Killer Duke? He and his club have taken everything I own. I’m supposed to simply allow it? What of my money?”
Not what of you. Not what of my sister.
The omission should not have surprised her, and yet it did. But she held back her surprise and lifted her chin. “Money isn’t everything.”
“Oh, Mara,” he said, sounding older and wiser than she’d ever heard him. “Of course it is.”
The lesson of their father, burned into them.
He met her gaze. “I am not free of this. And now, neither are you.”
Truth at last.
Hours later, Lavender on a cushion at her feet, Mara was attempting to focus on her work when Lydia Baker stepped into her small office and said, “I’m tired of pretending as though I have not noticed.”
Mara attempted surprise, turning wide eyes on her closest friend. “I beg your pardon?”
“Do not pretend to misunderstand me,” Lydia said, seating herself in a small wooden chair on the opposite side of Mara’s escritoire, and patted her lap to get Lavender’s attention. The piglet raised her head, considered the human, and decided to remain on her pillow. “That pig doesn’t like me.”
Mara grasped at the change in topic. “That pig spent half the morning running from a dozen maniacal boys.”
“Better than a farmer with an axe.” Lydia narrowed her gaze on the beast.
Lavender sighed.
Mara laughed.
Lydia returned her attention to Mara. “For seven years, we’ve worked side by side, and I’ve never once asked you about your past.”
Mara sat back in her chair. “A fact for which I am ever grateful.”
Lydia raised a blond brow and waved one deceivingly delicate hand in the air. “If it had only been the man who visited this afternoon, I might have ignored it. But combined with this morning’s visitor, I’m through with not asking. Dukes change everything.”
No doubt that was the understatement of the century.
Lydia leaned forward, tapping the edge of the letter in her hand on the desk with perfect rhythm. “I may work at an orphanage, Margaret, but I am not completely unaware of the world beyond the door. The enormous man who arrived at the crack of dawn was the Duke of Lamont.” She paused, then qualified, “The Killer Duke of Lamont.”
Lord, she was coming to hate that moniker.
“He’s not a killer.” The words were out before Mara could stop them—before she could realize that they were a tacit admission that she knew the man in question.
She pressed her lips together in a thin line as Lydia’s eyes went wide with interest. “Isn’t he?”
Mara considered her next words carefully. She settled on “No.”
Lydia waited for Mara to continue for a long moment, her blond curls wild and unruly, barely contained by the two dozen pins shoved into the nest. When Mara said nothing more, her first employee and the closest thing she could call a friend sat back in her own chair, crossed her legs, rested her hands in her lap, and said, “He wasn’t here to deliver a child.”
It was not unheard of for men of the aristocracy to arrive toting their illegitimate sons. “No.”
Lydia nodded. “He was not here to retrieve one.”
Mara set her pen into its holder. “No.”
“And he was not here to make a generous, exorbitantly summed donation to the orphanage.”
One side of Mara’s mouth kicked up. “No.”
Lydia cocked her head. “Do you think you might convince him to do so?”
Mara laughed. “He is not in a generous spirit when I am near, sadly.”
“Ah. So he was not here for anything relating to the orphanage.”
“No.”
“Which means he was here because of your second visitor of the day.”
Alarm shot through Mara as she met her friend’s eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Liar,” Lydia replied. “Your second caller was Mr. Christopher Lowe. Very wealthy, as I understand it, having inherited a glorious fortune from his dead father.”
Mara pressed her lips into a thin line. “Not wealthy anymore.”
Lydia cocked her head. “No. I hear he’s lost everything to the man who killed his sister.”
“He didn’t kill—” Mara stopped. Lydia knew.
“Mmm.” Lydia brushed a speck of lint from her skirt. “You seem very sure of that.”
“I am.”
Lydia nodded. “How long have you known the Duke of Lamont?”
There it was—the question that would change everything. The question that would bring her out of hiding and reveal her to the world.
She was going to have to start telling the truth at some point. She should consider it a gift of sorts that she could begin with Lydia. Except telling her closest friend, who had trusted her for seven long years, that she had been lying all that time was about the most difficult thing she’d ever done.
Mara took a breath. Let it out. “Twelve years.”
Lydia nodded slowly. “Since he killed Lowe’s sister?”
Since he supposedly killed me.
It should have been easy to say it. Lydia knew more about Mara than anyone in the world. She knew about Mara’s life, her work, her thoughts, her plans. She had come to work for Mara as a young, untried governess to a motley group of boys, sent from a large estate in Yorkshire—the one where Mara had herself hidden all those years ago.
Lydia lowered her voice, her tone gentle. Accepting. Filled with friendship. “We all have secrets, Margaret.”
“That’s not my name,” Mara whispered.
“Of course it isn’t,” Lydia said, and the simple words proved to be Mara’s undoing. Tears sprang to her eyes and Lydia smiled, leaning forward. “You no more grew up on a farm in Shropshire than Lavender will.”
Mara huffed a little laugh in the direction of the pig, who snorted in her sleep. “A farm in Shropshire would quite suit her.”
Lydia grinned. “Nonsense. She is a spoiled little porker who sleeps on a stuffed pillow and is fed from the table. She would care for neither the weather, nor the slop.” Her eyes grew large and filled with sympathy. “If not Shropshire, then where?”
Mara looked to the desk where she’d worked for seven years, every day hoping that these questions would never come. She spoke to the papers there. “Bristol.”
Lydia nodded. “You don’t sound like you were raised on the Bristol docks.”
A vision of the enormous house where she’d spent her youth flashed. Her father used to say that he could buy Britain if he’d wanted to, and he’d built a h
ouse to prove that fact to the rest of the world. The house had been gilded and painted, filled with oils and marbles that made the Elgins look minuscule. He’d been particularly fond of portraits, filling every inch of wall with the faces of strangers. Someday, I’ll replace them with my own family, he used to say every time he hung a new one.
The house had been exorbitant at best, outrageous at worst.
And it had been the only thing he’d loved.
“I wasn’t.”
“And the duke?” Lydia knew. No doubt.
“I . . .” Mara paused, chose her next words carefully. “I met him. Once.”
Not false, and yet somehow not true. Met wasn’t precisely the word she would use to describe her interactions with him. The hour had been late, the night dark, the situation desperate. And she’d taken advantage of him. Briefly.
Long enough.
“On the eve of your wedding.”
She had dreaded this moment for twelve years—had feared that it would destroy her. And yet, as she stood on the precipice of admitting the truth for the first time in twelve years—of being honest with her friend and, somehow, with the universe, she did not hesitate. “Yes.”
Lydia nodded. “He didn’t kill you.”
“No.”
Lydia waited.
Mara shook her head, rubbing her forearm absently. “I never meant for it to look so . . . dire.” She’d meant to bloody her sheets. To make it look like she’d been ruined. Like she’d run off with a man. He was to have escaped before anyone saw what had happened. But there’d been too much laudanum. And too much blood.
There was a long moment while Lydia considered the words. She turned the envelope in her hand over and over, and Mara could not help but watch the small ecru rectangle flip again and again. “I can’t remember your name.”
“Mara.”
“Mara.” Lydia repeated, testing the name. “Mara.”
Mara nodded, pleasure coursing through her at the sound of her name on someone’s lips. Pleasure and not a little bit of fear.
No going back now.
Finally, Lydia smiled, bright and honest. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
Mara caught her breath at the words, at the way they flooded her with relief. “When he gets his way, I shall be found out.”