What was he talking about? What board? She felt a moment of pure bewilderment, and she sharply shook her head and thought about the man she knew before her. Not the rake but the dangerous, calculating lurker she often spied. He made a comparison to a chess game and possibly thought in terms of its strategies.
It struck her forcibly how much she did not know about him. “Why do you have enemies?”
“They took something from me.”
“What?”
“Something precious.”
The soft, regretful way he said it made her throat ache with unexpected sorrow. “A lady?” She was not sure why she asked; there might be other things this man considered to be precious: land, wealth, jewelry.
His lashes swept down for a second before he pinned her with that penetrating stare of his. “Yes.”
Oh! “I am sorry,” she whispered.
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“I am still deeply sorry for your loss. Are you trying to…to take back what they stole?”
He took a few steps away from her, the shadows from the curtain casting him in darkness. She realized it was such a deliberate move on his part, to conceal his expression.
“Do not hide from me,” she whispered. “Please, Nicolas.”
He stepped into the path of the moonlight. The icy shrewdness of his look made her pulse trip in alarm.
“If they prick us, do we not bleed? If they wrong us, do we not revenge?”
“So, it is a revenge plot then,” she said lightly, painfully aware of the furious pounding of her heart. She walked over to him, lifted her hand, and cupped his jaw. He took a deep, shuddering breath, leaning slightly into her touch. “I understand the need to right the wrong done to you or someone you love. Will you tell me about it?”
His eyes lowered and he stilled. When he lifted his gaze to her, she flinched and stepped back. The eyes staring at her were indifferent, his lips almost cruel in their dispassionate curve. Nicolas’s entire posture radiated coiled menace. A murderous coldness settled on his face.
“Who dared to hurt you?” he asked softly.
…
Maryann’s unbound hair rippled in wondrous waves down her back and over the front of her nightgown. Several tendrils curled along the slope of her cheeks in a rather becoming way. She was lovely…and his heart stumbled in his chest. Her eyes were widened as if he had frightened her with his harsh whisper. An elusive sensation whispered through him, but it vanished before it shaped into a sense of tangibility.
“You silly man, I am not afraid of you.”
Some of the tension left him, and with a start he realized he had needed to hear those words from her. He glanced at the dark, mottled bruises which encircled her arms. “These must be incredibly painful.”
She placed her hands behind her back as if hiding candy from a toddler.
He glanced at the basin. Earlier, when he’d thought to steal in through her windows, he’d seen her soak her hand in rosemary water, then gingerly rub an ointment on her skin.
Nicolas thought it a result of falling into the streets. But these bruises spoke of something darker, the shape of a hand…fingers perhaps. Someone had hurt her, quite deliberately. To have left such bruises, the person was precise in their brutal punishment. Her father? The earl did not seem the type. Or was it her brother? The black Dahlia?
He took her hand between his. The tip of her finger was not soft and feminine, her nails were cropped short and the pad of her finger rough…and prickly. “What was the cause of this?”
An almost embarrassed smile touched her mouth. “Needlepoint. It is one of my favorite pastimes, especially when I am agitated. It soothes me.”
He used the tip of his finger and gently touched one of the marks above her wrists. “And who did this?”
She tried to tug her hand away, but he held onto her wrist gently.
“I thought we were friends.”
She sent a mirthful look from beneath her lashes. “Friends? I imagined nothing of the sort.”
His Maryann tried to sound snappish, but her voice trembled.
“Then what are we?”
Her face flushed a delicate, rosy hue. “I…I do not know, but I sense friendship does not define it.”
His resistance to her allure was very fragile, and way down inside, in a secret place he himself did not know, he felt the barrier he was trying to erect crack. And he understood her sentiments perfectly. He felt torn between the ache of wanting