No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean

what he thought she meant.
    Except she clearly did, for the smug look on her face, the dancing sparkle in her knowing gaze, as though she had been waiting a lifetime to set him on his heels.
    And perhaps she had.
    He snapped forward in his seat, both feet firmly on the ground, the residual glow from the candles casting him in light. “What did you say?”
    She raised a brow, and he knew she was mocking him. “Is there a problem with your hearing, Your Grace?”
    She was the most disastrous, damaging, difficult woman he’d ever know. She made him want to upturn the dainty, velvet furniture in this utterly feminine place, and tear the clothes from his back in irritation.
    He was about to stand and intimidate her into repeating herself—into explaining herself—when the fastenings of her dress came loose, and the frock fell to her feet in a remarkable, fluid swoosh, leaving her standing there in her pale wool chemise, unadorned corset, and little else.
    And then he couldn’t move at all.
    Goddammit.
    The Frenchwoman circled Mara, considering her for a long moment while Temple attempted to find his speech.
    Hebert found hers first. “She will require lingerie as well.”
    Temple disagreed. Mara did not require undergarments at all. In fact, he’d prefer she never wore another stitch of unmentionables again.
    Or anything else, for that matter.
    Good Lord.
    She was perfect.
    She was also lying.
    For if he had seen her in her underclothes—in anything close to the things she wore now—he would remember.
    He would remember the slope of her breasts, the spray of freckles across them, the way they curved in pretty, plump rounds topped with . . . he couldn’t see, but he knew that her nipples were very likely as gloriously well-formed as the rest of her breasts.
    He would remember those breasts.
    Wouldn’t he?
    It is not the first time you’ve seen me in my underclothes.
    He closed his eyes against the frustration that flared—the recollection that would not come. There had been a woman, one he’d thought was more muse than memory. More piecemeal than not.
    Wide smile. Strange, intoxicating eyes.
    “Is it red?”
    The modiste’s words were like gunfire in the dark, quiet room. They startled Mara as well. “I beg your pardon?”
    “Your hair,” Hebert replied. “Candlelight plays tricks on the eye. But it is red, no?”
    Mara shook her head. “It’s brown.”
    A silken waterfall of auburn curls.
    “It’s auburn,” Temple said.
    “You do not seem the kind of man to notice the difference,” she said, refusing to look at him, her eyes instead tracking the slender Frenchwoman now kneeling at her feet.
    “I notice more than you could imagine.”
    That hair had flickered in his memory for twelve years. There had been countless points when he’d decided it wasn’t real. In his darkest moments, he’d thought he’d fabricated it. Her. Something good to remember of that night.
    But she’d been real.
    He’d known Mara was the key to that night. That she remembered more than he did. That she was his only chance at piecing together his fall. But it had never occurred to him that she’d been with him for longer than it took to destroy him.
    Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps it was a lie. Perhaps she’d drugged him and left him to distract the world while she ran from God knew what to God knew where, and those teasing words were her latest attempt at torture.
    It wasn’t a lie.
    He knew that as well as he knew anything.
    But somehow, knowing the truth made everything worse. Because she hadn’t left him with no memory of the night.
    She’d left him with no memory of her.
    He had to pull himself together. To regain the upper hand. He forced himself to lean back against the settee, refusing to allow her to see that she’d riled him. “For example, I notice that you never wear gloves.”
    As if on strings, her hands came together, clasping tight. “When one works for a living . . . one can’t.”
    But she hadn’t