Free No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean Page B

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 childhood 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.
    H ours 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.”