The Dark Affair by Máire Claremont Page A

flexing and unflexing despite the bindings over his body. “Do you care?”
    “About your lineage?” She pursed her lips as if considering. “No. I don’t give much of a tinker’s damn for your silly English traditions. But about your ability to live as a free man? Yes, I care very much.”
    He stared blankly before arching that one damning brow. “Do you think me a freshly born babe?”
    Her lips twitched at the very idea. Powers had no doubt been born domineering and dripping sarcasm the moment he had popped into the world. “Hardly, my lord.”
    “You want something,” he stated flatly.
    She nodded. Unsurprisingly, it appeared the best course had to be straight for him to follow her lead. He would sense it if she laced too much sweetness into her proposition. “I do at that.”
    “Out with it.”
    She cleared her throat, the words oddly discomforting. “’Tisn’t just for myself, you understand, what I’m about to suggest.”
    “How noble.”
    She bit the inside of her cheek, knowing this was much like ripping off a bandage that had stuck to a wound. She simply needed to do it quickly and with authority. “I should like you to marry me.”
    The silence that followed was punctuated by a mad cackle somewhere down the hall.
    Powers contemplated her, his face an odd mask of dispassion. “And they say I’m mad.”
    She couldn’t help but say, “They do indeed.”
    He blew out an agitated breath. “My good woman—”
    “Hear me out,” she said loudly, determined to cut him off and finish off her bargain.
    He attempted to inch away from her, a rather hilarious spectacle, given the narrowness of the bed and the tightness of his leather straps. “I’d rather bash my brains out against the wall.”
    Well, this was going splendidly. “Do you revile me, then? Find me repugnant? Repulsive?”
    That seemed to stop him, and he eyed her with a careful curiosity. “That is a great many R’s. Is your vanity wounded by my reluctance to tie myself to such as yourself?”
    Such as herself? It was extremely tempting to pursue that line of thought, but she was not leaping to that bait. “That you’d rather be judged mad than marry me? Yes, I suppose my vanity is a wee bit trampled.”
    He scowled. “You are an exceptionally beautiful woman, for which I am sure you are already cognizant.”
    Her cheeks burned. She was aware of how men watched her, their trousers bulging, eyes lighting with lust and superiority simply because they were men. Even as they admired her, they doubtlessly imagined her in a place of far less power than the place she’d managed to carve out for herself in this hard, male-ruled world. She’d done her best to avoid their unwelcome advances and kept to herself. It was imperative that she carefully cultivated a trustworthy, responsible reputation for healing in a world that generally expected women who ventured outside the home to be nothing better than whores.
    “Ah.” A slow sort of dawning amusement sprang in his eyes. “You are aware, then. So . . . why do you wish to marry a madman?” he intoned with exaggerated drama. “Tired of working your pretty little fingers to the bone?”
    The sneering note to his voice grated against every principle she’d managed to form over the last years, principles she was gleefully tossing to the wind for the sake of her future. No, not her future. The future of her brother and so many others that she would finally be able to truly help.
    She supposed she could have turned down the earl’s offer and thrown herself on the generosity of other lords she had helped, hoping to avoid a marital entanglement. But she needed aid immediately. The earl had promised it, and there was no guarantee that any other lord, no matter the debt they owed her, would be willing to assist her brother in such a state.
    It took a great deal of fortitude not to slap the ragingly arrogant superiority off his face. God, how she hated his immediate assumption that she would