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monster?
    Good Lord, he was enormous.
    And intimidating, somehow, despite being unconscious.
    And handsome, though not in a classical way.
    He was all size and force, even motionless. Her gaze tracked the length of him, the long arms and legs in perfectly tailored clothes, the cords of his neck peeking out from above the uncravatted collar of his shirt, the stretch of bronze to his strong jaw and dimpled chin, and the scars.
    Even with the scars, the angles of his face betrayed his aristocratic lineage, all sharp edges and long slopes—the kind that set women to swooning.
    Mara couldn’t entirely blame them for swooning.
    She’d nearly swooned herself, once.
    Not nearly. Had .
    When he was young, he’d been quick to smile, baring straight white teeth and an expression that promised more than pleasantry. That promised pleasure. His size, combined with that ease, had been so calm, so unpracticed that she’d thought him anything but the aristocracy. A stable boy. Or a footman. Or perhaps a member of the gentry, invited by her father to the enormous wedding that would make his daughter a duchess.
    He’d looked like someone who did not have to worry about appearances.
    It hadn’t occurred to her that the heir to one of the most powerful dukedoms in the country would be the most carefree gentleman for miles. Of course, it should have. She should have known the moment that they came together in that cold garden and he smiled at her as though she were the only woman in Britain and he the only man, that he was an aristocrat.
    But she hadn’t.
    And she certainly hadn’t imagined that he was the Marquess of Chapin. The heir to the dukedom to which she would soon become duchess. Her future stepson.
    The man sprawled across mahogany and carpet didn’t look anything stepson-like.
    But she would not think on that.
    She crouched low to check his breathing, taking no small amount of relief in the way his wide chest rose and fell beneath his jacket in even strokes. Her heart pounded, no doubt in fear—after all, if he were to wake, he would not be happy.
    She gave a little huff of laughter at the thought.
    Happy was not the word.
    He would not be human.
    And then, with the giddiness of panic coursing through her, she did something she never would have imagined doing. Or, rather, she would have imagined doing, but never would have found the courage to do.
    She touched him.
    Her hand was moving before she could stop it. Before she really even knew what she was about. But then her fingers were on his skin—smooth and warm and alive. And ever so tempting.
    Her fingers traced the angles of his face, finding the smooth ridges of the inch-long white scar along the bone at the base of his left eye, then down the barely-there bumps and angles of his once-perfect nose, her chest tightening as she considered the battles that would have produced the breaks. The pain of them.
    The life he’d lived to wear them.
    The life she’d given him.
    “What happened to you?” The question came out on a whisper.
    He did not answer, and her touch slid to his final scar, at the curve of his lower lip.
    She knew she shouldn’t . . . that it wouldn’t do . . . but then her fingers were on that thin white line, barely there against rich skin, edging into the soft swell of his lip. And then she was touching his mouth, tracing the dips and curves of it, marveling at its softness.
    Remembering the way it had felt on hers.
    Wishing for—
    No.
    Her hand came away from him as though she’d been burned, and she turned her attention to the rest of him, to the way one arm spread haphazardly across the carpet, the victim of laudanum. He looked uncomfortable, and so she reached across him, intending to straighten that arm, to lay it flat against his side. But once his hand was in hers, she couldn’t help but consider it, the spray of black hair that dusted the back of it, the way the veins tracked like rivers across its landscape, the way the knuckles rose and