Brazen and the Beast

by Sarah MacLean

  “You don’t know him, Hattie.”

  “I know I made a deal with him.”

  Augie froze. “What kind of deal?”

  “Yes, what kind of deal?” Nora echoed, her lips curving in amusement.

  “Nothing serious.”

  You are in no position to make me an offer.

  I get all of it.

  What is mine. What is yours. And the name.

  A sizzle of pleasure ran through Hattie at the memory of what he’d taken even as he’d promised that retribution. The heat of his kiss. The promise of his touch.

  Augie interrupted her thoughts. “Hattie—if he agreed to see you again—whatever he said—you have to know—he’s not after you.”

  She swallowed the disappointment that came with the words. Augie wasn’t wrong. Men like the one she’d met that evening—men like Beast—they were not for women like Hattie. They did not notice women like Hattie. They noticed beautiful women with small, slender bodies and delicate dispositions. She knew that.

  She knew it, but still . . . the unfettered honesty about her lack of allure stung.

  She covered the hurt with a laugh, the way she always did. “I know that, Augie. And now I know just what he’s after. My idiot brother.” She enjoyed the hot flush that washed over Augie’s face more than she should. “But I intend for him to keep our agreement. And in order to do that, he will have to accept our offer.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.” The last thing she needed was Augie with her, mucking things up. “No.”

  “Someone has to go with you. He doesn’t leave Covent Garden.”

  “Then I shall go to Covent Garden,” she said.

  “It’s no place for ladies,” Augie said.

  If there were any five words that would catapult a woman into motion, they were surely those. “Need I remind you that I grew up in the rigging of cargo ships?”

  Augie changed tack. “He’ll do whatever it takes to punish me. And you’re my sister.”

  “He doesn’t know that. He shan’t know it,” she said. “I have the upper hand here.”

  Had they not parted on a challenge? One would find the other? And now . . . she knew how to find him. Pleasure coursed through her. Triumph. Something dangerously close to delight.

  “And if the Beast hurts you?”

  “He won’t.” That much, she knew. He might tease her, and tempt her, and test her. But he wouldn’t harm her.

  She saw Augie’s acquiescence, chased like a rabbit by relief. Of course he was relieved. She was about to clean up his mess. Like always.

  He exhaled. “All right.”

  “But Augie?” Her brother lifted his gaze and she paused, her heart pounding. “If I do this . . .” Suspicion crossed his face, but he did not speak. “If I save your hide . . . then you shall do something for me.”

  His brow furrowed. “What do you want?”

  “Not what I want, August. What you shall happily provide.”

  “Go on, then.”

  Now or never.

  Take it.

  You told the Beast that you didn’t lose, either.

  Make it so.

  “You will tell Father you don’t want the business.” Augie’s eyes went wide as Nora let out a low whistle that Hattie ignored, frustration and determination and triumph coursing through her all at once. “You’ll tell him to give it to me.”

  It seemed today was the beginning of the Year of Hattie, after all.

  Chapter Seven

  The next afternoon, as the sun sank into the western sky, Whit stood in the small, silent infirmary deep in the Covent Garden Rookery, keeping watch over the boy who had been ferried here after the attack on the shipment.

  The room, filled with golden light, was fastidiously clean, in sharp comparison to the world beyond—a world where filth reigned—and it should have given Whit a modicum of peace.

  It didn’t.

  He’d gone immediately to the Rookery after leaving 72 Shelton Street—come to check on the riders who had been with him the night before. Come to check on this boy, Jamie, who’d been on the ground when Whit had been knocked out, the street beneath him black with blood. Even as he’d lost consciousness, Whit had raged. No one hurt the Bareknuckle Bastards’ men and lived.

  Whit’s heart pounded with the memory even as the door to the room opened and closed, the young, bespectacled doctor wiping his hands with a clean cloth as he entered and approached. “I’ve sedated him,” the doctor said. “He shan’t wake for hours. You needn’t hover.”

  Whit needed to hover. He protected his own.

  The Bareknuckle Bastards reigned in the twisting labyrinth of Covent Garden, beyond the taverns and theaters made safe for the London toffs, where nothing was safe for outsiders. But Whit had come up through the Rookery alongside his half brother and the girl they called their sister—learning to fight like dogs for whatever scraps they could find. Fighting had become second nature, and they’d clawed themselves higher, starting a business and pulling the Rookery with them—hiring the men and women of the neighborhood for work in their myriad businesses: swinging pies in their taverns, tracking wagers in fight rings, butchering beef and tanning hides, and running the cargo that came in off the ships twice a month.

  If they hadn’t secured the loyalty of the Garden as children, the money would have done it. The Bastards’ Rookery was known throughout London as a place that provided honest work for good wage and safe conditions, and from a trio who had built themselves from the dirt of the Garden’s streets.

  Here, the Bastards were kings. Recognized and revered beyond the monarch himself; and why not? The other side of London might as well be the other side of the world for those who grew up in the Rookery.

  But even a king couldn’t keep death at bay.

  The unconscious young man—barely a heartbeat from boyhood—had taken a bullet for them. For it, he lay in a blindingly white room against blindingly white sheets, in the hands of fate, because Whit had been too late to protect him.

  Always too late.

  He shoved a hand in his pocket, his fingers rubbing over the warm metal of one watch, then the other. “Will he live?”

  The doctor looked over from the table in the corner of the room, where he mixed a tonic. “Perhaps.”

  Whit growled low in his throat, his hand fisting at his side . . . itching for a face. For a life. He’d been so close to it the night before—if he’d woken to the enemy, he might have had his retribution.

  But he’d woken to the woman instead. Hattie, eager to play at a brothel while his men fought at the hands of a surgeon. And then she’d refused to give him a name.

  He watched the sleeping form, the bed somehow making Jamie smaller and slighter than he was when he was hale, when he laughed with his brothers-in-arms and winked at pretty girls as they tripped past.

  Hattie would give Whit the name of the man she protected—the one who’d stolen from him—the one who threatened what was his. The one who was working with the real enemy—and who would lead Beast to him once he suffered the full force of Beast’s wrath.

  He’d rampage for Jamie and for all those under his protection here in the Garden, where scarcity threatened not a quarter of a mile from some of the richest homes in Britain. He’d rampage for the seven others who had come before him. For the three who had left this room and gone straight to the ground.

  Another growl.

  “I understand that you do not like it, Beast, but it is the truth. Medicine is imperfect. But it is the cleanest a wound can be,” the doctor added. “The bullet entered and exited; we stemmed the bleeding. It’s packed and protected.” He shrugged. “He could live.” He came closer. Extended the glass in his hand to Whit. “Drink.”

  Whit shook his head.

  “You’ve been awake for more than a day, and Mary tells me you haven’t had food or drink since you arrived.”

  “I don’t need your wife watching me.”

  The doctor
cut him a look. “As you’ve been standing sentry in this room for twelve hours, she had little choice.” He extended the drink again. “Drink—for the cracking head you won’t admit you have.”

  Whit took the drink, ignoring the throbbing ache at the back of his skull as he knocked it back, before swearing roundly at the taste of the rotten swill. “What in hell is that?”

  The doctor took the glass and went back to his desk. “Does it matter?”

  It didn’t. The doctor was unorthodox, rarely using a common cure when he could mix a paste or boil a draught of something disgusting, and he had an obsession with cleanliness that Covent Garden had never seen. Whit and Devil had lured him away from a small northern village two years earlier, after he’d reportedly saved a young marchioness from a gunshot wound on the Great North Road with a curious combination of tinctures and tonics.

  A man with a skill for defeating bullets was worth his weight in gold, as far as Whit was concerned—and the doctor had proven him right, saving more than he’d lost since arriving in the Rookery.

  Today, he might save another.

  Whit turned back to Jamie. Watched him in the silence of the afternoon.

  “I’ll send someone to fetch you when he wakes,” the doctor said. “The moment he wakes.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  A pause. “Then I shall send someone to fetch you when he doesn’t.”

  Whit grunted, logic telling him that there was nothing to be done. That fate would come, and this boy would live or die by it.

  “I fucking hate this place.” Whit couldn’t stay still anymore. He went to the end of the room, to the exterior wall of the building, built by the best masons the Bastards’ money could buy. Without hesitation, he put his fist into it.

  Pain shot through his hand and up his arm, and he welcomed it. A punishment.

  The doctor’s chair creaked when he turned back to Whit. “Are you bleeding?”

  He looked down at his knuckles. They’d seen worse. He grunted his denial, shaking out the limb. The doctor nodded and turned back to his work.

  Good. Whit was in no mood for conversation, a fact rendered irrelevant when the door to the room opened and his brother and sister-in-law entered, and behind them, Annika, the Bastards’ brilliant Norwegian lieutenant, who could move a hold full of contraband in broad daylight like a sorceress.

  “We came as soon as we heard.” Devil went straight to the bed, looking down at Jamie. “Fuck.” He looked up, the six-inch-long scar that ran the length of his right cheek now white with anger.

  “We’re looking for his sister,” Nik said as she moved to the other side of the bed, her hand settling gently on the boy’s. “She’ll be here soon, Jamie.” Something tightened impossibly further in Whit’s chest; Nik loved the men and women who worked for them like she was decades older than her twenty-three years, and they her children.

  And he couldn’t keep them safe.

  Devil cleared his throat. “And the bullet?”

  “Side. Clean through,” the doctor answered.

  “I almost had ’im. Left a knife in ’im,” Whit added. “Aim was true.”

  “Good. I hope you cut off his bollocks,” Devil said, tapping his silver-tipped walking stick on the floor twice—a sign of his desire to unsheathe the wicked blade from within and run someone through.

  “Wait,” Whit’s sister-in-law, Felicity, said, coming to face him, forcing him to look down at her. “You almost had him?”

  Shame ran through Whit, hot and inescapable. “Someone knocked me out before I could finish the deed.”

  Nik whispered a curse as Felicity took Whit’s hands in her own, squeezing them tightly. “Are you well?” She turned to the doctor. “Is he well?”

  “Seems so to me.”

  Felicity narrowed her gaze on the other man. “Your keen interest in medicine never fails to impress, Doctor.”

  The doctor removed his spectacles and cleaned them. “The man is upright before you, is he not?”

  She sighed. “I suppose so.”

  “Well, then,” he said, and he left the room.

  “Such an odd man.” Felicity turned back to Whit. “What happened?”

  Whit ignored the question, instead catching Nik’s gaze across the room. “And Dinuka?” The second outrider. Whit had sent the young man for cavalry. “He’s safe?”

  Nik nodded. “Got off a shot, but doesn’t think it landed. Did as he was told. Came running for cavalry.”

  “Good man,” Whit said. “Cargo?”

  She shook her head. “Lost before we could track it.”

  Whit ran a hand over his chest, where his knife holster was missing. “Along with my knives.”

  Devil turned to him. “Who?”

  Whit met his brother’s eyes. “I can’t be certain.”

  Devil didn’t hesitate. “But you’ve a wager.”

  “All I have says it’s Ewan.”

  He didn’t use the name anymore, Ewan was now Robert, Duke of Marwick, their half brother and Felicity’s once-fiancé. He’d left Devil for dead three months earlier and disappeared, sending Grace into hiding until he was found. There’d been a break in hijackings after Ewan had vanished, but Whit couldn’t shake the feeling that he was back. And responsible for Jamie.

  Except . . . “Ewan wouldn’t have left you unconscious,” Devil said. “He’d have done much worse.”

  Beast shook his head. “He’s got two working for him. At least two.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m close,” he said. She’ll tell me soon enough.

  “Does it have something to do with the woman at Shelton Street?”

  Whit’s attention flew to Nik at the words. “What?”

  “Ah, yes. The woman. We heard about that, too,” Devil said. “Apparently you were tossed out of a carriage into a group of drunks and then followed what Brixton referred to as—” He grinned at his wife. “What was it, love?”

  Felicity’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “A lady toff.”

  “Ah, yes. I hear you followed a lady toff into Grace’s brothel.”

  Whit did not reply.

  “And lingered,” Nik added.

  Dammit.

  Whit met the Norwegian’s eyes. “Have you nowhere to be? We still run a business or two, do we not?”

  Nik shrugged. “I shall get the story from the lads.”

  Whit scowled, pretending not to notice when she brushed her hand over Jamie’s brow, whispered a few encouraging words to the boy before taking her leave.

  After a long silence, Felicity said, “Are we to get the story from the lads, as well?”

  “I am already in possession of one inquisitive sister.”

  Felicity smiled. “Yes, but as she is not here, I must stand for both of us.”

  He scowled. “I woke up in a carriage, with a woman.”

  Devil’s brows furrowed. “And I assume this did not occur in the excellent way that such a scenario might?”

  It was the hottest kiss Whit had ever experienced, but that was not for his brother to know. “When I exited the carriage—”

  “We heard you were thrown out,” Felicity said.

  He gave a little growl. “It was mutual.”

  “Mutual,” Felicity repeated. “Carriage tossing.”

  Lord deliver him from prying sisters. “When I exited the carriage,” he said, “she was headed deeper into the Garden. I followed.”

  Devil nodded. “Who is she?”

  He stayed quiet.

  “Christ, Whit, you got the lady toff’s name, didn’t you?”

  He turned to Felicity. “Hattie.”

  Having a sister-in-law who was once an aristocrat paid handsomely at times, particularly when one required the name of a noblewoman. “Spinster?”

  It wasn’t the first descriptor he’d assign to her.

  “Very tall? Blond?” Felicity pressed.

  He nodded.

  “Plump?”

  The word brought back the mem
ory of the dips and valleys of her curves. He growled his assent.

  Felicity turned to Devil. “Well then.”

  “Mmm,” Devil said. “We shall come back to that. Do you know who the woman is?”

  “Hattie’s quite a common name.”

  “But?”

  She looked to Whit, then back to her husband. “Henrietta Sedley is daughter to the Earl of Cheadle.”

  The truth slammed through Whit, along with triumphant pleasure at the revelation of Hattie’s identity. Cheadle had earned the earldom—received it from the king himself for nobility at sea. I grew up on the docks, she’d told him when he’d tried to scare her with foul language. “That’s her.”

  “So Ewan is working with Cheadle?” Devil said, shaking his head. “Why would the earl go in against us? It doesn’t make sense.”

  And it didn’t. Andrew Sedley, Earl of Cheadle, was beloved on the docks. His business was a source of honest work and good pay, and men who worked the Thames knew him as a fair man willing to hire anyone with an able body and a strong hook, regardless of name or country or fortune.

  The Bastards had never had cause to interact with Sedley, as he exclusively ran aboveboard shipments, paid his lading taxes, and kept his business clean, with nary a whiff of impropriety. No weapons. No drugs. No people. The same rules the Bastards played by, though they played in the muck, their contraband running to booze and paper, crystal and wigs, and anything else taxed beyond reason by the Crown. And they weren’t afraid to defend themselves with force.

  The idea that Cheadle might have shot the first cannon at them was beyond understanding. But Cheadle and his daring daughter weren’t alone.

  “The son,” Whit said. August Sedley was by all accounts an indolent lackwit, bereft of his father’s work ethic and respect.

  “It could be,” Felicity said. “No one thinks much of him. He’s charming but not very intelligent.”

  Which meant the young Sedley lacked the sense required to understand that going up against Covent Garden’s best known and most beloved criminals was not to be done lightly. If Hattie’s brother was behind the hijackings, it could mean only one thing.

  Devil saw it, too. “Ewan has the brother doing his work, and the sister protects her family.”