Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “I am not known for subtlety.” There was something more in her tone than humor, though—something he found he did not like.
He refused to show it. “I can’t imagine why. I’ve known you for less than a day and during the time I was not unconscious, you were frequenting a brothel and threatening to knife a pair of Garden criminals.”
“It’s not as though you’re a Mayfair gentleman yourself.” She smiled. “Or did you forget the bit where I made an improper arrangement with you yesterday?”
Arrangement. The word sizzled through him with the memory of the night before. Of the taste of her. Of the feel of her in his arms. Of the damn look of her—like a banquet.
“Why not make one with one of your toffs?”
She seemed to consider the option. Don’t consider it, he willed silently before she replied, “Well, first, I don’t have a single toff, let alone more than one.” Because toffs were fucking imbeciles.
He grunted. “No choice but to slum it.”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t consider it . . .” She couldn’t repeat the words. Christ, she was soft. “. . . that.”
“What, then?”
She tilted her head. “I don’t care if you’re not a gentleman. I don’t require someone who knows their way around Mayfair. I see no reason why our arrangement should have anything to do with your ability to waltz or your knowledge of the hierarchy of the peerage.”
But he did know all those things. He’d been trained to be a peer. He’d spent two years learning the intricacies of the aristocracy. Of their shit world. And but for a single moment two decades ago, he might have been a different man. He might have met her under a different circumstance. If Ewan had lost and Whit had won—he would have been a duke.
And he could have come for her in another way entirely.
Not that he wished to. All he wanted was to get her out of Covent Garden.
What was it they’d been talking about? “The chaperone.”
She lifted a shoulder and let it drop beneath that finely knitted shawl that he imagined would never be white again after an afternoon in the muck. “I don’t require one.”
His exhale might have been shock if he were a different sort of man. “Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t. I am not a child. I am twenty-nine years old today, which, by the way, would usually merit some kind of felicitation.”
He blinked. “Happy birthday.” Why in hell had he said that?
She smiled, bright as the damn sun, as though they were in a ballroom somewhere, instead of a back alley. “Thank you.”
“You don’t need a chaperone. You need a jailer.”
“Literally no one cares a bit about where I go.”
“I do.”
“Excellent,” she said smartly, “as I came for you.”
It was the second time she said it, and the second time he liked it, and he did not wish to repeat the experience. “Why?”
She extended the knife to him then, opening her palm to reveal the hilt, dark against the pale glove she wore—a glove he wished wasn’t there, so he might see the ink stains on her wrists and read the story they told on her palm. “This belongs to you,” she said simply. “I promised you I would return it.”
He looked to the weapon. “Why do you have it?”
She hesitated, and he loathed the pause—the idea that this woman, who was full of honesty and truth, had hidden her reply.
“Because I promised I would return it,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.”
He took the knife. What did she apologize for? Was it as simple as the knife? As the set from which it had come? Was it the attack on the shipment the night before? The ones that had come earlier? Did she know they’d taken thousands of pounds? That they’d threatened the lives of his men?
Or something else?
Was it Ewan?
Fury and disbelief roared through him at the idea. And something else. Something like panic. If she was anywhere near Ewan, Whit wouldn’t be able to keep her safe.
He pushed the thought away. She wasn’t working with Ewan. He’d know if she was betraying him so keenly, wouldn’t he?
He struggled to tear his gaze from her, hating the way the light thieved her from him, the narrow streets of the Garden disappearing the sun prematurely, and his frustration had him reaching for her, taking her hand, and pulling her through the maze of streets, back to the market square, where white stone was aflame with the last vestige of orange.
He released her the moment they stepped into the clearing. “There. Back where you began.”
She turned to him. “It’s not just the knife.”
“No,” he replied. “It’s not. The sheer amount of what has been taken from me is far more than this knife.”
“I know that now. I didn’t last night.”
He believed her because he wanted to, even as he knew he shouldn’t. Even as he had absolutely no reason for it. “I want a name, Lady Henrietta.”
Prove you’re not a part of it.
Tell me the truth.
She shook her head. “Surely you can understand why I might not be able to give it.”
“Able? Or willing?”
No hesitation. “Willing.”
She was more honest than anyone he’d ever met. Far and away more honest than he was. “And so we are at an impasse.”
“We aren’t, though.” She turned a bright face toward him, full of truth and a simplicity that Whit wasn’t certain he’d ever exhibited on his own. “I have a solution.”
He shouldn’t have given the words even a moment’s thought. Should have stopped her from speaking and ended whatever madness she was about to suggest right there, as the sun set on the market square.
Instead, he said, “What kind of solution?”
“Reimbursement,” she said, happily, as though it were all perfectly easy, and trotted off toward the market, leaving him no choice but to follow her.
He did, like a hound, knowing that the spies on the rooftops above wouldn’t hesitate in reporting his actions to his brother and sister and Nik. Knowing, and somehow not caring. Instead, he followed Hattie toward the market stalls, staying several steps behind her, watching, until she crouched to inspect the contents of a basket at the feet of an older woman from the Rookery. Hattie looked up, an unspoken question on her open, friendly face, and received the only reply such an expression elicited. Yes.
Reaching into the basket, Hattie extracted a tiny, squirming puppy, coming to her feet to cuddle the black ball close to her chest and croon to it softly. Whit approached then, something tightening in his chest—something he did not wish to feel, and certainly did not wish to remember. Hattie didn’t seem to care about that, however, turning her bright smile on him to say, “I love it here.”
The words were a blow, this woman so unexpected and out of place on his turf, so impossible to ignore, with a soft joy in her voice that was impossible to miss. He didn’t want her to love it here. He wanted her to loathe it. To leave it.
To leave it, and him, alone.
But she didn’t. Instead, she elaborated. “When I was a child, my father would bring me to the market.”
It wasn’t a surprise. The market was a destination for London’s upper class—a way to play in the muck of the Garden without having to risk getting dirty. Whit had seen hundreds of nobs coming down from up on high in the market. Thousands of them. As a boy, he’d fleeced them, picked their pockets, led them astray. He’d watched the men with their pristine black suits and the women with their impossibly white frocks and the children, built in the image of their perfect parents.
And he’d hated them.
Hated that, but for an infinitesimal twist of fate, he might have been one of them.
He’d taken great joy in fleecing the rich. He’d lain awake at night, imagining the shock and anger and frustration on their faces when they discovered their pockets sliced, their purses cut, their money frittered away. Their money mig
ht rule the world, but in those moments, here, it was no match for Whit’s cunning. For the Bastards’ power.
“Before everything changed,” she said to the dog, and to him. Before Sedley had been given his peerage, he imagined she meant. He knew what kind of change that would have wrought. He’d wished it for himself once upon a time. More than once. A thousand times, even as he’d stood in this square and spit on the idea of it.
But now, as he watched this woman, cuddling a ball of black fur in her arms, he wondered if he’d ever seen her. If he’d ever watched her from the rafters above, or from behind a market stall. If he’d ever wondered at her strange violet eyes. If he’d ever seen her wide, winning smile and envied it. There had been days when his stomach was so empty of food that he’d fed on envy—and he would have envied Hattie her clean dresses and her happy smiles and her doting father.
He would have envied her life as much as he would have wanted to be a part of it.
Not any longer, of course. He didn’t have time for the daughter of an earl, with a life in Mayfair, slumming in the Garden.
Hattie rubbed her cheek against the puppy’s smooth head, a soft smile on her lips, and he resisted the desire that coursed through him at the idea of that soft touch on him. “There was a farmer who had an ancient stall . . . and in the spring he sold the sweetest, crispest French beans.” She laughed, the sound a pretty sting. “My father would buy me a sack full of them and I’d never get further than the entrance to the market before I had it open, munching away.” She paused, then, full of embarrassment, “He still calls me Bean.”
Whit didn’t want that story. He didn’t want to be charmed by it. He certainly didn’t want to know the silly name her father called her. He didn’t want to think of that little, fair-haired girl, with too-big eyes and a taste for French beans, he didn’t want the memory of those beans somehow on his own tongue.
She bent down, returning the puppy to the basket. His mouth watered.
She straightened, offering a wide smile to the older woman. “Thank you. That was lovely.”
The saleswoman nodded. “Would you like ’un, lady?” She looked to Whit, expectantly, as though a hound was a perfectly ordinary impulse purchase.
“Oh, I would love one,” Hattie said, softly, longingly, as she stared into the basket like the child he’d just been imagining.
For a wild moment, Whit considered buying the whole lot of them, dammit.
“But not today. Today, I merely needed a stroke.”
He nearly choked at the words, so innocent and sweet, and somehow, so fucking filthy in his mind. He growled low and reached into his pocket, extracting a bob and passing it to the older woman. “For you, Rebecca. For humoring the lady.”
The woman dipped a curtsy. “Thank ’e, Beast.”
He caught her eye. “You and I both know those pups shouldn’t be far from their dam just yet. If you and Seth are struggling, you come to Devil and me.”
“We don’t need your charity, Beast.” The words were stern and full of pride. Rebecca’s only son had lost a leg in an accident a year earlier, and the woman grew older by the day, but there were ways to ensure the pair was able to eat.
“I’m not offering charity. We’ll find you both honest work.”
The old woman’s eyes went glassy and her lips thinned as she held back her response; she ultimately nodded once and reached down to collect her basket, setting it on her hip and making her way home through the square. Whit watched for a moment before turning back to Hattie, with her unyielding violet gaze.
He resisted the urge to look away—to hide from those eyes that seemed to see everything. Resisted, too, the urge to ask her what she saw.
She didn’t tell him. Instead, she said, “I have the power to ensure your reimbursement.”
He believed her, even as he knew others wouldn’t. She wouldn’t lie to him. But still, he asked, “How am I to know that?”
“I know enough for both of us,” she said, as though she’d had this conversation a dozen times before. And perhaps she had. Uncertainty threaded through him as she continued. “I know four shipments have been thieved. I know they were worth nearly forty thousand pounds. I know the wagons hijacked were filled with contraband—liquor and fabrics and paper and glass, all smuggled up the Thames and out of Covent Garden without tax and beneath the eye of the Crown.” He hid his surprise from her, remaining silent as she added, “And I am prepared to return those funds.”
Why?
He resisted the urge to ask her. Instead, he crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. “And where will you find forty thousand quid?”
She narrowed her gaze on him. “You think I cannot?”
“That is precisely what I think.”
She nodded and looked around them, darkness finally having cloaked the market square, making it impossible to see farther than a few feet. She stepped closer—so he could see her? Or so others couldn’t?
“I’ll find it where I found the knife I returned,” she said.
That damn knife. The meaning of it. The message. Had she pulled it from the thigh where he’d seated it? Had she cleaned it? How deep was she in her brother’s actions? How involved was she in Ewan’s? Possibly more than he’d thought if she was here now with no protection and Whit’s throwing knife.
And yet . . . when her hands moved to the opening of her shawl, gripping the soft white knit there, he leaned forward, drawn to the movement, to the waft of almonds that came with it. Was she cold? Without thinking, he was reaching for his own coat, to shuck it and give it to her.
She spoke before he could, soft and teasing, and with a touch of . . . was that triumph? “And where I found the others.” She opened the fabric, revealing the dress beneath, the perfect moss green now gray in the twilight, a quiet color befitting a spinster doing a market shop.
But it was not the pale color of the frock that sent want thrumming through Whit, stealing his breath; it was the black leather overlaid on it in thick, sturdy straps. Leather he knew like second skin, because it was his second skin.
Christ.
The woman was wearing his holster. Filled with the rest of his knives, gleaming in the twilight as though they belonged with her—a warrior queen.
And the sight of her, proud and strong and stunning, threatened to put him to his knees.
Chapter Ten
She should have panicked at the way his eyes narrowed when she revealed the rest of the knives. She should have quaked at his penetrating stare, at the way he stilled, like a wild animal, tuning every one of its senses to the racing heartbeat of its prey.
And Hattie’s heart did pound. But not from fear.
From excitement.
She raised a brow and lifted her chin, knowing she tempted fate. “Do you believe I have the power to negotiate a deal now?”
A low growl sounded in Beast’s throat before he said, “Where did you get them?”
She couldn’t tell him that, of course. “I’m here to return them, just as I promised I would return the rest. Every pound.”
He came closer, reached for the edges of her shawl, his rough fingers brushing over her gloves, making her wish she wasn’t wearing them. Her breath was shallow as he pulled it closed around her, hiding his knives and looking about, just as she had done, as though searching for witnesses.
As though this man called Beast might reveal the precise origin of that name.
“You know not what you play at, Lady Henrietta.”
A shiver went through her. She should have been terrified. But she wasn’t. She put her shoulders back. “I’ve no interest in playing. I came to find you, and to apprise you of my plans.”
The Year of Hattie.
He didn’t hesitate. He grasped her hand and pulled her through the marketplace, back the way they’d come. She had a dozen things to say and even more questions to ask, but she remained quiet as he led her down a dark cobblestone street, curving away from the market square, to a sole lant
ern swinging happily above a painted sign. The Singing Sparrow.
“Is this place named for the Singing Sparrow?” The world-renowned singer was revered by Londoners, and was said to have been birthed here, in Covent Garden, where she still sang when she was home from her legendary travels.
With a grunt that might have been confirmation, Whit pushed through the door into the dark tavern, past a handful of men, listing on their chairs. Hattie craned to see the space, tugging at Beast’s grip even as he tightened it, not slowing down as he passed the bar, behind which a great blond man stood, wiping a pint glass. “All right, Beast?”
Another grunt.
The man, who sounded American, turned to Hattie. “All right, miss?”
She smiled brightly. “He doesn’t speak much.”
The American blinked his surprise. “No, he doesn’t.”
“I speak enough for both of us.”
“There’s no both of us,” Beast growled, before opening a door on the far side of the room, pulling her inside, and closing them in—and the barkeep’s laughter out.
She took in the large stockroom filled with crates and casks, illuminated by a small torch high in one corner. “Do you make a habit of commandeering tavern storage rooms?”
“Do you make a habit of commandeering men’s weapons?”
“I hadn’t, until now. But I will admit, they came in quite useful.” His gaze narrowed on her, intense enough to steal her breath. He stepped toward her, and she wondered if he could hear her heart beating in her chest. It seemed he should. It seemed all of London should be able to hear the thunder of it.
“Take them off.”
The growl sizzled through her, and for a wild, mad moment she thought he meant something other than the knives. Something like her clothes.
For a wild, mad moment, she almost did it.
Thankfully—thankfully?—she returned to her senses.
Or did she?
“Not yet.” The reply didn’t seem sensible at all. Not as the words flew from her lips and certainly not when he stepped closer, close enough for the heat of him to envelop her. It had been the first thing she’d noticed about him, that warmth, and now he threatened to incinerate her.
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