Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards 2)

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 might 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.