Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards 2)

“Russell said—”

Hattie shook her head, cleaning the wound, enjoying her brother’s hissing curse more than she should. “I don’t care. Russell is a brute and you should have left the knife in.” She knocked twice on the worktable. “Lie back.”

Augie groaned. “I am bleeding.”

“Yes, I see that,” Hattie replied. “But as you are conscious, it would make my work a darn sight easier if you were lying flat.”

Augie lay back. “Be quick about it.”

“No one would blame you for taking your time,” Nora said, approaching with a biscuit tin in hand.

“Go home, Nora,” Augie snapped.

“Why would I do that when I am so enjoying myself here?” She extended the biscuit tin to Hattie. “Would you like one?”

She shook her head, focused on the injury, now clean. “You’re lucky the blade was so sharp. This should stitch well.” She extracted a needle and thread from the box. “Hold still.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Not more than the knife did.”

Nora snickered and Augie scowled. “That’s unkind.” He followed the words with a hiss as Hattie began the work of closing up the wound. “I can’t believe he hit his mark.”

Hattie’s breath caught in her throat. Beast. “Who?”

He shook his head. “No one.”

“Can’t be no one, Aug,” Nora pointed out, mouth full of biscuit. “You’ve a hole in you.”

“Yes. I noticed that.” Another hiss as Hattie continued stitching.

“What are you into, Augie?”

“Nothing.” She pressed the needle more firmly on the next stitch. “Dammit!”

She met her brother’s pale blue gaze. “What have you gotten us all into?”

His gaze slid away. Guilty. Because whatever he’d done, whatever had put him in danger that night—it put them all in danger. Not just Augie. Their father. The business.

Hattie. All the plans she’d made and everything she had set in motion for the Year of Hattie. Business. Home. Fortune. Future. And, if the man with whom she’d made a deal was involved, it threatened the rest—body.

Frustration thrummed through her, making her want to scream. To shake him until he told her the truth that had landed a knife in his thigh. That had landed an unconscious man in her carriage. And God knew what else.

Another stitch.

Another.

She stayed quiet, and seethed.

Not six months earlier, their father had summoned Augie and Hattie to him, informing them both that he was no longer able to manage the business he’d built into an empire. The earl had grown too old to work the ships, to manage the men. To keep watch over the ins and outs of the business. And so he offered them the only solution a man with a life peerage and a working business had—inheritance.

Both children had grown up in the rigging of the Sedley ships; both of them had spent their early years—those before their father had been offered a title—at their father’s heels, learning the business of shipping. Both had learned to heft a sail. To tie a knot.

But only one of them had learned well.

Unfortunately, that one was the girl.

So their father had given Augie the chance to prove himself, and for the last six months Hattie had worked the hardest she’d ever worked to do the same—to prove herself worthy of assuming control of the business, all while Augie rested on his laurels, biding his time until their father decided to hand the whole thing over to his son for no reason other than because Augie was male and that was how inheritance was done.

There was no other way to intuit the earl’s reasoning:

The men on the docks need a firm hand.

As though Hattie didn’t have the strength to manage them.

The shipments need an able body.

As though Hattie was too soft for the work.

You’re good, girl, and with a head for it to be sure . . .

A compliment, but never spoken as such.

. . . but what if a man comes along?

That one was the most insidious. It was the one that shouted spinster and underscored it. It was the one that effortlessly pointed out that women weren’t for life if they could be for men instead.

And worse, it was the one that told her that her father didn’t believe in her.

Which, of course, he didn’t. No matter how many times she assured him that her life was for her alone, and not for a marriage. Instead, the earl would return to his work and say, “It’s not right, girl.”

She’d set out to prove him wrong. Devising strategies for increased revenue. Keeping books and tallying records and spending time with the men on the docks, so when she had a chance to lead them, they’d trust her. And they’d follow.

And tonight, the Year of Hattie began. The year when she secured everything for which she’d worked so hard. She’d just needed a bit of help setting it in motion—help one might think would have been more easily procured.

She’d had every intention of returning home to tell her father that marriage was no longer in her cards. That she’d ruined herself. She wasn’t thrilled that she’d returned with her virginity still intact, but she was more than happy to report she’d found an ideal gentleman to take care of the situation.

Well. Perhaps not a gentleman.

Beast.

The name came on a hot flood of pleasure, entirely inappropriate and not easily ignored. But she did her best.

Even he had been a means to an end.

And somehow, Augie had gone and gotten himself stabbed by the same man.

She let her brother stay quiet while she finished stitching and bandaging him . . . a process that would have gone much faster if he’d lay still and stop whining.

She let him stay quiet while she washed her hands in the great sink, and while she sent a servant to the apothecary to fetch herbs to stave off fever.

She let him stay quiet when she returned to the table and reached for the discarded knife’s hilt, gleaming and black, a silver design inlaid within, like honeycomb. While she traced the metalwork.

And then she picked up the knife, testing its weight, and met his eyes again. “You’re going to tell me what you’re into.”

Augie was a portrait of arrogant bluster. “Why would I do that?”

“Because I found him.”

His eyes shot wide as he struggled to find a reply. “Who?”

“You insult us both with that question. I also let him go.”

Augie shot to his feet, wincing with the movement. “Why would you do that?”

“Because he was in my carriage, and we had somewhere to be.”

Augie scowled at her and then Nora. “I think you mean my carriage.”

Hattie huffed her frustration at him. “If we are parsing words, then it is neither of our carriage. It belongs to Father.”

“And will eventually belong to me,” Augie said, as though it were not a question.

Hattie swallowed her distaste at the words. It had never occurred to him that Hattie might do a better job of running the business. Or that she might know more about the business than he did. It had never occurred to him that he might not receive precisely what he desired the precise moment that he thought to have it. “But for now, it belongs to Father.”