Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards 2)

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 memory 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.