“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.”
“And he didn’t give you permission to use it whenever you like.”
He had, as a matter of fact, but Hattie had no interest in having such an argument. “Oh, but he’s allowed you full permission to kidnap men and leave them tied up inside of it?”
They both looked to Nora in the wake of the question. Nora, who had moved to fill the teakettle. “Don’t mind me. I’m barely paying attention.”
“I wasn’t going to leave him there.”
Hattie spun toward her brother. “What were you going to do with him?”
“I don’t know.”
She caught her breath at the hesitation in the words. “Were you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know!”
Her brother was many things, but a criminal mastermind was not one of them. “Good God, Augie—what are you into? You think a man like that would simply disappear—possibly die—and no one would come looking for you?” Hattie pressed on. “You’re damn lucky all you did was knock him out! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking he put a knife in me!” He waved at his bandaged thigh. “The one in your hand!”
She tightened her fingers around the hilt and shook her head. “Not until you went after him.” He didn’t deny it. “Why?” He didn’t answer. Lord deliver her from men who decide to wield silence like a weapon. She huffed her f
rustration. “It seems to me that you must have deserved it, Augie. He doesn’t seem the kind of man who goes around stabbing people who don’t deserve it.”
Everything stilled, the only sound in the room the fire beneath Nora’s kettle. “Hattie—” She closed her eyes and looked away from her brother. “What would you know of what kind of man he is?”
“I spoke with him.”
More than that.
I kissed him.
“What?” Augie came off the table with a wince. “Why?!”
Because I wanted to.
“Well, I was rather relieved he wasn’t dead, August.”
Augie ignored the warning in her words. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Who is he?” She waited.
He began to pace the length of the kitchen. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
“Augie!” she said firmly, summoning his attention again. “Who is he?”
“You don’t know?”
She shook her head. “I know he calls himself Beast.”
“That’s all anyone calls him. He’s Beast. And his brother is Devil.”
Nora coughed.
Hattie cut her a look. “I thought you weren’t listening.”
“Of course I’m listening. Those are ridiculous names.”
Hattie nodded. “Agreed. No one is called Beast or Devil outside of gothic novels. And even then—”
Augie had no patience for her jest. “These two are called that. They’re brothers—criminals. Though I shouldn’t have to tell you that, considering he stabbed me.”
She tilted her head. “What kind of criminals?”
“What kind of—” Augie looked to the ceiling. “Christ, Hattie. Does it matter?”
“Even if it didn’t, I should like to know the answer,” Nora said from her spot by the stove.
“Smugglers. The Bareknuckle Bastards.”
Hattie inhaled at the words. She might not have known what the men called themselves, but she knew of the Bareknuckle Bastards—the most powerful men in East London, possibly the rest of London as well. They were whispered about in the Docklands, only ever moving the cargo from their ships under cover of night, and paying a premium for the men with the strongest hooks.
“Also a ridiculous name,” Nora said while pouring her tea. “Who are they?”
Hattie looked to her brother. “They’re ice dealers.”
“Ice smugglers,” he corrected her. “Brandy and bourbon and other things, too. Silks, playing cards, dice. Whatever Britain taxes, they move beneath the Crown’s notice. And they’ve earned the monikers you two think are silly. Devil’s the charming one, but quick to take your head if he thinks you’ve been doing disservice in Covent Garden. And Beast—” Hattie moved forward during Augie’s pause. “They say Beast is—”
He cut himself off, looking unnerved.
Looking frightened.
“What?” Hattie said, desperate for him to finish. When he did not reply, she forced a scoff. “King of the jungle?”
He met her eyes. “They say that once he comes for you, he does not rest until he’s found you.”
A shiver went through her at the words. At the truth in them.
I shall find you.
The words made an excellent promise and a terrible threat.
“Augie, if what you’re saying is true—”
“It is.”
“Then what on earth makes you think you can go up against such men? That you could steal from them? That you could hurt them?”
For a moment, she thought he would balk at the question. At the suggestion that he was no match for these men. But he wasn’t. There were few men in the world who were matches for the one she’d met earlier that evening. And that was without his knife in their thigh.
Augie seemed to know that. Because instead of masculine bluster, he lowered his voice and said, “I need help.”
“Of course he does.” The snide comment came from the stove.
“Shut up, Nora,” Augie said. “This isn’t your business.”
“It shouldn’t be Hattie’s, either,” Nora pointed out. “And yet, here we are.”
Hattie held up a hand. “Stop it. Both of you.”
They did, miraculously.
She turned to Augie. “Speak.”
“I lost a shipment.”
Hattie’s brows furrowed and she considered the ships’ logs she’d left on her desk earlier in the day. No shipments were missing from her father’s records. “What do you mean, lost?”
“Remember the tulips?” She shook her head. There hadn’t been tulips in a cargo since—“It was in the summer,” he added.
The ship had come in laden with tulip bulbs, fresh from Antwerp, already marked for estates across Britain. Augie had been responsible for the cargo and the delivery. The first he’d overseen after their father had announced his plan to pass on the business. The first her father had insisted Augie manage from start to finish—to prove his mettle.
“I lost them.”
It didn’t make sense. She’d seen the shipment marked unloaded in the books. The overland transport had been marked complete. “Lost them where?”
“I thought—” He shook his head. “I didn’t know they had to be delivered immediately. I put it off. I couldn’t find the men to do the job when it came in. They were working other cargo, and so I let them sit.”
“In the warehouse,” she said.
He nodded.
“In the dead of London summer.” Wet London summer.
Another nod.
She sighed. “For how long?”
“I don’t know. For Christ sakes, Hattie, it wasn’t beef. It was fucking tulips. How was I to know they’d go to rot?”
Hattie thought she showed immense restraint when she wanted to say, You’d know they’d go to rot if you’d ever paid an ounce of attention to the business. “And then what?”
“I knew we’d have to return the payment to the customers. I knew he’d be furious.” Their father would have raged, and he would have been right to do so. A full hold of good Dutch tulips was worth at least ten thousand pounds. Losing it would have cost them goodwill and enough money to matter.
But they hadn’t lost it. Somehow, Augie had hidden it. Dread spiraled low in her stomach. “Augie . . . what did you do?”
He shook his head, looking down at his feet. “It was only supposed to be once.”
Hattie turned to Nora, who had given up any pretense of not paying attention. When her friend shrugged her shoulders, she turned back to her brother and said, “What was only supposed to be once?”
“I had to pay the debt to the customers. Without Father discovering it. And then there was a way.” He looked up, met her gaze. “I came upon their delivery route.”
He took something of mine. Beast’s words earlier.
Nora let out a soft curse.
Hattie sucked in a breath. “You stole from him.”
“It was only—”
She cut him off. “How many times?”
He hesitated. “I paid the debt with the first one.”
“But you didn’t stop.” Augie opened his mouth. Closed it. Of course he hadn’t stopped. It was Hattie’s turn to curse. “How many times?”
He met her eyes, and she saw the fear in them. “Tonight was the fourth.”
“Four times.” She gave a little humorless laugh. “You’ve robbed them four times . . . It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”
“Hang on,” Nora said from her place across the kitchen. “How did you subdue that man?”
He scowled at her. “What does that mean?”
She cut him a look. “Augie. That man was twice as broad as you on your very broadest day. And you have a knife in your thigh.”
He looked as though he might argue, then admitted, “Russell knocked him out.”
Of course those two had made a mess of this. And now, as usual, it fell to Hattie to clear it up. “It should be illegal for the two of you to speak to e
ach other. You make each other less intelligent.” She looked to the ceiling, mind racing, then said on a sigh, “You’ve made a hash of it.”
“I know,” her brother said, and she wondered if he truly did.
“What you told me about him? The Beast?” Augie met her eyes, trepidation in his own. “He’s coming for you, Augie. It’s a miracle he hasn’t found you yet. But tonight—what you did—it was immensely stupid. What would possess you to tie him up? In the carriage?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I’d been stabbed. And Russell . . .”
“Ah, yes. Russell.” She stopped him. “He’s through, too. This ends now. We don’t sell another drop of their cargo. Where is the cargo you took tonight?”
“Russell took it to our buyer.”
She cocked a brow. “Another brilliant tactician, no doubt. Who is that?”
If possible, her brother grew even paler. “I won’t have you involved with him.”
“As though I am not in deep enough with you?”
Augie shook his head. “You’ve no idea how deep you could find yourself. The man is barely sane.”
“Now you find your sense of familial preservation?” Hattie resisted the urge to scream. “I suppose I should be grateful that our most pressing foe is merely vengeful, not mad.”
“I’m sorry,” Augie said.
“No, you’re not,” Hattie retorted. “If I had to guess, you’re happy I’m willing to fix this. And I can fix this.”
Augie stilled. “You can?”
“I can,” she said, the plan crystallizing. The path forward. And then—her path. “I can.”
“How?” It wasn’t the worst question in the world. She looked to Nora, whose brows were nearly in her hairline in a silent echo of Augie’s question.
Hattie straightened her shoulders, more certain than ever. “We make a deal for the cargo. We share the income from our shipments until he’s paid.”
“It won’t be enough.”
“It will be.” She’d make it enough. She’d promise him no more hijackings. And income. With interest. If he was a businessman, he’d recognize a good deal when he saw it. Killing Augie wouldn’t bring back his lost cargo, and it would bring the Crown down upon his head—something smugglers would not care for.
But money—money was real. She’d convince him of it.
She met her brother’s blue eyes. “You stay out of it.”
Brazen and the Beast Page 6
