Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(10)

She filled the silence, as he was discovering she was wont to do. “I suppose you’re not going to tell me your name? I know it’s not Nelson.”

“Because I’m too much to be Nelson.”

“Because you do not match my qualifications. You are altogether too broad in the shoulder and too long in the leg and not charming, and certainly not at all affable.”

“You’ve made a list of qualifications for a hound, not a fuck.”

She did not take the bait. “And all that before we even consider your face.”

What the hell was wrong with his face? In thirty-one years, he’d never had a complaint, and this wild woman was going to change that? “My face.”

“Quite,” she said, the word coming like a speeding carriage. “I requested a face that wasn’t so . . .”

Whit hung on the pause. Now the woman decided to stop talking?

She shook her head and he resisted the urge to curse. “Never mind. The point is, I didn’t request you and I didn’t attack you. I had nothing to do with you turning up unconscious in my carriage. Though, to be honest, you are beginning to strike me as the kind of man who might well deserve a whack to the head.”

“I don’t believe you were a part of the assault.”

“Good. Because I wasn’t.”

“Who was?”

Beat. “I don’t know.”

Lie.

She was protecting someone. The carriage belonged to someone she trusted, or she wouldn’t have used it to bring her here. Father? No. Impossible. Even this madwoman wouldn’t use her father’s coachman to ferry her to a brothel in the middle of Covent Garden. Coachmen talked.

Lover? For a fleeting moment he considered the possibility that she was not simply working with his enemy, but sleeping with him. Whit didn’t like the distaste that came with the idea before reason arrived.

No. Not a lover. She wouldn’t be in a brothel if she had a lover. She wouldn’t have kissed Whit if she had a lover.

And she had kissed him, soft and sweet and inexperienced.

There was no lover.

But still, she was loyal to the enemy.

“I think you do know who tied me up in that carriage, Hattie,” he said softly, approaching her, a thrum of awareness coursing through him as he realized she was nearly his height, her chest rising and falling in staccato rhythm above the line of her dress, the muscles of her throat working as she listened. “And I think you know I intend to have a name.”

Her eyes narrowed on him in the dim light. “Is that a threat?” He didn’t reply, and in the silence, she seemed to calm, her breath evening out as her shoulders straightened. “I don’t take kindly to threats. This is the second time you have interrupted my evening, sir. You would do well to remember that it was I who saved your hide earlier.”

The change in her was remarkable. “You nearly killed me.”

She scoffed. “Please. You were perfectly agile. I saw you tumble your way from the carriage like it wasn’t the first time you’d been tossed from one.” She paused. “It wasn’t, was it?”

“That doesn’t mean I am looking to make a habit of it.”

“The point is, without me, you could be dead in a ditch. A reasonable gentleman would thank me kindly and take himself elsewhere at this point.”

“You are unlucky, then, that I am not that.”

“Reasonable?”

“A gentleman.”

She gave a little surprised chuckle at that. “Well, as we are currently in a brothel, I think neither of us can claim much gentility.”

“That wasn’t on your list of qualifications?”

“Oh, it was,” she said, “But I expected more the approximation of gentility rather than the actuality of it. But there’s the rub; I have plans, approximations be damned, and I’m not letting you ruin them.”

“The plans you spoke of before tossing me out of a carriage.”

“I didn’t toss you.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “All right, I tossed you. But you fared perfectly well.”

“No thanks to you.”

“I don’t have the information you want.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. “How very rude.”

“Take your mask off.”

“No.”

His lips twitched at the unyielding reply. “What is the Year of Hattie?”

She lifted her chin in defiance, but stayed silent. Whit gave a little grunt and moved across the room to the champagne, returning to fill her glass. When the task was done, he returned the bottle to its place and leaned back against the windowsill, watching her fidget.

She was always in motion, smoothing skirts or playing at her sleeve—he drank in the long line of the dress, the way it wrapped her unruly curves and made promises that a man wished she would keep. The candlelight teased over her skin, gilding her. This was not a woman who took tea. This was a woman who took the sun.

She had money, clearly. And power. A woman required both in spades for entry to 72 Shelton—even knowing the place existed required a network that did not come easily. There were a thousand reasons why she might wish access, and Whit had heard them all. Boredom, dissatisfaction, recklessness. But he couldn’t see any of those in Hattie. She wasn’t an impetuous girl—she was old enough to know her mind and to make her choices. Nor was she plain, or a dilettante.