Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(108)

He was going to marry Henrietta Sedley.

Nothing had changed, and somehow everything had.

So it was unfortunate but expected that, when he suggested the idea, it was less of a question and more of a command, but he certainly hadn’t expected what came next. He hadn’t expected her to go still against him, as though the words had been a blow. And he hadn’t expected her to lift her head slowly, moving the way one might around a rabid dog.

And he certainly hadn’t expected her to say, simply, as though he’d asked her if she would like tea, “No.”

What in hell?

“Why not?”

“Because I love you.”

His breath caught at the words, the ones he’d wanted so desperately earlier, but he could not bask in the pleasure of them. He was too concerned about the rest. “Dammit, that’s a reason to marry me, Hattie.”

“Not if you can’t love me back.” She paused. “Not if you can’t love me as your equal. Can you?”

Yes. No.

Not the way she wanted.

Goddammit.

Fear spread through him, hot and unpleasant. He knew what she meant by equal. He’d heard her proposal of partnership.

But if they were partners, he couldn’t keep her safe—not from Ewan, and not from anything else.

If he loved her, he’d lose her.

She sat up in his silence, reaching for her clothes, and he hated that they were here again—her dressing and him feeling like he’d been smacked over the head with a tea service in a blow he absolutely deserved.

Coming to her knees, she tugged her skirts over her full hips and pulled the bodice around her before saying, quietly, “I don’t wish to force the issue. I don’t wish to be the person you maybe love. The one it takes thought to know you love.” She paused. “I wish to be the answer that pours from your lips—no matter how stoic you are. I wish to be the person you cannot save for high days and holidays, because you want me by your side on all the other days.”

She was too precious for the other days.

“I deserve that. Partnership. Equality. You taught me that.” She gave him a little smile. “I know that’s impossible. And so, no . . . I won’t marry you.”

There was such emotion in the words, sadness and resignation and honesty, as though she’d known these words long before she’d had cause to speak them. As though she’d been prepared for them. God, he hated the idea that she’d been prepared for them.

“Hattie.” He stood, pulling his trousers up and finding his shirt, pulling it on over his head. “You don’t understand.”

She sighed and said, “I don’t wish to be rivals. I wish to be . . .” She shook her head, and he loathed it. “I shall release the men tomorrow.” She waved in the direction of his pocket. “I assume you have a watch to confirm it, but I imagine it is too late to bring all the hooks back to work tonight.”

He extracted a watch, barely registering the warm metal that backed it as he read the time. “It’s six minutes to ten.”

She looked up from tightening the lacing of her bodice to look down the dock to the ship sitting lower in the water than all the others. “You should be half done with your unloading—all that ice on wagons trundling through the city.”

“Not half. But you’re not far off. Hattie—”

She cut him off. “I’ll release them tomorrow,” she said again.

“How did you do it? Lock them down?”

She smiled. “You’re not the only one with loyal friends, Beast.”

The moniker thrummed through him. “I believe that without question.” He wished she counted him among them. “It’s not often someone calls me that without fear in the word.”

“I am not afraid of you.”

He knew that. And it gave him more pleasure than he could say. He cast about for the right words. “You have always been fearless. Always knowing what you want and how you intend to get it. Never allowing others to set you on a path.” He paused, then told her the truth. “I have never had that fearlessness.”

Her brow furrowed and he pressed on, shaking his head. “All I am is fear. I was forged in it. Made in the terror that one day, someone I love would face danger, and I would not be able to save them.” He exhaled on a shuddering breath. “I can’t keep you safe.”

Her beautiful violet eyes did not waver. “Of course you can’t.” The words cut through him like a blade. “There is nothing fearless about me. I am scared every day. I fear the wide world and the way it stares at me and sneers at me and whispers about me when it thinks I cannot hear. I fear a life of half measures, full of shadows of emotions and hints of possibilities and a thousand things I might have had if only I’d reached a bit farther.”

He shook his head. “That’s not a life you’ll ever have.”

He’d make sure of it.

Tears sprang in her beautiful violet eyes, and an ache started in Whit’s chest. Why was she crying? “There was a time when I wanted marriage, you know. When I wanted children and domestic idyll. Of course I did. It’s what women are told we should want from birth. Our fathers tell us, and our brothers, and the world around us. Except, when you’re like me—too loud and too big and with too many ideas—you can’t have the dreams everyone insists you must have. Because they aren’t really for you.”