it not? Romance, as preferred, purchased and packaged.
Champagne and petits fours and a four-poster bed.
Suddenly very ridiculous.
She gave a little nervous laugh. There was no way she was eating canapés or petits fours. Not without immediately casting them up from her roiling stomach. But champagne—perhaps champagne was just the thing.
She poured herself a glass and drank it down like lemon water, warmth spreading through her faster than she’d expected. Warmth and just enough courage to propel her across the room to pull the bell. To summon Nelson. Exceedingly-thorough-like-the-war-hero Nelson.
She supposed there were worse names for the man who would rid her of her virginity.
Hattie pulled the bell—silent in the room, but ringing in some faraway place in the mysterious building, where Hattie imagined a passel of handsome men waited to provide exceeding thoroughness, like horses at a racing start. She grinned at the wild image, at faceless Nelson—wearing a full uniform and an admiral’s hat for lack of more creative imagining—leaping to movement at the sound, running toward her, long legs taking stairs two, perhaps three at a time, huffing his breath in the race to get to her.
How should she be arranged when he got here? Should she be at the window? Would he want to see her standing up? To assess the situation? She wasn’t wild about that thought.
Which left a chair by the fireplace, or the bed.
She highly doubted he’d wish to converse with her. Indeed, she was not certain that she was interested in being conversed with. This was a means to an end, after all.
So. The bed it was.
Should she lie down? That seemed rather forward, though, truthfully, she’d likely passed forward somewhere between seeking out 72 Shelton Street months ago and hitching the carriage that evening. She’d fully lost sight of forward while kissing a man in her carriage.
And for a wild moment, it wasn’t a faceless admiral who raced toward her. It was a different kind of man entirely. Beautifully faced. With perfect features and amber eyes and dark brows and lips that were softer than she’d ever imagined lips could be.
She cleared her throat and pushed the thought away, returning to the question at hand. Lying down felt wrong, as did sitting, ankles crossed, on this bed. Perhaps there was a middle ground? A seductive lean of some kind?
Ugh. Hattie had never been seductive in her life.
She perched on the most dimly lit corner of the bed and leaned back, wrapping an arm about the post to keep herself steady, pressing herself to it, willing herself to look like the kind of woman who did this sort of thing all the time. A seductress who knew her desires and her preferences. Someone who understood phrases like exceedingly thorough.
And then the door was opening and her heart was pounding, and a great shadowed figure was entering, and he wasn’t wearing an admiral’s hat or a uniform. Or anything remotely dapper. He was wearing black. An immense amount of black.
He was inside then, and the light cast his perfect face in a warm, golden glow.
Her heart stopped and she straightened, overcompensating for her shifting position, nearly tossing herself straight off the bed.
He moved with singular grace, as though he hadn’t been unconscious in her carriage an hour earlier. As though she hadn’t dispatched him from it. Her gaze traced over him, checking for scrapes and bruises, for aches and pains from his fall. Nothing.
She swallowed, grateful for the low light. “You’re not Nelson.”
He did not reply. The door closed behind him.
And they were alone.
Chapter Four
She should have been a needle in a haystack.
She should have disappeared.
She should have been one of a thousand women, in a thousand carriages, scurrying like scorpions through the darker corners of London, unseen by the ordinary men of the world beyond.
And she would have been just that, except Whit wasn’t an ordinary man. He was a Bareknuckle Bastard—a king of London’s shadows, with scores of spies posted in the darkness—and nothing happened on his turf without him knowing it. It was laughably easy for his wide-reaching network of lookouts to find the single black carriage headed into the night.
They’d been following it before he took to the rooftops. They had its location as quickly as they’d had the information they’d known he’d want. The shipment he’d been driving was gone, the outriders who had been attacked were alive, and their attackers were disappeared. Unidentified.
But not for long.
The woman would lead him to the enemy—an enemy for whom the Bareknuckle