In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,26

admitted and you saw me, Mr. Bragger felled you.”

Hugh’s sore jaw worked several times. “I’m not being polite.” That would be the first time he’d been accused of that sentiment.

“Yes, well, given that you’re bellowing, I’d certainly say you are not. I was referring to—”

“What in hell are you doing here?” he snapped.

Lila the Flittermouse jumped, then spoke on a rush. “You told me to return when you weren’t seeing to business so we might continue our discussion.”

So they might continue their discussion? What in hell? Hugh considered Lila. If she had so much as half a brain in her head, she would have dashed off.

“I failed to anticipate that you’d still be working. We should have settled on a time when we last met.”

Silence hung in the fighting ring.

It was the more loquacious of their trio that broke the impasse. “This isn’t working,” Bragger called, pulling the young woman’s attention from Hugh over to him.

“I . . . it certainly seems like fighting.”

“Aye, it is.” Bragger toweled off his face. “But this?” He grinned coldly. “This is pleasure.”

This is pleasure . . .

To every other man who stepped through these doors, including the very ones who owned it. Except for Hugh. This place, an empire of almost nothing, was as much a curse as a blessing.

Lila shivered; at that slight tremble, her muslin cloak rustled noisily. “Thank you for that clarification.”

Bragger chuckled. “Proper lady, this one is.”

“I don’t have dealings with the nobility,” Hugh Savage said coolly. “I don’t trust them.”

“Ahem.” The flittermouse cleared her throat and settled her focus on Hugh. “As I was saying, I’ve come so that we might resume our discussion.”

Bragger grabbed a towel from the wall and tossed it over to Hugh.

“That wasn’t a discussion,” Hugh said, wiping the blood and sweat from his face.

“Then what would you call it?”

Hugh ignored her question. “And that was your takeaway last evening, Flittermouse? That I wanted you around?”

She nodded. “Just not in the evening, during your fight-club hours.”

It appeared he’d not been so very clear with the woman, after all.

From over her shoulder, he caught Bragger’s keen gaze watching them. “Get out.”

The young woman brought her shoulders back. “I . . . I don’t think I will.”

“Not you,” he gritted out between clenched teeth. “Actually . . . yes, you, too. All of you, get out.”

Both of his former fighting foes took themselves off, laughing uproariously as they went. Lila folded her hands primly before her, but remained affixed to her spot.

She’d not fled.

Even as she should have. Even as she’d seen the violence Hugh had told her he was capable of.

It proved the greatest twist of irony that he’d managed to run off two of the toughest street fighters in East London . . . and the flittermouse remained. “I can’t decide if you’re brave,” he muttered, “or stupid.”

The young woman shoved her hood back. “I far prefer the former.” Her gaze fell to his bloodstained knuckles, and he balled them tightly at his sides.

“Well, the only thing to convince me it isn’t the latter is if you leave.” When she made no move to heed that order but rather stared on, transfixed, at his hands, he snapped, “Now.”

“I’m afraid I cannot”—this time, she directed those words not to the digits that had unleashed ruthlessness this morn, but rather at his naked chest. Her already enormous brown eyes formed perfect moons in her face. With a little squeak, she directed her eyes up at the ceiling—“do thaaat,” she said, her voice pitched several shades higher, emerging slightly garbled.

He gave his head a bemused shake. Leave it to Lila the Flittermouse to be more fazed by his damned naked chest than the evidence of earlier bloodshed. Being an object of horror wasn’t an unfamiliar one. Women had alternately been gripped with a perverse fascination by his heavily scarred body or had run off screaming. “Not at all shocking, the flittermouse squeaks,” he taunted.

Lila took that for the challenge it was. She lowered her head until their gazes met. She didn’t steal so much as another glance at his naked chest, but neither did she run, and it answered that question he’d been asking himself since they’d met several hours earlier: she was brave. “They are bats.”

Of their own volition, his brows drew together. What in blazes was she on about?

“It is just, following our meeting last evening—”

“This morning.” And any other woman, nay, person, for that matter, would have been soundly sleeping following the hours this