Chapter 15
She stood by the bar and watched as he stoked the fire.
There was something very pleasing indeed about the way he stacked the planks of wood, methodical and precise, layering kindling in between the patterns he made.
He had left his jacket over the chaise, and she could see the muscles in his back move as he went about his task, kneeling and prodding at the pile until the spark caught and began to smoke.
It had so captured her interest that it had interrupted her own removal of her winter layers, her hand stilled on the button at her throat that held her stole in place, her lip caught between her teeth.
When he turned back around and saw her, his eyes fell immediately to both details and his shoulders sagged, as though she were holding such a pose deliberately to torment him.
It made her laugh.
She turned and shrugged her stole off, draping it over the nearest barstool, and went to work unbuttoning the pelisse underneath with her back to him, allowing him a chance to regain whatever dignity he felt he had lost at finding her admiring him so as she slid the garment from her shoulders.
She felt him arrive behind her, his shadow falling over her body, his breath close enough to warm the nape of her neck. She did not move. She did not dare.
He inhaled her, the warmed air from the fire coaxing loose the frozen scent of her perfume from the strands of her hair. His body radiated heat against her back, so close, so like being touched, but he did not reach out. He did not close the gap between them.
She closed her eyes for the briefest moment and let herself feel it. Let herself revel in it.
When he stepped away, she sighed. She opened her eyes and watched him move across the room, watched him take a seat far from her, in that same chaise where he’d put his coat.
“Why do you run from me?” she asked, turning and leaning back against the bar. “What have I done to push you away?”
He did not answer immediately, those dark eyes glittering in the firelight as he watched her from across the room. He took a breath, stretching one shoulder and then the other. “Hannah, if I let myself get any closer to you, I couldn’t account for what I’d do.”
“Couldn’t you?” she asked, blinking. “It isn’t as though we haven’t … indulged in temptation before.”
His lips thinned, his fingers flexing where they rested on his knees. “That should not have happened,” he said grimly, “and I know I owe you an apology for it.”
“An apology?!” she scoffed, laughing aloud. “Hardly! Thaddeus, I want more of that immediately. Right now, if you please.”
He made a soft little sound, his eyes shutting for a moment. “Please do not tempt me right now, girl,” he said. “Not before I can say my piece.”
“You could always say your piece after I tempt you,” she replied with a little smirk. “But, fine. Go ahead. I shall settle for the pleasure of your voice for now.”
She pulled out a barstool and climbed into it, resting her elbows on her knees and framing her face in her hands. “Go on,” she prompted, knowing that he was watching every little move she made, and thrilling in the knowledge of it.
He leaned back, his big frame spanning the chaise in shadow. “What is it you think you want from me, Hannah?” he asked in that velvety basso, lacing his fingers together loosely in front of him. “I suppose we should start with that.”
She gave him a small, slow smile. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I want all of you. Everything. I thought I had made that clear.”
He did not move, his dark eyes watching hers. “You want to be my wife, you mean? Hannah, is that even possible?”
“Possible? Why wouldn’t it be?” She tilted her head in her hands, drumming her fingers across her chin. “What on earth do you mean?”
He sighed. “I will not take you away from your family and have you cast out of your community for me. I cannot think they would approve.”
“Oh, that,” she replied, straightening with a grimace. “That is what all this has been about? Because I am Jewish? That is why you have been acting this way? All this time? Really?”
He almost smiled at her, a little laugh and a shake of his head. “No. It isn’t. It just seemed like the easiest thing to start with, and now I sound like an ass, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do,” she said, frowning.
He sighed. “What would I have to do to marry you? Convert?”
She was the one who laughed then, slapping a hand up over her mouth in an attempt to stop it.
“No! God, no. No. Thaddeus, please.” She took a breath and shook her head.
“If this were really an issue, do you think my parents would have debuted me to the whole of British Society? Do you think my father would have brought me to Blackcove? We are … it is not an issue.”
“No?” He looked skeptical. “They debuted you to the social elite, Hannah, not to the likes of me.”
“Thaddeus, I assure you, married is better than not,” she said dryly. “My mother sent me out into the world months ago explicitly with the blessing to seek out the gentile man I was clearly in love with and to see if he wanted me back. They know. It is fine.”
He was quiet for a long moment after that. He watched her. He digested it.
“In love with,” he repeated softly, after a time.
“Yes,” she said. “Since Blackcove.”
He shook his head, like she didn’t know what she was saying.
The fire spit in the hearth, though Hannah could not say if it was in agreement or protest of his hard-headedness.
“Do you know what I was doing at Blackcove?” he asked. “Did Ember ever tell you?”
“No,” Hannah replied. “Playing games with money, I presumed.”
He chuckled. “Yes. And no. Hannah, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.
A lot of unflattering, unpleasant, truthful things that I think might blow away the regard you have for me that I am not entirely certain I deserve.
And I know I should tell you all of it. I am going to tell you all of it.
But Jesus, I really don’t want to. I want you to keep looking at me like that until the day I die. ”
“If you think,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “that you can tell me a single bloody thing from two years ago that is going to change how I look at you today, then you must really be a fool. After all of this. After everything.”
“Just hear it,” he said, holding one of his hands up, one of those scarred hands, big and warm. “Just hear it first.”
“Fine,” she said, and leaned back in the stool, crossing her arms. “Speak.”
He smiled again like he couldn’t quite help it, a little shake of his head as his eyes scanned her posture.
He took a breath and forced himself to sober, leaning forward and nodding.
“All right, so first you should know that I was born very, very poor. Worse than many of the folk you’ve seen at the tenement.
I began life with nothing. My father was a bareknuckle boxer with a drinking problem and my mother sold flowers in Covent Garden.
I helped put food on the table from a very young age carrying link torches. It was not an easy life.”
She blinked. She nodded.
“Reed, Matthew, and I started running games to make extra money very young,” he said, “but I was the best at it. Reed lived in a brothel, and that was where we set up most days, but eventually, I found a shuttered gaming hell in St. James with a broken latch that we could break into through the cellar. This was around the time my mother died. I was making an amount of money that would have made her weep doing this, enough for years and years of flower stall work day after day. Enough to get my sister sent off somewhere safe, clean, and respectable to be educated and to start tucking away money and actually thinking about a real future.”
“Goodness,” she said, covering her mouth.
He sighed. “The man who owned the club we’d been breaking into eventually caught me.
He was a good man. Friendly. He offered to let me buy into the place and get it back running again properly.
He offered me a real future as a business owner in London.
I was fifteen. He gave me a key and a timeframe and told me how much I’d need to save up, and we shook on it.
A few months later, he suddenly died, and of course, his verbal agreement with a street urchin wasn’t recorded anywhere. His widow inherited the club. Ember.”
Hannah blinked, shuffling a little in her chair.
“She shut the door in my face,” he said with a wry little smile.
“She was only a few years older than me, had just lost her husband, and the only thing she had to show for it was a failed gaming hall. Remembering it now, I can understand why she had nothing left for a boy at the door crying and begging to be let in. But you have to understand that I hated her. She became the symbol of everything evil and wrong in the world to me, and her club, Brigid’s Forge, became the ultimate thing I wanted in the world.
It was supposed to be mine, and I was going to have it, no matter what it cost.”
He stood up, like he couldn’t stand to be on the chaise anymore, shaking himself a little and pacing in front of the fireplace, shaking his head.
“It took me five years or so more to buy the Tod and Vixen,” he continued. “And a few more after that to scrape enough more together to offer to buy her out properly. She always had very colorful ways of saying no. I think the last time, she suggested I go sit on a peg.”
He paused and chuckled, shaking his head.
“God, I hated her. I thought she was this pampered, wealthy, lucky woman who had never earned a single thing in her life and was taking for granted the one thing that was supposed to be mine. So I decided to usurp her. I was very clever about it. I went around the city, buying up all the debt slips I could find for the Forge, enough that I knew she wouldn’t be able to pay out in liquid funds if I showed up one day and demanded it.
It was an evil, underhanded, cruel tactic. ”