Page 62 of How the Belle Stole Christmas

Three days before Christmas Eve found Nico walking through the hospital garden with Jane once more.

She was terribly pretty today, as she was every day, wearing a serviceable gray gown and matching mantle, her rosy cheeks all but hidden beneath the wide brim of a formidable bonnet.

She was also terribly irritated with him.

“I’ll not agree to marry you,” she hissed, “if you insist on dying soon after.”

“I’ve not offered marriage, and I’m not going to die. Might be maimed a bit, but—”

A child barreled into them, and Jane righted him.

“Sorry, Miss,” he said.

“Be careful, Jem.” She patted his head.

Jem grinned and fled, his too-skinny legs pumping and his lungs calling out to his friends with joy.

“I’ve sent word to the Grants,” Nico said, voice lower.

“To see if they’ll help place more of the children in apprenticeships.

I’ve also contacted Mr. Stone at the Alchemist Guild.

He should be able to place others.” Alchemy could be taught, but not all children would take to it.

It had to be a thing you wanted, an obsession in your blood, and only some followed the call.

Placing the Bristol Hospital foundlings in apprenticeships with Guild members was a solution, but not an ideal one.

She nodded. “I’ve widened my net in town. But the seamstress and the inn are not in need right now. I’ve checked at the docks, too, but I cannot bear the thought of putting them on a ship. Such backbreaking work…” Her hands wrung the edge of her cloak.

“We’ll find them homes, Jane,” he whispered. In the past three days, he’d tried to keep her focused on the children, a necessary distraction from other topics of conversation that fanned her anger like a wild wind. Marriage. Christmas Eve.

God, he wanted to marry her. He’d known she was a great temptation, but when she’d said her brother planned to give her away to some stranger, he’d almost lost control. His anger could have warmed an entire house in the middle of winter.

“We can do nothing,” Jane said, “if you are dead.”

“Not dead. Just maimed.”

“Do not shrug off the loss of your life.”

“Potential loss of my life.” He wanted to lift her hand to his lips, kiss her, reassure her. But she might read into that, think his resolve was melting. Still… impossible not to flirt. “You’re adorable when you growl.”

“I seem to be growling often of late.”

“Hm. Wonder why.”

She poked him in the chest. “We have spent days talking, and you still refuse to listen to sense.”

He shrugged. “I’ll find a way.”

“Oh, yes, stepping through a window in the dead of night and into the barrel of a gun. If you escape the guns chasing you down outside first.”

Moments like this, he believed she might love him just a little, believed she might want to marry him for reasons other than survival.

He cleared his throat. “A sleeping potion is an excellent idea. If Mrs. Tottle is adept with potions, as you insist she is, then it will be easy to—”

“Have her locked up on charges of poison. You know it’s illegal.”

When practiced on men. “I know.”

“Oh!” She grabbed the pocket of his waistcoat, pulled him closer. “I’ll do it. You stay at Bowen, and I’ll sneak downstairs and distribute the gifts. Then—”

“Miss Dean.” He took her hand and looked about the garden. The children had tumbled one another into a great big laughing pile, and the guards had ambled out of sight. He stepped her backward under the cover of a naked, low-branched tree. “Jane.” He slipped her hand into his pocket. Mine. “No.”

“They will be looking for an intruder outside of the dormitory, and I’ll already be inside, and—”

“There will be two guards positioned there. We know that.”

“I tried to convince Mr. Jameson it was not right, but he did not care and—”

“And so we cannot move forward as if it is not a proven fact. If you are the one to enter the dormitory, you would be the one facing down the barrel of a gun. We need to figure how to lead the guards inside the dormitory away.”

In his pocket, her hand clenched. “I’ll visit my brother, speak with him in person.”

“And he’ll listen?”

She hung her head. “I wish he would.”

“So do I.” Surely beneath the branches, they were unseen.

Mrs. Tottle ambled along the path watching the children.

He could take her lips with his own, kiss her.

Perhaps coax her back to Bowen Hall. He couldn’t though, no matter how much he wanted to.

He’d rejected her twice now, and though she hadn’t seemed to back down, he couldn’t hurt her again, couldn’t bear to see that rapid blinking as she shoved down her pain and disappointment.

“Trust me, Jane. Can you simply trust me that I will figure this out?”

She slipped her hand out of his pocket—nothing but air there now—and wrapped her arms around her middle.

She seemed so small and lonely that way.

And he remembered thinking how small and lonely she looked last Christmas, even with a fire poker in hand forcing him away from her charges.

He was losing his friend. The loss entirely his fault.

Because he could not care for her the way she needed him to.

“Will you go home for Christmas?” he asked, desperate to reconnect with her in whatever way possible.

She shook her head. “The family seat is south of Oxford. That’s where my brother will be. He does not want me there.” She gave a small, soulless chuckle. “Bastard. Remember?”

How could anyone not want her?

He shrugged his hands into his pockets and his shoulders into his ears. “You and your brother were not close as children?”

“No.” She joined him in the space between light and dark, their arms brushing against each other.

“Well… when we were quite young, I think we were. I remember toddling about after him, and him reading stories to me. He made me a daisy chain for a crown once, and I wore it until every bloom on it had turned brown and wilted away.” Her half smile held a full tragedy. He wanted to kiss it away.

“Jane,” he said softly, carving the word into a caress.

“It is fine. My father loved me quite enough for an entire legion of men. The only thing he ever did wrong was bring me into this world.”

“Jane, no.” Her existence was a bloody miracle, one of the great wonders of the world.

“It is true. Had I been his wife’s babe, things would have been different. But I was born to his mistress. I barely remember my mother. And I didn’t know my father until I was eight, after she died.” She shivered. “That’s why my father took me. I almost died.”

“How in hell do you say that so cheerfully?”

“I didn’t. But I remember it. My mother must have lost her protector. I do not remember much about him.”

“He wasn’t your father?”

“No. My mother told me, before she died, that she’d told the man I was his, but somehow he discovered I belonged to Morington.

I look just like him and my brother. That’s when he kicked us out.

We had nowhere to go, though. We moved from place to place, finding shelter where we could.

I think my mother did the best she could.

I suspect she sold herself on the street.

One morning she had a cough, and that turned into a cold, and that’s when we set out for the duke’s country seat.

We made it as far as the nearby village, and she sent a letter to the house through a stable boy.

My father appeared, and he took me away, and…

and I suppose my mother died alone there at that inn. ”

“Fuck.”

“Yes, quite. But you see why… why I am so set on marriage to you. I”—she lifted her face to him and blinked out of the past—“trust you not to leave me alone on the streets, cold and hungry.”

The unstated fact—she did not trust her brother or whomever he found to marry her.

Cursed flames, he’d felt the weight of her situation ever since she told him of her brother’s intentions.

But he’d not been able to take the leap.

She needed him, she said, but she didn’t know how useless he was.

He couldn’t figure a damn thing out about his own life.

But now he saw she didn’t care. She just didn’t want to die alone in an inn bed somewhere, cold and abandoned.

She deserved better than that, better than him.

Jane cleared her throat, forced a smile. “Do you have siblings?”

His laughter steamed the air. “You asked me to marry you, and we know so little about one another.” She’d allowed him to bring her to orgasm, to touch her intimately, and they knew so little. He knew so little.

Knew she was generous and sharp, intelligent and kind.

She let an intruder leave presents for children but allowed those gifts to be thrown away when challenged.

She stood up to cruelty, but only as far as she could.

Not that women could stand up terribly far without being scorched.

But she stood up as far she could, faced down the flames in little ways.

“I do not have siblings. It was me and my father for quite a long time.”

“How did he…”

“He was a copper alchemist. Many born near Bristol are. Copper is abundant here. He liked to go into the mines. Said he felt most powerful there. One day, he did not come out.”

A gasp like a startled breath. The flinch of her arm twined it with his own, so he finished the action and threaded their fingers together. She squeezed, and he took her comfort, let it wash over him, buoy his next words into the air.

“He loved the time between Christmas morning and Twelfth Night. Thought it important to make every day magical. When I awoke, starting on Christmas morning, it would be to a new copper toy. Like the ones I showed you. After he died, I had no family to go to, so I was sent here. To the foundling hospital.”

“I thought you were raised by the Grants.”