Page 63 of How the Belle Stole Christmas

He nodded. “But they did not discover my father’s death right away. Once they did, they brought me to London to live with them. But until then…” He looked out across the tangled garden. It used to be bright and alive even during the winter. “This was home.”

“Why did you return here?”

“It felt right. I can work my silver anywhere. I have no desire to go into any mines.” A shiver rippled through him, and her hand closed tighter about his.

“I suppose I’m trying to figure out what step to take next.

At some point, I’ll have to do something other than make silly little things. Statues and toys and dolls.”

“Not silly. They are art. They are… happiness.” A small smile curved her lips.

Oh hell. What a wonderful knife to his heart. She could carve her name right on it. Hers without a doubt.

Hers?

Yes. How could he do anything but love a woman like her, so different from himself. She possessed the courage he coveted. She knew what she needed and marched right after it.

She cleared her throat. “Have you always made toys?”

“No. I threw all the toys my father had made for me into a fire after his death.” Anger burned a person.

Grief scorched who they’d used to be into ash.

“When I came back here, I began to make the toys. No reason. Just to give my hands something to do. Your father had not died yet, and I had been back to the hospital, seen how well he kept the children there. Just as I remembered it. After he died, I watched the building deteriorate, the children’s clothes were not replaced when they were ruined or when they grew out of them.

Then your brother appeared for a visit, and with a flick of his hand—all better. ” But not all better. Just hidden.

Was that what Nico was doing? Pretending everything in his life was fine when it was not. London shop languishing, professional ambitions dead and in the grave. Worse, he was pretending he did not wish to change. He was pretending he did not have the power to change it.

Nico pulled Jane deeper into the shadows. “Last Christmas, the children were somber. They mourned your father, and they mourned their warmth, and they worried for their futures. You know that. You came, and you saw.”

She nodded.

He leaned low, their foreheads touching, sparks igniting.

“I wanted to give the children what my father had given me over and over again. A magical moment.” For a few held breaths, the words bloomed between them, warm and soft and so full of potential.

“Sometimes that is all we need to go on. The promise of magic. That promise made good.”

She licked her lips, and in that solemn, sacred, sizzling space between them, he wanted to taste what she did—her worry, her fear—and take it away, give her magic instead.

“And you promise,” she said, her voice so low, a hum of the earth and nothing more, but he could hear. “You promise not to die? Promise that some magic, the silver in your veins will keep you safe?”

Ah… he could not.

When he did not answer, she slipped from his grasp.

But she laid a palm on his cheek. “Your staying alive is the only magic I’m interested in, Sir Nicholas.

” Her touch felt better than silver in his veins, and it was gone too soon.

She left him in the shadows, scrubbing his hands up and down his face.

Silver lightning sparked all over his body in a storm of frustration.

She had no idea what the future held for her, but still she fought. Jane Dean would never give up.

But he would. He had, a long time ago.

Goddamn it! He was a coward. But he didn’t have to be.

A shadow stepped under the tree. One of the hired guards. “Everything good in here, my lord?”

“Not even remotely. Are you trying to stop my heart?”

“I’d prefer not to. But the duke’s who gives me my coin, and I doubt he’d like to hear of his sister hiding beneath trees with local baronets.”

He smiled as brightly as he could. “Naturally he would not. You need not worry, my man. We were discussing Christmas, our plans, what the children can expect. That sort of thing.”

Silence. Then, “What can the children expect?”

Interesting question. Why had the fellow asked it?

How best to make use of it? Before he’d fully made up his mind, Nico laid into the pathos.

Hard. “Nothing but cold and dreariness, my friend. Seems the duke’s used up his expendable funds hiring you lot.

” Putting it on thick. Good. If the man had a conscience…

but he might not. “The blankets have holes, you know.”

“They don’t.”

“They do. Glamoured to appear as if they are fine and thick. Morington’s a powerful talent. And not enough coal. You’ve been in the dormitory. Surely you know how breath fogs the air there.”

The man shifted from side to side. Uncomfortable? Good. “You help ’em out, then.”

“Oh, I’ve tried.” Nico sighed. Loud and long. Some people only understood maximum drama. “But the duke has strict rules about spoiling the children.”

“Keepin’ warm’s not spoiling,” the guard muttered.

Nico slapped him on the back. “Oh, I agree, but I’m afraid Morington’s soul is of a higher moral quality than my own.” The guard mumbled something else, and Nico ambled past him, stopped mid stride and leaned low as if offering a confidence. “I was a foundling once here.”

The man’s head whipped up, his gaze glittering but unreadable in the shadows. “I was too. Not here, but…” He grunted.

“You understand then. You’re a good man. I wish there was more I could do. More… we could do.” Then Nico left the man under the barren branches, alone and, hopefully, thinking.

He barely noticed the path he took back home or the white flecks that had begun to slowly dance down from the sky.

He was thinking of promises as he went into the stables, and he was thinking of Jane when he saddled his horse.

When he took off for London, he was thinking that if he couldn’t keep one promise to her, he might be able to satisfy another.

Nico arrived in London past midnight, his body sore and dust-cloaked from the hard ride eastward.

Dust lay thick on every surface of the Finsbury Square shop, too.

It seemed to shape ghosts in every corner.

Nico’s father holding a tray of ornate pistols small enough for a lady’s hand.

A gentleman inspecting them. His father cleaning the locked glass cases where he kept the knives so sharp no force was necessary to rend apart whatever it sunk its teeth into.

Or his father in the forge behind the public-facing shop, tending the fire, sweat on his brow as he turned the copper over his hand, making a strong and beautiful hilt for a steel blade.

Or his muscles tensed, his body almost motionless as he crafted finials for pistols that would use copper electricity to push bullets farther than before.

Nico stood in the narrow doorway between shop and forge in the long-closed Bowen’s Weaponry.

It had been sold after his father’s death to a nice gentleman eager to continue a thriving business.

Nico had been too young to take charge, even if he’d wanted to.

What would his father have said, had he lived long enough to know Nico didn’t want anything his father had built.

He’d bonded with silver, not copper. Nico had apprenticed with the Grants instead of the Bristol alchemists who’d trained his father.

He’d tried crafting weaponry once, but soothing the shapes with his hands and heat had made him sick.

As much as he’d loved his father, he’d not been able to keep a single thing about him alive.

So when the man who’d bought Bowen’s Weaponry had died, and Nico had heard the shop was up for sale again, he’d bought the damn thing. Couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else having it, changing it. At least in this dusty mausoleum, he could do right by his father.

He’d closed it up as soon as the deed was warm in his hand and hadn’t touched it or even passed through its doorway in two years.

The former owner had changed nothing when he’d taken it over from Nico’s father.

And Nico couldn’t bring himself to change a damn thing, either, even though he didn’t want this.

The guns and knives, the implements of fear, bought because people were scared, because they wished to scare those around them.

Nico leaned a palm against the doorframe across from him and hung his head.

If he wiped this all away—the dust, the glass cases, the weapon-shaping implements in the forge—would he wipe his father away, too?

The man with kind eyes and a gentle touch.

Nico had been lucky. He knew that. So many of the children back at the Bristol hospital did not have a soft memory to retreat to when orphaned nights grasped them like death’s hand and squeezed.

Nico did. And for two years, he’d clung to it, to this shop, even though his soul knew damn well it wasn’t what he wanted.

But he couldn’t live this way forever, on his meager and ever-dwindling savings, this shop gathering dust. Bowen Hall had grown messier, too, because he couldn’t seem to bring it quite out of the past either.

But…

Jane needed him to stop being a coward.

And what he wouldn’t do for himself, he…

Hell. He could do for her.

When had he fallen for her?

Last Christmas he’d learned an obsession with her lips.

And then he’d wanted her secrets when he’d poked about her to discover if she knew his identity.

Then, at some point over the last year, he’d wanted her smiles and her eye rolls and her tears.

If she ever cried, and he suspected she found tears a sign of weakness.

But if she ever were to indulge, he’d want her to soak his shoulder.

But he couldn’t expect a gift like that unless he offered a gift of his own. Something more than stockings this time.

He straightened and looked around the shop with new eyes.

He banished the dust in his imagination and brought back the roaring fire in the forge.

No blades and bullets this time. No, the next time the doors opened to customers, there would be only dolls and trains, rocking horses and silver soldiers.

Toys that moved and shifted for bright eyes and sticky hands.

He closed his eyes, could see it so clearly.

Could feel, too, somehow, his father’s approval.

He’d been the one to teach Nico the joy of toys after all.

Perhaps a transformation would honor his memory after all.

He left the shop, touching nothing but the dust beneath his boots.

He craned his neck to study the weathered sign above the door.

A wooden rectangle with Bowen’s Weaponry charred into it hung on a rusted rod.

He found a nearby abandoned box and threw it down beneath the sign, stood on it, and grasped the rod, sought out the rust. A little doorway into the metal.

He entered, found the metal’s weakness and broke through it.

He jumped down from the box, sign in hand.

He placed it inside the shop and locked up.

The return trip to Bristol seemed much shorter than thirteen hours on horseback with stops to change horses and relieve himself.

He barely saw the roads and travelers breeze by.

Too much to think about. Christmas approached.

He had a toy shop to plan, and a wife to woo.

All of it kept him wide awake, gaze riveted on the road ahead, on the future he was ready to step into now.

He had to step into it. Or people he loved would be hurt. Jane would be hurt.

But more than anything, Jane craved safety. For herself, for him, for those she loved. She craved it more than she craved him. And he would damn well give it to her.

He fell off the horse in his small stables at Bowen Hall and patted Remmy on the rump. The donkey snorted and flicked him with its tail, a remonstration.

“I left Mrs. Grady with instructions to care for you, your majesty.”

Another snort, but Nico barely heard it because he was already out of the stables. Legs heavy and eyes bleary, he made it to his workshop and shrugged out of his confining layers—unwound his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, rolled up his sleeves—and hovered over his worktable.

The silver hummed in him, wanting a shape, and his fingers wanted…

ah, yes, the silver wires. Heating them with his fingers, he twisted them, crafting a long coil, two strands going round and round and round one another.

The fibers separate but joining. Soldering only with the heat of his fingertips glowing white-hot.

Too much twist, and their separateness would dissolve. Didn’t want that.

There. Now… He wiggled his fingers over the tools on the table.

What a mess. Where was the damn mandrel?

He found it, slid his fingertips down its tapered end until he found the width that felt…

right. Like holding her hand, like a digit taking up the perfect amount of space in his pocket.

Wrap the coiled wires around the mandrel at that perfect spot.

Fingers glowing, silver melting just the right amount, joining, cooling. Bound.

Perhaps he was just a tool, a machine to be used for industrial production.

But silversmithing without his tools always felt like magic, like reaching out for something greater than the self and finding it…

in the self. Yet also in the world, the earth, the snow-filled sky.

Finding it in another’s chest, in the beating of another’s heart.

He set the ring to the side to cool, then found two more wires and set to work forming the soul once more. Set to work forging a promise.