Page 12 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twelve

Bess woke wishing she had someone in London to talk to about the Duke of Ashbourn other than his younger sister.

Nathaniel.

All through Lucy’s gratifying raptures over the ginger biscuits and their trip back to Dr. Perry’s surgery to share them with Charlie, Bess had worried the problem of Nathaniel over and over in her mind, like Mr. Woodhill’s Aberdeen terrier, Alfie, with a bone.

He was like no one she’d ever known.

Nathaniel wasn’t the implacable snob she’d thought him at first. Or not entirely. Of a certainty, he was haughty and proud. Cold. Arrogant. Very accustomed to having his own way in everything.

But he was also capable of great kindness. Empathy. He was even able to admit when he’d done wrong—and that was a quality Bess had found to be in short supply, among high- and lowborn alike.

There was a terrible darkness in him.

She’d caught glimpses of it before, but never so clearly as last night in that empty kitchen, with his blood on her hands and all the battered strength of his great body huddled on the floor at her feet.

It had felt wrong, in every way, to see him brought so low. She still couldn’t believe he hadn’t wanted the doctor, or to alert the authorities about the brigands who’d accosted him in the streets.

Bess remembered the time she’d seen him stumble to his rooms in darkest hour before the dawn, and wondered if she could credit the tale of cutpurses and a robbery gone wrong. But what else could explain a duke with wounds like the one in his side, and the bruised, swollen state of his poor hands?

He must have fought back viciously hard, to skin his knuckles like that. She’d have hated to see the cutpurse who’d had the misfortune to try and rob that particular duke.

Lucy interrupted her ruminations by closing her copy of The Romance of the Forest with a snap. “And there we leave Adeline, still pursued by the wretched de Montfort and threatened by ghosts, or perhaps not ghosts, we shall have to see! Next time. Charlie, are you quite well?”

“Doing much better, miss,” the young man said, picking at the coverlet. “Reckon they’ll be sending me home soon. Me mam’s been by every day, learning how to care for the bandages and such.”

“That’s wonderful, Charlie!” Lucy patted his arm. “And you must remember to call me Lucy, not miss.”

He smiled faintly, brown eyes downcast. “I don’t think Miss Jenkins would like that.”

Molly Jenkins, Lucy’s lady’s maid, had accompanied them to visit Charlie several times, and the sailor and the maid had seemed quite taken with one another.

Bess thought she’d detected a slight disappointment in the boy’s demeanor when they’d arrived today without the maid. Even the gift of ginger biscuits hadn’t seemed to lift his spirits, and he’d been shooting sidelong glances at Bess since they arrived.

Wondering if there was something he wanted to speak with her about in private, and seeing her chance to perhaps quiz him about that tavern Lucy had mentioned, Bess said, “Lucy, why don’t you go and ask Mrs. Perry if there’s anything we can bring over to make Charlie’s transition back home easier on him or his mother.”

Lucy bounced out of her chair, always happy to be moving and doing rather than sitting still. “Good idea! I’ll be back in a tick; don’t eat all the biscuits while I’m gone!”

She was out the door in a flurry of ruffles and impatient strides. Bess smiled after her. “I’ve never met anyone with more energy than that girl.”

“Miss Jenkins says she can hardly keep up with her.”

Bess turned back to the patient, making sure to keep her expression open and warm. She had a feeling she knew what Charlie might wish to speak with her about. “You and Miss Jenkins have seen each other a fair bit, since she’s been coming here with Lucy.”

Charlie ducked his head. “Miss Jenkins has been very kind to me. They both have.”

Choosing her words with some delicacy, in deference to a young man’s tender feelings, Bess said, “I’m certain Miss Jenkins would be glad to stay in touch with you after you leave Dr. Perry’s.”

To her surprise, Charlie peeked up with a raffish grin that suited his lean, young face. “I know. She’s already agreed to walk out with me when I’m able to get more than ten steps without wheezing like an old man.”

“Oh!” Bess blinked. “I thought perhaps you wanted some encouragement, but I see now you have the matter well in hand!”

“No—that is, I did want to speak with you, Miss, but not about Miss Jenkins. I hope I’m not talking out of turn, but it’s about The Nemesis.”

Bess’s pulse quickened. “Is that the boxing saloon Lucy mentioned?”

He looked mortified. “She told you. Lord. I should never have even mentioned it; it’s been worrying at me ever since I let it slip to Miss Lucy. You need to tell her not to go talking of it to any of her fancy friends. The Nemesis is no boxing saloon. It’s no place at all for a lady to be knowing of. I’m heartily sorry I said anything about it to her, that I am, Miss.”

But Bess was no lady, and this place was sounding more intriguing by the moment.

“So it’s more than a few bored gentlemen taking boxing lessons and sparring?”

“Much more.” He pressed his lips together tightly. “Truly, Miss. Don’t ask me anything else, please, the rest isn’t fit to speak.”

Leaning forward in her chair, Bess said, “Charlie, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I don’t need to be protected from the truth. I promise, I’m not the frail flower of English gentility you think me. And if you don’t tell me exactly why I should avoid The Nemesis, well…I’m afraid I’ll have to seek it out, if only to satisfy my curiosity.”

So, reluctantly and with a deal of stammering and blushing, he did.

Then Bess knew she had to see it for herself.

Maybe at The Nemesis, surrounded by people indulging in every sort of vice to satisfy every sort of lust, she’d finally be able to put the Duke of bloody Ashbourn out of her head.

Before she did something irrevocably foolish like allowing herself to care about him.

Bess wanted to ruin herself, not her entire life.

So that was it, then. Bess was going to The Nemesis.

* * *

The familiar smells and sounds of The Nemesis pulled at Nathaniel, roaring and scrabbling for his attention. The miasma of spilled ale, sweat-soaked straw, and over-applied cologne couldn’t completely hide the iron tang of blood.

Good. That’s what he was there for. Nothing focused the mind like seeing the red of his own blood ground into the bare knuckles of the man he faced in the ring.

Usually.

The noise in Nathaniel’s head threatened to deafen him, or maybe that was the noise from the crowd gathered in the other room. He sat in Leda Price’s office behind the bar and let it wash over him, elbows planted on his knees and head hanging heavy. The mask pressed against his face, and he shook his head from side to side, testing the limits of his peripheral vision.

Stupid to fight again tonight, after last night.

Every breath in pulled at the strip of fabric still tied around his ribs. Might as well paint a target on his body.

Hit me where it will hurt.

Still, his hand hesitated over the knot. He didn’t want to take it off. As though if he removed the makeshift bandage, he’d be stripping himself of the memory of Bess’s deft, capable hands. The care she’d taken with him.

He couldn’t look too closely at how that care had made him feel. It was like staring into the sun too long or holding his naked palm over a candle flame. It became unbearable very quickly.

And yet it was all he could think about.

Leda’s partner, Rufus, a whipcord-lean white man who was a veteran of many a fight—both at The Nemesis and aboard a ship in His Majesty’s Navy—rapped smartly on the door frame to bring Nathaniel’s head up.

“It’s time, guv.”

Nathaniel breathed out, slowly, feeling the extremely welcome narrowing of his focus to the warmth of his muscles, the ease of his breath, the core of stillness inside him that nothing and no one could ever touch, that he had to protect at all costs—and that a soft-voiced woman with golden hair and whiskey eyes had come gut-wrenchingly close to exposing, simply by touching him gently.

Locking it all down, Nathaniel lifted one perfectly steady hand to tear free the knot of the cloth binding his ribs.

He unwound it and checked the scabbed-over gash in his side dispassionately. It would do.

“Ready for this? The crowd is wild tonight,” Rufus observed, holding the door open for Nathaniel to duck through. “You’ll be going in the first bout, since you wasn’t on the schedule.”

A wall of sound struck him. The place was packed. Nathaniel let their bloodlust wash through him, firing his sinews. “I’m ready.”

Rufus seemed to hesitate, then put a rough hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder. “You don’t have to fight tonight. Someone else can step in, if your head’s not in it.”

Wondering what the man had seen, how he’d given himself away, Nathaniel shrugged off the hand and met Rufus’s calm blue eyes. “Who’s in the ring?”

“Jack Fuller.”

Nathaniel’s lip curled. “That oaf.”

Rufus tilted his head back and forth like he was cracking his neck. “That oaf near knocked the block off Kent Morris last month. He’s a fighter.”

“He’s not a fighter.” Nathaniel stared toward the ring, where a bulky ginger-haired man was whipping the crowd into a frenzy. “He wants to win too much.”

The adulation of the crowd, the triumph of grinding another man into the dirt.

The right to choose a willing, dazzled partner for the night.

None of that held any appeal for Nathaniel. That wasn’t why he did it.

“And what do you want,” Rufus asked, amused. “If not to win?”

Nathaniel’s fist tightened around the scrap of fabric he still gripped in one hand. Without looking at it, he stuffed it into the back pocket of his breeches.

“I want to forget.”

But from the moment he stepped into the ring, the crowd falling away into formless, faceless commotion around him, Nathaniel could not seem to lose himself in the present moment the way he usually did. Something pulled at him, an insistent tug, a relentless undertow dragging him forward until he looked out across the heaving crowd of bodies and saw?—

Her.

It was Bess.

Sweet, lovely, gentle Bess, here in this place of violence and pain.

It made no sense. She belonged as far from here as possible. Yet he knew, without a doubt, that it was her.

Even with a hooded cloak covering the burnished gold of her hair and a simple black velvet domino mask shading her cognac eyes, he knew her.

He would have known her anywhere.

Her gaze met his, locked and held. She was a still point in a swirling cosmos. Time slowed. Nathaniel drank her in, like cool water after days of thirst.

Until Jack Fuller’s voice rasped in his ear, overloud and smelling of onions, “Let’s give the punters a good bout tonight, eh? None of your one hit, two hits, boom done stuff, eh? I’m going to last, mate, I’m telling you. Eh? You hearing me?”

Nathaniel ignored him the way he would ignore a fly buzzing annoyingly at his ear. He didn’t like to engage in the pre-fight theatrics some of the others loved. He didn’t need it to screw his own courage up and he didn’t care whether the people watching were entertained. He’d rather get straight down to the fighting.

But tonight, he couldn’t make himself look away from Bess. Her eyes burned him, but it was a fire he’d be glad to die in.

Tonight, admittedly, he was distracted.

Which Jack Fuller, known as Red Jack, clearly was quick enough to notice.

Leaning in until his ginger hair tickled the side of Nathaniel’s face, he gloated, “I see someone in the crowd has finally caught The Berserker’s eye. You’re no better’n the rest of us, after all. She’s a pretty enough piece, I grant you—when I win, I’ll be sure to give her your regards while I’m tupping her into the mattress. After all, that’s what she’s here for, innit? She wants it bad. And any man who wins in the ring can ’ave her.”

The taunt peeled the very skin back from Nathaniel’s bones—the skin he wore about town, to balls and to Parliament, to fool the world that he was a civilized gentleman.

Whatever it was inside him that needed to fight, to claw and scratch and scream its rage into the void, came surging up the back of his throat.

He turned to look at his opponent, who went white and pinched around the mouth that dropped open for a moment in shock at whatever he saw in the depths of Nathaniel’s furious eyes.

And the fight was on.

Nathaniel heard nothing but the eerie whistle of wind past his ears as time slowed to a crawl for everyone else. Everyone but him.

The first thing he did was bloody the foul mouth that had dared to spew its filth about Bess. But he didn’t stop there. He couldn’t.

Nathaniel’s fists weighed a thousand pounds each and they moved with the swift precision of a striking snake. He could see every feint, every block, every attempt his opponent made to come back from the pounding he was taking.

Nathaniel only faltered once, when it suddenly occurred to him that she was there—she was seeing this, seeing him like this, seeing the monster that lived under his bones snarling its way to the surface—but she didn’t know it was him.

He was masked. She couldn’t recognize him.

The relief of that thought staggered him for an instant only, but it was long enough for Jack to sneak a sly punch to the still-healing wound low on Nathaniel’s side.

Pain flashed through him. Nathaniel made some sort of noise dredged up straight from the monster and beat Jack back with a barrage of blows no man could withstand.

He fell. Nathaniel stood over him, sweat pouring off him and his lungs working like a bellows.

Any man who wins in the ring can have her.

When Nathaniel won, he always went home alone. He didn’t choose anyone to take upstairs. He never even glanced over the crowd, didn’t want to see the mingled hope and fear and excitement in their avid eyes. That was the way it went, before.

But.

Any man who wins in the ring can have her.

Was his the only fight tonight?

Nathaniel didn’t know, and he couldn’t take the risk. For all that she was a widow and a woman grown, Bess was an innocent. She’d lived a sheltered life in the country; she could have no conception of what it would mean to be chosen to go upstairs with a man still flushed with victory in the ring, a man with his blood up and ready to fuck.

No. Everything in him revolted.

He turned and found her in the crowd. Both of her hands—those hands that had touched him so gently—were pressed to her lovely mouth in shock or horror, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

Nathaniel pointed straight at her, pausing long enough to be sure everyone had seen his claim. Then he turned and walked out of the ring, back through the door behind the bar, and up the narrow set of rickety stairs he’d never climbed before.

It was done. She was safe.

He would let them bring her to him, let the word spread through The Nemesis that she was his…and then he’d let her go.

Even if that was the last thing he wanted to do.