“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.
