Only him. Smiling. Rotten cabbage between his teeth.
As the carriage bumped through a rut in the road, she clutched her middle and closed her eyes. She hadn’t killed her father, but she would kill Mr Irving if he so much as?—
“One of Mrs Haggert’s boys found me crying in the street.”
She opened her eyes and glanced his way, but it wasn’t satisfaction tightening her chest. He had wavered. Waveredwhen he thought she was afraid. Confessed to something most would not, and she could see how much it pained him.
Mr Hawke was indeed a complex man.
And complexity was a dangerous thing to admire.
“Where were your parents?”
“My father brought me to town to visit Tattersall’s. A friend persuaded him to look at a stallion at Aldridge’s Horse Bazaar. We were separated en route. I searched for him for hours. Mrs Haggert sent word to Shadowmere.”
He spoke with an air of detachment, as though the memory belonged to someone else, as though the boy left wandering the streets was far removed from the man before her now.
But the truth was there, in the stillness of his hands. In the faint tension that pulled at his jaw. In the way he failed to meet her gaze.
Whatever wound he’d buried had not healed cleanly.
Whatever defences he raised, she kept finding cracks in his armour. And each one unsettled her more than the last.
“Hardship brought its own kind of wisdom,” he said. “Mrs Haggert taught me something valuable. Something I’ve never forgotten.”
Daphne knew it wasn’t that retribution came at a price.
Perhaps it was how to wound and protect a woman in the same moment. How to make her believe he cared for her and disliked her in the same breath.
“What did she teach you?” she asked, hoping to peel back one more layer of the man who kept so much hidden.
“That doing what’s right doesn’t always look noble. Sometimes the right path runs straight through the gutter. Not every man born of a wastrel has to become one.”
He spoke with pride and an edge of defiance. He was nota man others held in high esteem. The ton feared him. Many loathed him. But she couldn’t bring herself to do either.
“Mr Irving is the man who hopes to settle a fortune on me.” Saying his name made her skin crawl. “I believe he planned to have me in a pew minutes after the ceremony. Such is his desperation to sire an heir.”
Mr Hawke went still. His eyes narrowed. “He wished to buy you like livestock at Smithfield Market?”
She gave a curt nod. “For a sum greater than ten thousand pounds, I imagine. My father would have insisted on enough to line his own pockets.” And to treat his mistress to a trip to Brighton. Mrs Foster enjoyed dipping her toe in turbulent waters.
A muscle ticked in Mr Hawke’s jaw. “If Irving so much as looks at you again, I’ll put him in the ground. Where might I find him?”
“He owns an ammunition firm. There’s a warehouse down by the Limehouse docks, and others in Birmingham and Manchester. He won the contract to open a factory in India.”
He didn’t speak right away. He just turned his signet ring once on his finger. “Irving won’t get his grubby hands on you. Not while I live to draw breath.”
The carriage felt smaller, and not because his threat loomed large. It was him. The idea that he might die to keep her safe. A cruel exaggeration, surely. So why did she believe him?
“Perhaps we should visit Mr Irving together.” They were already suspects in one murder. Heaven forbid they were charged with another. “Tell him we were married by licence yesterday. That should put an end to his plans.”
All that mattered to Mr Irving was siring a legitimate heir.
Mr Hawke arched a brow. “Let him think I’ve had you?”
“Just when you rise in my estimation, you say something to remind me you’re a beast.” When he frowned, she added, “Call me naive, but doesn’t making love require two participants?”
“And your point is?”
