Page 27 of The Boxer’s Belle

“I only need you to be⁠—”

“Leave.”

His lips pressed together in a thin line, but he nodded, backing from the room with an “I’m sorry,” so quiet she wasn’t certain she hadn’t imagined it.

Her heart ached, an angry throbbing overtaking her chest. Her limbs were weak and quivering, too small and too fragile to defend her.

Because Bella wasn’t safe with West. She wasn’t safe with Ben, hadn’t been safe with her father.

There was only herself.

CHAPTER 7

West stumbled back into his room and collapsed on the bed. His heart had seized with the first “Get out!” and hadn’t unclenched, leaving him shaken and dizzy.

He forced air through his lungs in slow, measured inhales.

Over the years, he’d broken more than a few ribs, and that pain was nothing compared to this. Every damn time he forgot himself, he wounded her.

Why could he never learn from his mistakes?

This dance between them… It was as old and familiar as breathing. Every time he got too close, he burned himself. Their situation wouldn’t have been so wretched if it were just him—if he were the only one scorched. But Bella…

Life in the Sinclair house had never been easy for her, or Ben. Ambrose Sinclair was a special kind of cruel. With Ben, he chose an active brutality—molding him into a dutiful soldier with pain and intimidation, until the boy would willingly sacrifice his very soul to please his father. But Bella received a different, more callous harshness. Not the heir, she merely existed as a pawn in whatever game he was playing. He was free to torment Ben with threats to her. Or sell her to the highest bidder.

Bella had always been beautiful. A pretty bauble to be hauled out to distract other men at the card table. Ambrose had started it when she was painfully young.

After West’s first win in the ring, he had used every shilling to purchase that decorative silver hairpin off a cutler in Cheapside. Her dark eyes had grown round and wide when he’d presented it to her with a sheepish shuffle of his feet. He hadn’t anticipated the intimacy that came with teaching her and helping her practice with the weapon.

Though he’d prayed she would never have to use it, some part of him had known Ambrose wouldn’t hesitate to let those men do more than look. But nothing could have prepared him for the night that had ruined them both.

He looked up from the heavy bag to see Bella, barefoot and out of breath and wearing only her nightdress, fear blazing in her eyes. She’d run across the mucky yard to the stables, hairpin clasped in her white-knuckled fingers—its silver tip glinting red. Devastation filled him. Devastation but not surprise.

“Bella?” He was too startled by her frightened state to be overcome by her undress. “Belle, are you—” He caught her wrist and urged her into the safety of the stables.

Her eyes were wild, her hair, half escaped from her ribbon, whipping around her shoulders in the breeze.

“He— I...” she trailed off with a whimper and allowed West to fold her into his arms, hands still wrapped from his session with the heavy bag.

“Are you hurt?”

“I— no.” She shuddered against his half-bare chest, though. “But I— he⁠—”

“Who?”

He felt her head shake against his frame as she pushed in closer. “It doesn’t— I stopped him. But, Father… he⁠—”

West’s heart stopped. “Your father?”

“No, he offered… me. I am to serve as repayment for the debt.” West’s blood froze. Each individual word made sense, but how could a father, even one so poor as Ambrose, offer his daughter up for⁠—

Bile rose in his throat.

He tugged her away from his chest, his cloth-covered hands catching her freckled cheeks. “I don’t even— Are you— Will he come after⁠—”

“I don’t think so. I caught his cheek with the blade. He’s occupied with that.” Elegant, trembling fingers held the hairpin aloft between them.

West released a shuddering breath. “Well done.” He took the tiny dagger and set it atop the ledge of a stall behind him without releasing her. “You’re safe now. I won’t let him— What do you need? Tea?” He felt a fool then, offering the traumatized woman before him a hot beverage as if that would make it all well.