Knockout: A Hell’s Belles Novel

By some stroke of very good luck, they’d made it in the main door, up the stairs, and into Tommy’s apartments at Mrs. Edwards’s rooming house without incident. No one had seen them, and Imogen, for her part, had understood immediately that there was no time for chatter as they made their way through the dark, quiet house.

The last thing they’d needed was Tommy’s landlady popping out from her own rooms in her stocking cap and tossing them both out into the storm beyond.

Closing and locking the door behind Imogen, he moved immediately to light a candle, and then the little stove in the corner, eager to get her warm.

She crossed the small room slowly, inspecting the space as she went, and Tommy tried to imagine it from her perspective. The frayed high-backed chair near the fire. The neat pile of books on the small table next to it. The larger table in the corner with a single, uncomfortable wooden chair, adorned with a coffeepot and a biscuit tin. A bookshelf with more books, ordered and even. A few frayed carpets on the floor, but not enough to muffle the sound of her exploration. A mahogany cupboard containing a neat row of ink, a pile of newspapers, a box of candles.

It was a far cry from her family’s palace in Mayfair.

Fucking hell. He’d failed, completely, in his task today. Instead of seeing the woman home safely, he’d taken her to supper in the East End and seen her stranded in a snowstorm. And attacked.

He was, quite possibly, the worst guard anyone had ever had. Including every royal who’d ever been assassinated.

Finished with his task, he stood, unable to bear the silence of his thoughts. “Are you—”

Imogen snapped to attention where she stood, her gloveless fingers trailing over a neat row of shelved books. “I’m sorry.” She dropped her hand immediately. “It’s very rude of me to—”

She was nervous.

Because of him.

“Would you—”

“Do you—”

They both stopped. She looked away. He wondered if he’d ever be able to look away from her again. He cleared his throat. “I would never hurt you.”

Her eyes flew to his, beautiful and brown and wide with surprise. “I know that.”

“I did not mean to frighten you. Outside.” He flexed his hand, where his knuckles were already bruising. The movement caught her attention. “I wish you hadn’t seen me . . . like that.”

She looked up. “Do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

“No.” It made him a monster, he knew. Coarse and brutish.

Something lit in her eyes. “You would do it again?”

“A dozen times,” he said. “A hundred.”

A small smile. “I shouldn’t like that.”

She should, though. He wanted her to like it. He wanted her to like him.

“Is it because of your deal with my brother?” She was moving toward him. Slow and easy. As though this conversation were perfectly normal. As though it wasn’t killing him.

“No.” Her brother had nothing to do it. Not now. Not ever, Tommy feared. “It is because no one hurts you. Ever again.”

“My guard,” she said softly, reaching for his hand. Taking it up in her own. Her touch impossibly soft as she circled his knuckles with her fingers. “My blade.”

Mine.

It took all he had not to say it.

Mine.

He would have given anything for her to say it.

But she didn’t. Instead, she lifted his hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, above his knuckles, red and raw.

Fucking hell. She was going to destroy him. How was he to keep himself from taking her? From claiming her?

“You’re shaking,” she whispered to his skin, the words like fire. “Are you cold?” She pulled back and stroked over his wrist, and her touch did impossible things to him. Made him ache. Made him hard as steel.

“I am not cold,” he said. “I am nothing near cold.”

That whisper of a smile. Those lips that were so wide and pink and perfect. A mouth that made him want to do wicked, unspeakable things.

She released him, pushing past him, the impossible scent of fresh pears in her wake, and he followed her like a dog on a lead, unable to stop himself as she moved to the door between the front room and his bedchamber.

Dammit. He couldn’t survive her in his bedchamber.

And still, he followed her.

She stilled inside the dark room, and Tommy moved to stoke another fire, even as he burned with the knowledge that she watched him. When the tinder caught and a flame was burning, he stood. “Let me light a candle.”

“No.” She held up a hand and crossed to the washbasin at the far side, near the window, barely discernible in the light from the fire. She fiddled at the basin before approaching with a length of cloth. “Sit,” she insisted, and he did, on the small, uncomfortable chair that stood at the end of the bed, rarely used.

He placed his hand in hers once more, the slide of her touch setting his heart pounding as she turned it toward the light and stroked the cloth over his knuckles, the ice-cold soothing their sting. “You must take better care,” she whispered as she came to her knees before him, to tend his wound.

He nearly came out of his skin.

He should tell her to stand. She was a lady, for Chrissakes. But he couldn’t find the words. And he couldn’t stop himself from looking at all the parts of her he shouldn’t. Her dark lashes, shielding her eyes, her pink lips, full and tempting, her body, round and lush, and her breasts, shadowed and straining at the line of her dress inside that yellow coat.

She was perfect.

“I would have done much worse if you hadn’t been there,” he vowed.

She pressed carefully at the worst of the sting, and he sucked in a breath. Her gaze found his. “If I hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have had to do anything at all.”

He’d do it again. To anyone who touched her. Anyone who harmed her. Any time she required it, forever. All she would have to do was summon him. Her guard. Her blade.

“You did very well,” she said softly, seeming to understand that he needed her praise.

He exhaled. “I didn’t get you home.”

But he was not sorry for it.

She stayed quiet, watching her work. And then, “Have you ever had a . . . woman? Here?”

Her head was bowed and he stared at her silken curls, gleaming in the firelight, knowing what he should say. He should tell her that he had women here regularly. Disabuse her of the notion that she was the only one. Confess to a long line of women frequenting the bed that was an arm’s length away in that small, dark room made smaller by her presence.

But the lie would not come.

He told the truth. “No.”

She took a deep breath, and he reveled in her relief.

He should tell her that it was because of his landlady. His neighbors. The way the floors creaked and the walls let every sound in. He should keep the rest a secret—that instead of bringing women here, he lay in that bed and took himself in hand and closed his eyes and imagined Imogen—her soft skin and silky curls and that smile that made him hard every time she gifted him with it.

That, at least, he could keep from her.

“I have imagined it, you know,” she said.

What? Had he spoken aloud? What had she imagined?

“You, with another women,” she went on. “I’ve imagined her. Beautiful and clever. Graceful and calm. Tall and lovely. She is magnificent.”

You are magnificent.

“She is nothing like me.”

“She does not exist,” he insisted, louder than he planned, and he immediately stopped, lowering his voice. There were others in the house. They would have to be quiet.

Another reason that he should put her to bed.

“I know I should not be happy for it,” she said to his knuckles. “But I am.”

She finished her work and sat back on her heels, setting the cloth to the side before unbuttoning her coat and sliding out of it, letting it pool on the floor, giving him a full glorious view of the line of that dress the color of sunshine and lemons. A color that should not exist in the winter for the way it tempted a man.

Of course, she tempted him in every color, as though all else in the world was grey, and then Imogen came through and gifted it with her vibrancy. Like Persephone in hell.

“Imogen,” he whispered again. “I cannot see you home tonight. The snow—”

She shook her head and removed the obsidian brooch that was always pinned at her neck, taking a moment to refasten it and set it on the low table by the fire. “I shall have to make do with this home for tonight.”

Tommy groaned at the words—a delicious punishment for the way they made him imagine that this was her home. That he was her home. That he might give her all she needed. Food and shelter and pleasure.

The things he would do to please her.

She smiled up at him. “I like that sound you make. That rumble that sometimes makes me wonder if you cannot bear being with me and sometimes makes me wonder if you cannot bear being without me.”

He fisted his hands on his thighs, resisting the urge to reach for her. “It is both.” Something flashed across her face. Something like sadness, and he hated it. Hated that she might doubt her power here. Her worth. “I cannot bear being with you, because I am afraid of what I might do. How I might . . .” He trailed off with a deep breath. “Christ, Imogen. The things I wish to do to you.”

Sadness became curiosity. “What kind of things?”

Every muscle was tight with his restraint as he refused her. “I cannot say. If I do, I might not be able to keep myself from doing them. And you would be . . .”

“Ruined?”

God, that word. The images it conjured. Imogen, naked and lush and his. In his bed. By his fire. Her hands fisted in his hair as he feasted between her thighs. Riding his cock.

He made a noise that was more animal than human.

She came up onto her knees once more, straightening her spine. “Oh,” she said softly. “That’s a different noise.”

She was so close. The fabric of her dress brushed against his knee. “You should go to sleep,” he said. “You may have the bed.”

Her brow furrowed. “Where would you sleep?”

On the floor. Where he belonged, punished for all the things he wanted to do to her. With her. For her. For thinking even for a moment that he was worthy of her.

“In the other room.”

“And if I asked you to sleep here?”

“We would not sleep,” he said. “God forgive me, but I am not decent enough to resist the temptation.”

Her eyes lit with pleasure and he bit back a curse. “Of me?”

He shouldn’t have said it. “Of you.” And he certainly should not have confirmed it.

“But what if—”

“No.” His refusal was unequivocal. “If we— If I—” He leaned forward, coming closer to her. Urgent. “Imogen. Surely you see.”

“It is strange how we call it ruination,” she said softly, and his heart began to pound. “When it is so clearly the bit that is not ruined. It is the bit that is ripe and fresh and full of life.” She paused. “How can the path of my own choosing, the one that makes everything seem brighter and fuller and more exciting . . . how can it be the bit we call ruin?”

He whispered her name, because there was nothing else to say in the face of such a tempting argument.

“Tommy,” she went on in a soft whisper, her eyes the color of rich sable, pure temptation. “The way I feel . . . the things I feel . . .”

How was he to resist her? There wasn’t a saint in Christendom who could resist her. She was temptation and sin and something far more dangerous. Something he dared not name.

“I find I am . . .”

He gritted his teeth. Tell me. Say it.

She did worse. She touched him, her fingers on his knee, and he jolted, nearly leaping from his skin.

She snatched her hand back, and that—fuck—that was worse. He reached for her, stopping her retreat, returning her touch. Placing his large hand over her smaller one, pressing her palm flat to him.

Her eyes flew to his.

“Finish it,” he growled. Knowing he was too rough. Unable to find softness for the demand. “What do you feel?”

Her gaze lowered to her hand on his thigh, where his muscles flexed, eager for more of her touch. She squeezed and he went impossibly hard, aching, everything in him screaming to move her hand higher, to show her what he felt.

“I do not have the words,” she said, shaking her head.

It was for the best. “Try.”

Her fingers flexed on his leg and he sucked in a breath. Something flashed across her face. Recognition. “That,” she whispered. “I feel that. As though I am nothing but the place where we touch. And at the same time, not nothing. I am something terrible in all the other places. Aching. Raw.”

It was over. He knew it even as his fingers tangled in her curls, holding her still as he closed the distance between them. Whatever she asked for, he would give it to her.

He paused a hairsbreadth from her lips.

“I need you, Tommy.”

He captured the words with his kiss, coming off the chair, dropping to his knees, his hands on her cheeks, hers clinging to him. Wild. Desperate. She met his kiss with her own, opening for him, meeting his tongue as he licked into her, as he stroked over her slow and sinful, and gave in to his own ache. His own raw need.

She cried out and he swallowed the sound before breaking the kiss, leaving them both gasping for breath. He ran his lips over her cheek to linger at her ear. “Be certain,” he said. “I am not one of your pretty men who can play at this. I am coarse and rough. I lack the refinement required to deny you what you ask.” He sucked at the skin there, below her ear, soft and perfect and sensitive. She made a little noise that threatened to take him out. “Be certain of what you need.”

Her eyes opened, dark and sinful and so full of desire that he was grateful he was already on his knees, as she would have sent him to them. “I am certain,” she said. “I have been certain for months.”

Months.

“Fourteen months,” she said, the words soft and shy. “Thomas Peck, I have been certain since the moment I laid eyes on you.” A little smile. Like a fucking queen. “I need you.”

There was no resisting her.

No desire to.

“Get in my bed.”