Knockout: A Hell’s Belles Novel

“Was that O’Dwyer or Leafe?”

Imogen did not flinch at the question, and he saw the surprise that came on the heels of it. She hadn’t expected him to so easily sort through the identity of the doctor.

Without answering, she adjusted his arm on the table between them, inside the captain’s cabin of one of the Sedley-Whittington ships docked for the night. Even as Beast had blustered and balked at the idea of a Peeler inside one of his boats, his wife had recognized Imogen’s predicament—Tommy needed stitching, and driving anywhere to do it was out of the question.

And so, here they were, in one of the lushest cabins he’d ever seen, adorned with silks and fabrics and leather and mahogany and a table full of maps that rivaled Magellan’s.

She continued threading the needle Frances had given her, grateful for the excuse not to meet his eyes. “O’Dwyer.”

“Frances O’Dwyer, seamstress, hmm?”

Imogen met his eyes then, lifting the needle in her hand. “Does she not do a fair amount of stitching?”

He eyed the gleaming silver weapon and said, “I could do with some of that gin she wasted before you start.”

Imogen stood and crossed the room to the captain’s decanter filled with amber liquid, and he couldn’t resist watching her hips, swaying beneath her skirts. She poured it into a glass and walked it back to him. “Will whisky do?”

He knocked it back and coughed, screwing up his face. “Not whisky. Rum.”

“The risk one takes when one drinks stolen spirits,” she replied with a laugh.

He nodded to his arm. “Go on then.”

She adjusted the light and leaned over his arm, her deep focus making it easy to watch her. He wondered at her stillness—this woman who knew the ins and outs of explosives and raucous taverns and who carried a blade at her thigh and a bag full of danger at her side and who turned up wherever chaos threatened and who was always moving.

But now . . . as she investigated the slice on his arm, a little furrow at her brow where a curtain of perfect curls fell, tempting him with the idea of pushing them aside and letting them twine around his fingers, she was still, and he drank her in.

Sensing his attention, she met his gaze. “This won’t be pleasant.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Many times.”

Somehow, he simultaneously hated the answer and loved it. Hated that she’d many times been in proximity to the kind of danger that required a skill for stitching a wound. Loved that she was able to do the stitching—that for this moment, she would turn her skills to him. That they were somehow, for a heartbeat, partners.

Partners who held a single breath in anticipation of the first stitch.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the words barely there as she began her work, and the softness of them, the truth in them, made him ache.

“Go on,” he urged her, and she followed the instruction, placing the first stitch with a smooth, clean motion that proved her earlier claim. She’d done it before. “Who else have you stitched, Imogen Loveless?”

“Enough that I know the score,” she said, looking up through her curls. “Do you want names?”

Yes. He wanted names. He wanted to know whose skin she’d touched. Who she’d studied without shirts, or trousers. Or more.

“Would it help to know that your arm is one of the more impressive ones I’ve stitched?”

Yes. Yes, that helped very much. Though it shouldn’t.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, willing them both to hear the words. “Your brother will come looking for you.”

She shook her head. “He never comes home after events in society. He goes to his club, or to his mistress, to wash off the scent of matchmaking mamas.” A pause and then, “Ironic, that, isn’t it? That he is more than willing to play the part of matchmaking mama for me, and refuses to offer himself up to them.”

A pause, silence heavy in the room. And then Tommy asked, “Why don’t you wish to marry?”

She placed another stitch before she spoke to her work. “In my experience, husbands come in two flavors. The first is the kind my brother seeks for me. Full of bluster and power, lord of the manor, with a desire for a wife as a broodmare and a hostess and, at best, a pile of money.”

Tommy did not reply, even as the idea of Imogen in such a marriage—set high upon a shelf and brought out only when she was required—unsettled him, and he could not deny the instant relief that coursed through him when she wrinkled her nose and said, “The roasted lamb of men.”

He rumbled his amusement, urging her on.

“The second flavor,” she said, “I did not believe existed outside of storybooks.”

“Until your friends,” he replied, understanding instantly. “Lady Sesily. Miss Frampton.”

“Mrs. Calhoun. The Duchess of Clayborn.” She smiled. “They neither of them intended marriage, and then . . .” She paused and collected her thoughts before finishing, the words incredulous. “And then they met husbands who wished to stand by their side. Partners. Who believed in them. Who wanted them to . . .”

He waited what seemed like an eternity as she sought the word. When she found it, her eyes lit with satisfaction, gleaming deep and brown in the lantern light. “. . . to thrive.”

He couldn’t help repeating her. “To thrive.”

She nodded. “It is beautiful.”

More beautiful than he’d ever admit. “You mean husbands who love them.”

Another slow, methodical stitch. “A rare quality for husbands, these days.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

Her brows shot up.

Why had he said that?

Why was he suddenly imagining how it would be to stand by a woman the way the Duke of Clayborn had done on the water line earlier in the evening? How it would be to pull a woman he loved close and press a kiss to her temple, the way he’d seen Caleb Calhoun do a dozen times inside his Covent Garden tavern?

She looked to him. “You sound as though you’ve seen husbands like that, as well.”

“I’ve a counterpart at Scotland Yard. Loves his wife to distraction. Can’t go a day without singing Susie’s praises.”

“Lucky Susie.”

“And my father,” he said, immediately stopping. He didn’t know why he’d said it. He shouldn’t have. There was no reason for it.

Imogen peeked up at him, then returned to her work. Quiet.

A trick he’d used a hundred times in his work. A thousand. And still, he filled the silence. “He loved my mother wildly—convinced her to run away from the life into which she’d been born. Promised to carry her dreams with him.”

She smiled. “And then you came along.”

“And my sister and brother.” He watched the top of her head, curls gleaming in the candlelight. “He worked every day, until he died. To give us the life he wanted for us.”

And he never got there.

Tommy left the last unsaid, instead settling on, “So. Husbands who love their wives should not be rare. They should be everywhere.”

“There, at least, you are right,” she said, thoughtful. Still. “There is great joy in seeing my friends loved.”

“They love you, as well,” he said, remembering the Duke of Clayborn’s anger when he’d realized Imogen was inside the warehouse. The way Calhoun came into the street outside The Place to check on her.

Something threaded through him at the memory. Something that, if he inspected it too carefully, would be close to envy.

“I am lucky that loving my friends meant loving me.” She gave a little shrug. “But they do not understand me. I . . . baffle them. They think me curious and entertaining. Perhaps diverting. But madcap. Chaos.”

He didn’t like the way she said chaos. Didn’t like the resignation in it. The way it sounded, suddenly, like the word was a mantle she’d been given, not chosen.

How many times had he thought of her as such? Chaos? Mayhem? Havoc?

And yet, now, as they sat in a captain’s cabin on a ship docked in a berth on the Thames, as the world turned in the city beyond and she performed her calm, measured task, Tommy realized that it was the first time he’d ever seen her this way, still and calm and focused. And it felt as though she was revealing a piece of herself—one she’d hidden from him before now.

How many more of those pieces were there?

And how could he discover them all?

“So that is the flavor you prefer?” He shouldn’t have asked. None of this conversation was for him.

Except, she placed another stitch, clean and careful, and said simply, “It is not for me.”

He blinked. “Love?”

She met his eyes. “You are surprised.”

“In my experience, women want love.”

Instead of answering, she leaned back and considered her handiwork. “Not bad.”

He’d pushed her too far.

Resisting the urge to curse in the darkness, Tommy followed her gaze. “I thought you said you were rubbish at embroidery.”

The clouds in her eyes were replaced with a grateful gleam, and she clung to the change of topic. “As long as you do not expect an iris, or a chrysanthemum, or an inspirational quote, we should be fine.”

“What kind of inspirational quotes are you offering?”

“How about Beware falling rafters?”

He nodded, sagely. “A cautionary tale.”

“In ancient Greece, the oracles inked their prophecies on fabrics. I could make you my canvas.”

A vision flashed, unbidden, her fingers painting over his skin, her whispers at his ear. Desire thrummed through him. “And so you would paint me with your truth?”

Her thumb stroked along his arm, turning him carefully toward the light. “You would not like my truth.”

The words sizzled through him, a teasing glimpse of something more than what the rest of the world saw of Imogen Loveless. “Tell me.”

“I am not the kind of woman men love.”

Tommy sucked in a breath at the unexpected confession. “What does that mean?”

She sat back. “I think you are done.”

He set his free hand on hers, holding her firmly until she looked into his eyes. “What does that mean? That you are not the kind of woman men love?”

It was rubbish.

Something flashed across her face. Disappointment. She sighed and shook his hand off, reaching for a pair of scissors. “You are through, Mr. Peck. Do try not to get hit with falling rafters in the future.”

He sighed and released her. She was not going to answer. Another layer of Imogen Loveless that was not for him. And not for now. Hiding his frustration, he replied, “I make no promises.”

She tucked the scissors into her bag, followed them with the spool of thread and the needle before turning back to him. “What of you?”

“What of me?”

“What flavor of wife do you have a taste for? The one who marries for prestige? Or the one who marries for love?”

“There isn’t much prestige to be had with me, I’m afraid.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “The hero of Scotland Yard—you must have dozens of women chasing after you in a constant state of excitement.”

He raised a brow. “It might surprise you, my lady, that I am not interested in women suffering from excitement at a mere glimpse of me.”

“Ah. Then love it is.”

“Love would . . .” He paused. “. . . be nice.”

It wasn’t an appropriate conversation. Not when he should be asking her about the bomb she’d found in the warehouse. In the fire that the docks had narrowly escaped. His investigation and all the ways she turned up a part of it.

Not when he should be apologizing for taking advantage of her mere hours ago, his mouth on her skin as she came apart on his fingers.

She looked away, and he would have given a year’s salary to know what she was thinking.

“So there it is,” he said softly. “My truth for yours. Tell me the rest.”

“There is not much to tell,” she said. “It is not complicated or secret. I am, simply, a bit more than anyone bargains for.”

It wasn’t true. “How so?”

She wrinkled her nose, and he could tell he’d unwittingly disappointed her as she sat back, that hand sliding across the scarred table. “Really, Inspector, you embarrass us both.”

He reached for her, his hand landing on hers, keeping her still. Her gaze flew to his, surprise flashing in them in the strange, swinging light of the cabin. “I swear that is not my desire.”

She looked to their hands and he tightened his grip, resisting the urge to lace his fingers through hers. To kiss her again, as he had at the ball. To pull her into his lap and touch her. To play with her.

“The wide world thinks me chaos,” she said, searching for the words to explain. “But it is not chaos when it is simply . . . the way one is. I am . . . too much for most people.”

She was nothing close to too much.

Before he could say so, she held up a hand, a knowing gleam in her eyes. “When I say I am too much, people wish to comfort me . . . no no, Imogen, you’re not too much! But I am. I am big and bold, my laugh is loud and my hair is wild, and I am peculiar. I’ve a penchant for chemistry, and an instinct for danger, and if there is an adventure in the wind . . . I want it. All that, and my passion for explosives . . . which you have witnessed firsthand.”

He watched her with fascination, his brow furrowed, trying to understand. Trying to make sense of this wonderful woman. She smiled, a tiny, wistful expression, and reached for him, stroking her thumb over the furrow in his brow. “You’re trying to understand me.” She laughed. “Don’t. No one ever has. Not my family, not society, not even my friends—though they come closest, and love me in spite of my . . . peculiarities.”

“I want to,” he said. And it was the truth.

She nodded. “I know. But I wish you wouldn’t. It makes me wonder what it would be like if someone did.” She looked down at their hands.

The way those words tempted him . . . when he knew they should not. When he knew there was no way he could give her the life she deserved.

“Tonight, Imogen . . . I—I took advantage of you.”

Her eyes went wide. “You did?”

“Yes,” he admitted. He should have been stronger. Should have been able to resist her. But even now, with her pretty gaze on his and her soft fingers stroking over his arm, he couldn’t quite find the disappointment he should feel. “My job—I was to keep you safe.”

“I didn’t ask—”

He didn’t let her finish. “I was to keep you from harm, protect you. And instead, I practically ruined you in a Mayfair library and then failed to notice you were headed into a burning building.”

She met his eyes as she stroked his arm a second time. “Of my own doing.”

“It remains my fault.”

Another stroke, her fingers like fire. “Forgive me, Tommy, but you are—quite dim when you wish to be.”

He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“If you think for one moment that you could have kept me from here tonight . . . you really have not been paying attention. You needn’t carry the weight of the world. You could not stop us tonight.”

“You knew. You knew before anyone told the police. That the building was aflame. You knew there was an explosive inside.”

She nodded. “I did.”

“They came to tell you at the ball.”

“Yes.”

“And it wasn’t an accident.” He knew all this. He wasn’t a fool.

“Of course it wasn’t an accident,” she said. “We wouldn’t be here if it were an accident.”

“What in hell are you up to?” he asked, softly. “Tell me. Let me help you. Tell me why you are here. How you knew to come here. How you knew what was inside.” He paused. “Tell me how you’ve always known where to be. Where I should be. Tell me how you are always there first.”

“Because I receive the information before you do,” she said.

“How?” he asked, frustrated. “It isn’t your job to find the culprits. To keep them from doing it again.”

She shook her head. “It is not. And yet it falls to me, because there are too few others who care about the East End. Who can be trusted here.”

“I care, dammit. I can be trusted.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “You, Tommy Peck, detective inspector and hero of Scotland Yard, beloved of the News and half of the population of London for your strong arms and enormous thighs and your penchant for carrying women away from danger—”

“Woman,” he said.

“What?”

“Not women. I’ve only ever been seen carrying one woman from danger. If you’re going to mock me, I’d appreciate you getting your facts straight.”

“Fine,” she said, and he could see her cheeks darkening with a blush even in the dim light. “Carrying me from danger. Perhaps you could be trusted. But how are we to know when you work for them?”

“For whom?”

She gave a little, humorless laugh. “For power. For the police. For Parliament. For the legions of men—and their countless wives—who would rather see the East End destroyed than help lift it up.”

“That’s not what I want. I want the East End safe. But to keep it so, someone must let me in.”

Her brows rose. “And you wish for me to make the introduction?”

“They trust you. And the women you run with.”

“The women I run with.” Her lips twisted in amusement. “Did you not name us?”

“I didn’t,” he said with a scowl. “The papers named you. It’s a ridiculous name.”

“I rather like it,” she said. “Hell’s Belles—it makes us sound like we’ve teeth.”

He couldn’t stop a bark of laughter. “No one who’s spent any time with you would think you don’t have teeth, Imogen.”

Her eyes went wide. “You really must stop saying such nice things to me.”

“So they trust you. The people here. They trust you with the news of explosions in seamstress’s. In print shops. At bakeries . . . but shall I tell you what I think?”

She looked up at him, the focus in her big brown eyes threatening to distract him. What would it be like to have that focus—that unabashed interest—on him at other times? When he wasn’t discussing explosions. When he was simply . . . with her?

He pushed the thought aside. “I think that they were not a print shop, a seamstress, and a bakery.”

“Of course they were,” she said without hesitation. “I have seen the press, the fabric, and the milled flour myself.”

“I am not a fool, Imogen,” he said. “I know things, as well. And while I don’t know what was going on inside Mithra Singh’s brewery, I know that Frances O’Dwyer was not summoned to treat a man suffering from burns because she was a seamstress. I know women seek doctors like her when they have no other choice.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, standing once more, her stillness gone. “Women seek doctors like O’Dwyer and Leafe when they have made their choice, and they want someone to believe them.”

He nodded, grateful for the reply. Feeling like she was bringing him closer. He pressed on. “I know Mrs. Linden housed girls on the run in the back of her bakery—girls desperate for a better life. I know that’s where they received money and clothes and food, and papers to start a new life. And I know Mrs. Mayhew used her print shop to organize groups of workers in the factories across the city.”

Imogen stiffened and he knew he was right. “Who else knows?”

“No one,” he said softly. “Because I also know to keep my mouth shut until I have all the information. But more importantly, because I know you have that information. I think you know the whos and the whys and the hows. And I wish you would trust me enough to let me in.”

She remained silent, but her gaze did not waver.

In the two years he’d known Imogen Loveless and her gang of women, they’d been instrumental in bringing down some of the most powerful men in Britain, each one with a collection of evidence that Tommy himself could not have amassed.

Their access to the West End and their welcome in the East End gave them a particular skill for collecting information. They did not always come to him. But when they did, it was with irrefutable evidence.

Evidence he had no doubt they had been collecting. Evidence he had no doubt Imogen was collecting. Evidence he could use, dammit, to stop these crimes. “You cannot always do it on your own, Imogen. Surely you understand that. At some point, the four of you will find yourselves too close to danger.”

“We’ve done just fine in proximity to danger so far.”

He shook his head. “You think you will remain unnoticed? Unnamed? Your brother can see you are up to something. How long before he tells his friend the home secretary? How long before someone notices what I already have? That you four turn up like bad pennies?”

“I beg your pardon. There’s nothing bad about us. If anything, Detective Inspector, when I turn up, you make arrests. Your star rises,” she pointed out, fire in the words and in her eyes. “Indeed, when you are named superintendent of whatever nonsense division of Scotland Yard they intend to give you, it shan’t be because you found me in plain sight. It shall be because you’ve sent multiple aristocrats to prison on the backs of our work. And if we don’t think you are ready to know everything . . . perhaps you are not ready to know everything.”

“You aren’t wrong,” he said. “But what has changed? You brought me in before—why not now?” His fist clenched on the table and he resisted the pain that shot over his newly stitched wound. “Dammit, Imogen, what happens when you run out of luck? Whoever they are—these are not good men. These are men with destruction in mind. What happens when they decide to make you their next target?”

She was quiet.

“You will need me, then. To keep you safe.”

“And if you cannot keep me safe?”

The certainty in the words infuriated him. “I am extremely good at my job.”

“And I am extremely good at mine.”

Frustration consumed him, roaring in his ears like one of her explosions. “Imogen. Do you know who it is? Who threatens you? Who threatens these places?”

She didn’t reply.

Goddammit.

“Imogen.” Her name came on a whisper. “Whatever this is . . . I can help.”

She shook her head. “Can and will are not the same.”

Frustration rumbled through him. Caught in his throat. In his chest. “I will. I will help.”

“How?” She reached the end of her fuse. “You come back tomorrow? Pick through the ash and round up the witnesses for questioning. Frances O’Dwyer? Erin Leafe? Mithra Singh? You question my friends—a collection of aristocrats and criminals, businessmen and sailors? The half-dozen women who work the docks when the ships are in port? You trust that someone knows something about how warehouses burn. About how explosives threaten.”

“I don’t have to do any of that,” he said. “I only have to question you. You know everything they know, don’t you? You were here before me. You are always here before me. I can help you. I can keep these places—these people—safe. It is my job.”

A beat. And then she burst out laughing. “You expect these people to believe Scotland Yard will help? These people in this place where Peelers rarely show their faces except to round them up and carry them off to Newgate for crimes ranging from being poor to being desperate? You think one evening on the water line, preventing a warehouse from burning, will uncouple them from their safest adage?”

“Which adage?”

“The one that tells them not to trust the police.”

He stilled. He knew that the new police force and the residents of the East End were often at odds. But still—the idea that they thought they could not trust him? That she could not trust him? “I’ve no intention of taking anyone to Newgate tonight.”

“And how are we to know that, Detective Inspector?”

He hated the way she lingered on his title with disdain here, in the East End of London, where he had been born. Where he’d brawled as a child and again as a young man. Where his father had been born before him. Where his father had died.

This place Tommy had once vowed to protect.

She continued, standing and smoothing her skirts, straight and regal. “Does your truncheon strike a different kind of blow? Does your whistle sing a different note?” Something shifted in the air between them. Something angry. Something important. “Are we to believe you are good because you tell us so?”

Yes.

The word stuck in his throat.

He’d worked for the police for eleven years, and he was not a fool. He had been pulled from the streets of the East End, only months after the Metropolitan Police were formed in response to the Bow Street Runners growing more and more corrupt and less and less in service to justice.

Adams had hired Tommy with the promise that this was a job that would allow him to build something. To be something. To change something.

So, yes. They could trust him. She could trust him.

But he knew better than most that he could vow it a dozen times in a dozen ways, that he could beg her to believe it, and the vowing, the begging, the willing it to be true would change nothing.

If he wanted Imogen Loveless to trust him—to believe that he was a decent man with a just goal—telling her she could would never be enough.

Tommy would have to show her.