Wicked and the Wallflower (The Bareknuckle Bastards 1)

“Does it appear that there is anything but ice in those wagons?”

She shook her head. “Appearances are not reality.”

“Lord knows that’s true, Felicity Faircloth, plain, unassuming, uninteresting wallflower spinster lockpick.” He paused. “What do your unfortunate, terrible friends think of your hobby?”

She blushed. “They don’t know about it.”

“And your family?”

She looked away, heat and frustration flaring. “They . . .” She paused, thinking twice about the answer. “They don’t like it.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what you were going to say. Tell me the first bit. The true bit.”

She met his eyes, scowling. “They are ashamed of it.”

“They shouldn’t be,” he said simply. Honestly. “They should be bloody proud of it.”

She raised her brows. “Of my criminal tendencies?”

“Well, you won’t find criticism of criminal tendencies here, love. But no. They should be proud of it because you’ve got the future in your hands every time you hold a hairpin.”

She stopped breathing at that, her heart pounding at the calm assessment of her wild, wicked skill. He was the first person who had ever, ever understood. Not knowing how to respond, she changed the subject. “What else is in the wagons?”

“Hay,” he said. “It insulates the ice at the back, near the door openings.”

“Oi! Dev!”

Devil’s attention snapped to the growl from the darkness. “What is it?”

“Tear yerself from the girl and ’ave a look a’ the manifests.”

He cleared his throat at the impertinent question and turned to Felicity. “You. Stay here. Don’t leave. Or commit any crimes.”

She raised a brow. “I shall leave all crime committing to you lot.”

His lips pressed into a flat line and he crossed into the darkness, leaving Felicity alone. Alone to investigate.

Ordinarily, if this were, say, a ballroom or a walk in Hyde Park, Felicity would have been too afraid to approach a location so teeming with men. Aside from pure good sense—men were too often more dangerous than they weren’t—Felicity’s interactions with the opposite sex rarely ended in anything that was not an insult. Either they rebuked her presence or they felt entitled to it, and neither left a woman interested in spending time with a man.

But somehow, now, she’d been made safe among them. And it wasn’t simply that Devil had wrapped her in the mantle of his protection; it was also that the men assembled didn’t seem to notice her. Or, if they did, they didn’t seem to care that she was a woman. Her skirts weren’t interesting. They weren’t judging the condition of her hair or the cleanliness of the gloves she was not wearing.

They were working, and she was there, and neither thing impacted the other, and it was unexpected and glorious. And full of opportunity.

She headed for the wagons, larger than most, and made not of the wood and canvas that was so commonly found on London streets, but of metal—great slabs of what looked to be flattened steel. She approached the nearest conveyance, reaching up to touch it, rapping at it to hear the sound of the full cargo beyond.

“Curious?”

Felicity whirled to face a tall man behind her. No, not a man. A woman, incredibly tall—possibly taller than Devil—and whipcord lean, lean enough to be mistaken for a man as she was, dressed in men’s shirt and trousers, and tall black boots that only served to elongate her, so that it seemed as though she could reach her arms over her head and touch the clouds themselves. But even without the height, Felicity would have been fascinated by this woman—by her easy stance and her obvious comfort. By the way she seemed to stand in the dimly lit warehouse and claim it as hers. She did not need to pick a lock to gain access . . . she possessed the key.

What must it be like to be a woman such as this, head now tilted to one side, staring down at Felicity. “You can look, if you like,” the woman said, one hand waving toward the back of the wagon, her voice carrying a strange, soft accent that Felicity could not place. “Devil brought you here, so he must trust you.”

Felicity wondered at the words, at the certainty that Devil would do nothing to harm this place or the people who worked within it, and something flared in her—something startlingly akin to guilt. “I don’t think he does trust me,” she replied, unable to keep herself from looking in the direction of the woman’s wave, wanting nothing more than to follow it and look inside this great steel wagon. “I brought myself here.”

A smile played at the other woman’s lips. “I promise you, if Devil didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be here.”

Felicity took the words at their face, and moved toward the open back of the wagon, her fingers trailing along the steel, which grew colder as she reached her destination.

The woman turned to a man nearby. “Samir, this one is ready for you. You stay on the North Road and you don’t stop until daylight. Keep to your planned stops and you’ll see the border in six nights. There, you’ll be met by three others.” She handed the man a handful of papers. “Manifests and directions for the other deliveries. Understood?”

Samir, who Felicity imagined was to drive the wagon, tipped his cap. “Aye, sir.”

The woman clapped her hand on his shoulder. “Good man. Good chase.” She turned back to Felicity. “Devil will be back in no time. He’s just checking the loads.”

Felicity nodded, rounding the corner of the wagon to discover a wall of hay, loaded up to the top. She looked to the woman. “They don’t have a better way to bring ice to Scotland than through London?”

The woman paused, then said, “Not one we know of.”

Felicity turned back to the wagon and reached out to touch the coarse straw hiding whatever was inside. “Strange no one has realized that Inverness is directly across the North Sea from Norway.” She paused. “Which is where ice comes from, no?”

“Is she bothering you, Nik?” Felicity pulled back her hand and spun toward the question, spoken altogether too close to her ear. Devil had returned to inspect the open wagon, and Felicity, it seemed.

“No,” the woman named Nik replied, and Felicity thought she might hear laughter in the other woman’s voice, “but I’m imagining she’s going to bother you quite a bit.”

Devil grunted and looked to Felicity. “Don’t bother Nik. She’s work to do.”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” Felicity retorted. “Ensuring your ice is shipped the hundreds of miles back toward its origin.” He looked over her shoulder at that, and she followed his gaze to Nik, who was smirking at him. Excitement flared. “Because it’s not ice, is it?”

“See for yourself.” He reached past her, pulling a bale of hay down from the wagon, revealing a block of ice behind. He frowned.

Felicity’s brows rose. “Are you surprised?”

Ignoring her, he reached for another bale, and another, pulling them down to reveal a wall of ice the length of the wagon and rising nearly to the top of it. He looked to Nik, the wicked scar on his face gone white in the dim light. “This is how we get melt.”

The woman sighed and called into the darkness, “We need another row here.”

“Aye,” came a chorus of men from the darkness.

They came almost instantly, carrying great metal tongs, each bearing a block of solid ice. One by one, they passed the blocks to Devil, who’d climbed up onto the wagon and was fitting them carefully into the void left at the top of the shipment, ensuring as little space as possible was left.

Felicity would have been fascinated by the process if she weren’t so fascinated by him, somehow hanging off the edge of the wagon, heaving great blocks of ice up nearly to above his head as though he were superhuman. As though he were Atlas himself, surefooted and holding up the firmament. He wasn’t wearing a topcoat or a waistcoat, and the linen of his white shirt stretched and flexed over his muscles as they did the same, making Felicity wonder if it might tear beneath his strength.

Everyone was alw

ays on about women’s décolletages and how corsetry was growing more salacious by the minute and skirts clung too close to women’s legs, but had any one of those people seen a man without a coat? Good God.

She swallowed as he put the last block into place and leapt down, raising a strange, steel lip from the base of the wagon—approximately twelve inches high and so tightly fitted to the sides of the vehicle that the scrape of it screamed through the warehouse.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Keeps the ice from sliding when the melting begins,” he said, not looking at her.

She nodded. “Well, anyone peeking into this wagon would think that you were a very skilled ice deliverer, that is certain.”

He did look at her then. “I am a very skilled ice deliverer.”

She shook her head. “I would believe it, if it were ice.”

“Do your eyes deceive you?”

“They do, in fact. But my touch does not.”

His brow furrowed. “What’s that to mean?”

“Only that if this entire steel wagon were filled with ice, the entirety of the outside would be as cold as the rear two feet.”

Nik coughed.

Devil ignored the words, reaching to swing the large rear door to the wagon closed, latching it in three separate places. Felicity watched carefully as he closed the locks and delivered their keys to Nik. “Tell the men they’re ready.”

“Aye, sir.” Nik turned to the men assembled. “That’s a go, gentlemen. Good chase.”