Wicked and the Wallflower (The Bareknuckle Bastards 1)

“It’s only a matter of time,” he said, knowing he should be more committed to the endeavor, considering that Ewan and Felicity had to be engaged before Devil could steal her away from the engagement. The engagement was part of the plan. A part of Ewan’s lesson. Of course Devil wanted it.

“He asked me last night.”

He just hadn’t wanted it so quickly, it seemed.

He turned to her. “He asked you to do what?”

Her hair glittered copper in the candlelight as she smiled up at him. “To marry him. It was really quite simple. He introduced himself, told me he was happy to marry me. That he was in the market for a wife, and I had . . . how did he put it? Oh, it was terribly romantic.” Devil’s teeth clenched as she searched for the words and then found them, dry as sand. “Oh, yes. I had turned up just at the right time.”

Good Lord. Ewan had never been a brilliant wordsmith, but that was particularly bad. And proof that the duke, too, had a plan. Which meant that perhaps Felicity Faircloth’s request was not such a terrible idea after all. “Terribly romantic, indeed,” he said.

She shrugged. “But he is very handsome and dances like a dream, as I said.”

It didn’t seem possible that she was teasing him. How could she possibly know how the words would grate? “And that is a thing all women look for in their husbands.”

She grinned. “However did you know?”

She was teasing him. She was teasing him, and he liked it. And he shouldn’t. “You want the man mad for you.”

“Well, I remain unconvinced that he is not mad in general, but yes,” she said. “Doesn’t every wife want that from her husband?”

“Not in my experience, no.”

“Do you have a great deal of experience with wives?”

He ignored the question. “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” he said, turning back down the corridor.

She followed him. “What does that mean?”

“Only that passion isn’t a thing one toys with—once the wings are singed, the moth is yours to deal with.”

“As the moth shall be my husband, I imagine I will have to deal with him anyway.”

But he won’t be your husband. Devil resisted the urge to say it. Resisted, too, the emotion clawing at him as he thought the words. The guilt.

“You promised me, Devil,” she said softly. “You made me a deal. You said you’d make me flame.”

He didn’t have to do anything to turn her to flame. She burned too brightly already.

They reached the exterior door to the hold, and he crouched low, placing the lantern on the ground as he reached for the ring of keys. She came to his side, reaching out for the row of locks, her fingers tracing over one of them as though she could pick it by touch alone. And with the way she’d tackled the Chubb earlier, he half believed she could.

Cold seeped through the steel door, and he hunched his shoulders, sliding the key into the first lock. “Why do you lockpick?”

“Is that relevant?”

He threw her a sidelong look. “I’m sure you can see how it would be of interest.”

She watched as he worked the second lock. “The world is full of doors.” Lord knew that was true. “I like being able to open my own doors.”

“And what do you know of locked doors, Felicity Faircloth?”

“I wish you would stop doing that,” she said. “Treating me as though I have never wanted for anything in my life. As though it has all been mine for the taking.”

“Hasn’t it been?”

“None of the important bits, no. Not love. Not . . . friendship. Barely family.”

“You’re better off without those friends.”

“Are you offering to be a new one?”

Yes.

“No.”

She huffed a little laugh, reaching to take one of the padlocks from the door as he continued his work. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her turning it over and over in her hand. “I pick locks because I can. Because there are very few things in the world I can control, and locks are something I am good at. They are a barrier I can clear. And a secret I can know. And in the end, they bend to my will and . . .” She shrugged. “I like that.”

He could imagine bending to her will. He shouldn’t imagine it. But he could. He opened the first, heavy door, frigid air washing over them as the second door came into view. He set to work on the next row of locks. “It’s not the kind of skill one expects a woman to have.”

“It’s exactly the kind of skill we should have. Our whole world is built by men. For them. And we’re simply here for decoration, brought in at the end of everything important. Well, I grow tired of ends. Locks are beginnings.”

He turned to look at her, consumed with a desire to give her infinite beginnings.

She kept talking, seemingly mesmerized by his keys as he worked. “The point is, I understand what it is to want to be on the other side of the door. I understand what it is to know that the room isn’t mine for the taking. So many doors are closed to all but a fraction of us.” He opened the last lock, and she finished, softly, “Why should others be the ones to decide which doors are for me?”

The question, so honest, so forthright, made him want to break down every door she came to from now until the end of time.

Devil settled on the one in front of them, pushing it open to reveal the ice hold. A wall of cold greeted them, and beyond it, darkness. Unease thundered through him—resistance to the darkness, an all too familiar urge to run.

Felicity Faircloth had no such urge. She stepped right into the room, wrapping her arms about her. “So, ice it is.”

He followed her, holding the lantern high, even as the cavernous space swallowed the light. “You still did not believe me?”

“Not entirely.”

“And what did you think I was planning to show you down here?”

“Your mysterious, underground lair?”

“Underground lairs are highly overvalued.”

“They are?”

“No windows, and they’re hell on the boots.”

Her little laugh was a flicker in the darkness. “I expect I shall have some explaining to do tomorrow when my maid sees the hem of my skirts.”

“What will you tell her?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She sighed. “Late night gardening? It doesn’t matter. No one expects me to do anything like explore the underground caverns of Covent Garden.”

“Why not?”

She paused, and he would have given anything to see her face, but she was too busy peering into the darkness. “Because I’m ordinary,” she said simply, distractedly. “Terribly so.”

“Felicity Faircloth,” he said, “in the few days I’ve known you

, I’ve learned one, unimpeachable truth. You are no kind of ordinary.”

She turned back to him at that, fast and unexpected, and in the lantern light he discovered her cheeks pinkening from the cold, which made her rather . . . fetching.

Whit would eat him for supper if he knew Devil had even thought the word fetching. It was a ridiculous word. The kind of word used by fops and dandies. Not by bastards who carried cane swords. And she wasn’t fetching. She was a means to an end. An aging, wallflower, spinster means, in his orbit for a sole purpose—his brother’s end.

And even if she weren’t all those things, she absolutely wouldn’t be for him. Felicity Faircloth was the daughter to a marquess, the sister to an earl, and so far above his station she should have a different climate. Her porcelain skin was too perfect, her hands too clean, and her world too grand. Her wide-eyed delight at his Covent Garden warehouse and her smirking pride at cracking the lock to his criminal life only proved the point. Lady Felicity would never know what it was to be common.

That, alone, should have been enough.

Except she smiled before he could stop this mad game, and the candlelight played tricks, because she went from fetching to fucking beautiful. And that was before she said, breathlessly, “No kind of ordinary; I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Christ.

He had to get her out of there. “Well, now you’ve seen the hold.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“This is all there is to see.”

“It’s dark,” she replied, reaching for the lantern. “May I?”

He relinquished it reluctantly, a thread of unease coiling through him at the idea that he was no longer in control of the light. He took a deep breath when she turned away from him and moved deeper into the hold to discover the stacks of ice within.

The ship’s cargo had been moved carefully, through a long, straight path cut by removing blocks of ice, revealing the center of the hold, which only hours ago was full of casks and crates and barrels and boxes now on their way to myriad locations throughout Britain.

Damned if Felicity Faircloth didn’t head straight for that path, as though she were attending a tea party at the center of a labyrinth. She called back, “I wonder what I shall find inside the ice?”