Wicked and the Wallflower (The Bareknuckle Bastards 1)

He licked at the soft skin, loving the way it puckered beneath his touch. She hissed at the sensation and he pulled back from her. “Are you cold?”

She shook her head. “No. No. No. No.” Her fingers tightened at his head and she rose toward him, closing the distance between them. “Again, please.”

Anything she wants. Everything.

He groaned and pulled the line of the dress lower, revealing her nipple for his lips and tongue, scraping it with his teeth as he tucked his hard length against her, his trousers suddenly too tight. She cried out when he suckled, light and then harder as she whispered his name in the darkness. “Devil.”

Devon, his mind whispered back, and he pushed the thought aside, refusing to allow it purchase. No one called him by his given name. Certainly no woman. And he wasn’t about to let Felicity Faircloth be the first.

But he would let her do other things—he would let her touch him, let her direct his mouth to where she wanted it, let her press closer to the long, throbbing length of him even when she didn’t know what she was tempting. What she was asking. “I want—”

“I know,” he replied, rocking against her, letting her taste the pleasure he could give her. She quickly got the hang of it, and Devil let her use him. He growled and sucked deeper, loving the cry she let loose against his hair as he worked her with tongue and lips. As she worked herself on him. She was fire.

And he was aflame.

All he wanted was to lie her back on this slab of ice and worship her with his hands and mouth and cock until she’d learned the thousand ways he could bring her pleasure. She would let him. She was lost to pleasure, rocking against him, begging him for it. “Please.” She sighed.

Not tonight.

He stilled at that, raising his lips from her breast, staying the movement of his hand on her thigh where it played at the seam of her undergarments.

Not yet. Banns haven’t been posted.

The whisper came from deep within, from the place that had planned revenge against his brother. From the place that had hated his brother for twenty years. From the place that had hated his father for far longer.

Hate had no place with Felicity Faircloth.

It would. There would be a time when she would hate him.

A heavy pounding on the steel door to the room punctuated the thought, and they both turned toward it. It wasn’t locked, but Whit and Nik would know better than to enter without permission. They’d also know better than to knock in the first place unless something had gone wrong.

He pulled away abruptly, her fingers releasing his head as he lowered her skirts, dropping them over her legs and stepping back—putting room between them as their heavy breaths echoed through the cavernous space.

She reached for him, like a goddess.

He shook his head, somehow finding the will to refuse her. “No,” he whispered. “No more tonight, Lady Flame.”

“But—” He heard the frustration in the word—the same frustration that crawled through him. She wanted him. She wanted all of it. But Felicity Faircloth didn’t know how to ask for it, thank God, and so she settled on, “Please.”

Christ, he wanted to give it to her.

Not tonight. Too soon.

He shouldn’t give it to her ever.

A knock again. Urgent and unwilling to be ignored.

He righted her bodice and pulled his coat tight around her when she shivered, the cold finally finding her. “Come,” he said, and she did, following him back through the ice to the steel door.

Behind it, Nik. “It’s London Second. Again.”

Devil cursed. “It’s been what, an hour?”

“Long enough to clear the rookery,” she said. “They were waiting for us. Stopped just before crossing Long Acre. Headed for Mayfair.”

They were already through the steel door, letting it clatter behind them, unlocked as they headed down the long, dark corridor to the hatch that let them up into the warehouse.

“What’s happened?” Felicity asked at his elbow. “Is it the Crown?”

He looked to her, half grateful she knew the truth and half irritated she knew the truth. “What would the Crown want with ice?” Then, without hesitating, he looked back to Nik. “The boys?”

“Dinuka is returned.” One of the outriders. “He fired on them. Thinks he winged one. Niall and Hamish are shot.”

“Goddammit, we changed the route.” It was the third hijacking of the same delivery in two months.

Felicity’s gasp drowned out his curse at the news. “Shot by whom?”

Nik looked to her. “We don’t know.”

If they knew, Devil would have run them through already. He swore again as Nik reached the ladder and set to climbing. Niall was one of the Bastards’ best drivers; the Scotsman had been with them since he was a boy. Hamish was his brother—barely out of boyhood, hadn’t even grown his first beard.

“Alive?” he shouted up to Nik as she turned to help Felicity out of the hold.

The Norwegian looked down at him. “We don’t know.”

Another curse as he passed up the lantern, Felicity leaning down to take it from him as though she’d done this a hundred times instead of once. “Devil,” she said, softly, and he hated the pity in her tone, as though she understood the rioting emotions in him. These were his boys. Every one of them, his to keep safe.

And tonight, three of them had been threatened.

He turned away from her gaze, looking back toward the ice hold.

Mistake.

There was darkness everywhere now that he’d handed up the lantern, and its nearness, the way it crept into the corners of his consciousness, was too much. He scrambled up the ladder, desperate to escape it. Except he’d never been able to escape it. He lived in darkness.

But there, on the surface, was Felicity, light and hope and everything he would never have. Everything he’d once been promised. Everything he’d once imagined might be his, in a brilliant, beautiful package.

The concern in her eyes was nearly his undoing.

He barked an order to Nik to close the hatch to the ice hold.

What had he been thinking?

What had he been doing?

She didn’t belong here—in this place or in his life. He shook his head once and started across the warehouse, toward the door she never should have come through, where Whit stood sentry, dark eyes seeing everything, lingering at a place near Devil’s thigh. Devil’s hand flexed under his brother’s watchful gaze, and he realized Felicity’s was in his grasp.

He hadn’t even noticed.

Devil dropped her hand, catching the cane sword Whit tossed before he was through the door and calling for John, who leapt down from the roof, rifle in hand. Waving back at Felicity without stopping, Devil ordered, “Take her home.”

Felicity’s inhale was loud as a gunshot in the warehouse courtyard. “No.”

Devil didn’t look at her.

John nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Wait!” She chased after Devil. “What’s happened? Where are you going? Let me come. I can help.”

She had to leave here. She was in more danger every moment she lingered. She was more danger to him every moment she lingered. What if she hadn’t been here? Perhaps he would have decided to drive the rig. Then Niall wouldn’t have a bullet in him.

His gaze met Whit’s, calm and collected and absent of judgment, but Devil felt the judgment anyway.

What the hell was he doing, playing at passion in the ice hold while men with lives and families and futures were shot at in his name? Christ. He never should have let her in. Hadn’t Whit said it? Hadn’t Devil known it?

What a fucking mess.

He repeated his order to John. “Take her home. Shoot anyone who gets in your way.”

“Aye,” John replied again, reaching for her arm. “My lady.”

She pulled away. “No.” The word was firm and John hesitated. “Devil. I can help. If it’s the Crown—no one hurts a marquess?

?s daughter.”

Devil stopped then, turning to her, unable to keep his frustration from rising. “You think for a moment that if someone comes at you with a rifle, they’ll care if you’re a marquess’s daughter? You think they’ll care that you’re a lady who embroiders and speaks two languages and knows where to put the goddamn soup spoon and is engaged to a fucking duke?”

Her eyes went wide, and he should have stopped, but he didn’t. He was angry. At himself, but at her as well, for her fresh-faced innocence and her certainty that the world wasn’t bitter and cruel. “They won’t. Not for a second. In fact, they’ll aim for you, looking like sunshine and smelling like jasmine, because they know men raised in the dark will do anything for light.” Her jaw dropped, and he cut her off before she could speak. “You think you can help us?” He gave a little, humorless laugh. “What will you do, pick their locks?”