“I heard the same,” Amanda said with near-breathless excitement. “And I heard he’s doing the rounds of the doyennes’ tearooms.”

Matthew groaned. “If that doesn’t make the man suspect, I don’t know what does. Who wants to drink tea with a score of dowagers?”

“A man in need of a bride,” Jared replied.

“Or an heir,” Amanda said, wistfully.

“Ahem, wife,” Matthew teased, and the whole group laughed, making Felicity remember for half a second what it was to be welcome in their jokes and jests and gossip. A part of their glittering world.

“He had to meet the dowagers to get London here tonight, no?” the third woman in the party interjected. “Without their approval, no one would have come.”

There was a beat of silence, and then the original foursome laughed, the sound edging from camaraderie into cruelty. Faulk leaned forward and tapped the young blond woman on her chin. “You’re not very intelligent, are you?”

Natasha swatted her brother on the arm and offered a false, scolding, “Jared. Come now. How is Annabelle to know how the aristocracy works? She married so far above herself, the lucky girl never required it!” Before Annabelle could experience the full lash of the stinging words, Natasha leaned in and whispered, loud and slow as though the poor woman were unable to understand the simplest of concepts, “Everyone would have come to see the hermit duke, darling. He could have appeared in the nude and we all would have happily danced with him and pretended not to notice.”

“With how mad everyone’s made the man out to be,” Amanda interjected, “I think we were all half-expecting him to appear nude.”

Annabelle’s husband, the heir to the Marquessate of Wapping, cleared his throat and attempted to bypass the insult to his wife. “Well, he’s danced with a score of ladies already this evening.” He looked to Natasha. “Including you, Lady Natasha.”

The rest of the group tittered while Natasha preened—all, that is, but Annabelle, who narrowed her gaze on her laughing husband. Felicity found the response deeply gratifying, as the husband in question surely deserved whatever wicked punishment his wife was devising for not leaping to her defense.

And now it was too late.

“Oh, yes,” Natasha was saying, looking every inch the cat that got the cream. “And I might add that he was a sparkling conversationalist.”

“Was he?” Amanda asked.

“He was. Not a glimpse of madness.”

“That’s interesting, Tasha,” Lord Hagin replied casually, drinking his champagne for dramatic pause. “As we watched the whole dance, and he didn’t appear to speak to you once.”

The rest of the group jeered as Natasha turned red. “Well, it was clear he wished to talk to me.”

“Sparkling, of course,” her brother jested, toasting her with his champagne.

“And,” she went on, “he held me quite tightly—I could tell he was resisting the urge to pull me closer than was appropriate.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Amanda smirked, her disbelief plain.

She rolled her eyes as the rest of the group laughed. That is, the rest of the group, save one.

Jared, Lord Faulk, was too busy looking at Felicity.

Bollocks.

His gaze filled with hunger and delight in a way that sent Felicity’s stomach straight to the stones beneath her feet. She’d seen that expression a thousand times before. She used to go breathless when it appeared, because it meant he was about to skewer someone with his wicked wit. Now, she went breathless for a different reason.

“I say! I thought Felicity Faircloth left the ball ages ago.”

“I thought we drove her out,” Amanda said, not seeing what Jared saw. “Honestly. At her age—and with no friends to speak of—you’d think she’d stop attending balls. No one wants a spinster lurking about. It’s positively depressing.”

Amanda had always had a remarkable skill at making words sting like winter wind.

“And yet, here she is,” Jared pronounced with a smirk and a waved hand in Felicity’s direction. The whole group turned in slow, gruesome tableau, a sextet of smirks rising—four well-practiced and two with a slight discomfort. “Lurking in the shadows, eavesdropping.”

Amanda investigated a speck on one of her seafoam gloves. “Really, Felicity. So tiresome. Is there no one else you might skulk upon?”

“Perhaps an unsuspecting lord whose rooms you’d like to explore?” This from Hagin, no doubt thinking himself exceedingly clever.

He wasn’t, although the group did not seem to notice, sniggering and smirking. Felicity loathed the wash of heat that spread across her cheeks, a combination of shame at the remark and shame at her past—at the way she, too, used to snigger and smirk.

She pressed back against the wall, wishing she could disappear into it.

The nightingale she’d heard earlier sang again.

“Poor Felicity,” Natasha said to the group, the false sympathy in her tone crawling over Felicity’s skin, “always wishing she were of more consequence.”

And like that, with that single word—consequence—Felicity found she had had enough. She stepped into the light, shoulders back and spine straight, and leveled her coolest gaze on the woman she’d once considered a friend. “Poor Natasha,” she said, mimicking the other woman’s earlier tone. “Come now, you think I do not know you? I know you better than anyone else here. Unmarried, just as I am. Plain, just as I am. Terrified of being shelved. As I have been.” Natasha’s eyes went wide at the descriptor. Felicity went in for the final blow, wishing to punish this woman the most—this woman who had played so well at being her friend and then had hurt her so well. “And when you are, this lot won’t have you.”

The nightingale whistled again. No. Not the nightingale. It was a different kind of whistle, low and long. She’d never heard a bird like that.

Or perhaps it was the thrum of her heart that made the sound strange. Spurred on, she turned to the newest additions to the group, whose wide eyes were fixed upon her. “Do you know, my grandmother used to caution me to beware—she was fond of saying one could judge a man by his friends. The adage is more than true with this group. And you should watch yourselves lest you be tainted by their soot.” She turned to the door. “I, for one, count myself lucky I escaped them when I did.”

As she made for the entrance to the ballroom, quite proud of herself for standing up to these people who had consumed her for so long, words echoed through her from earlier:

You are a woman of serious consequence.

A smile played at her lips at the memory.

Indeed. She was.

“Felicity?” Natasha called to her as she arrived at the threshold.

Felicity stilled and turned back.

“You didn’t escape us,” the other woman snapped. “We exited you.”

Natasha Corkwood was just . . . so . . . unpleasant.

“We didn’t want you anymore, and we tossed you out,” Natasha added, the words cold and cruel. “Just like everyone else has. Just like they always will.” She turned to the assembly with a too bright laugh. “And here she is, thinking she might vie for a duke!”

So unpleasant.

That’s the best you can do?

No. No it wasn’t. “The duke you intend to win, correct?”

Natasha smirked. “The duke I shall win.”

“I’m afraid you are too late,” she said, the words coming without hesitation.

“And why is that?” It was Hagin who asked. Hagin, with his smug face and noxious perfume and hair like a fairy-tale prince. And the question was asked with such condescension, as though he deigned to speak with her.

As though they had not all been friends once.

Later, she would blame the memory of that friendship for her reply. The whisper of the life she’d lost in an instant, without ever understanding why. The devastating sadness of it. The way it had catapulted her into ruin.

After all, there had to be some reason wh

y she said what she said, considering the fact that it was pure idiocy. Absolute madness.

A lie so enormous, it eclipsed suns.

“You are too late for the duke,” she repeated, knowing, even as she spoke, that she must stop the words from coming. Except they were a runaway horse—loosed and free and wild. “Because I’ve already landed him.”

Chapter Three

The last time Devil had been inside Marwick House was the night he met his father.

He’d been ten years old, too old to remain at the orphanage where he’d spent his entire life. Devil had heard rumors of what came of boys who aged out of the orphanage. He had been preparing to run, not wanting to face the workhouse where, if the stories were to be believed, he was likely to die, and no one would find his body.

Devil had believed the stories.

Each night, knowing it was a matter of time before they came for him, he’d carefully packed his belongings—a pair of too big stockings he’d nicked from the laundry. A crust of bread or hard biscuit saved from afternoon meal. A pair of mittens worn by too many boys to count, too filled with holes to keep hands warm any longer. And the small gilded pin that had been stuck to his swaddle when he’d been found as a babe, run through with a piece of embroidery, on which was a magnificent red M. The pin had long-ago lost its paint, turning back into brass, and the cloth that had once been white had turned grey with dirt from his fingers. But it was all Devil had owned of his past, and the only source of hope he’d had for his future.

Each night, he would lie in the pitch black, listening to the sounds of the other boys’ tears, counting the steps to get from his pallet to the hallway, down the hallway to the door. Out the door, and into the night. He was an excellent climber, and he’d decided to take to the rooftops instead of the streets—they’d have been less likely to find him if they gave chase.

Though it had seemed unlikely anyone would chase him.

Tags: Sarah MacLean The Bareknuckle Bastards Romance
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