Wicked and the Wallflower (The Bareknuckle Bastards 1)

She stilled at the words, releasing his hand. When he looked to her, she was facing away from him, toward the city. As he watched, she spread her arms wide and turned her face to the sky, breathing in the night, a small smile playing over her lips.

Devil froze, unable to keep his eyes from her, from the joy in her eyes, the wash of excited color on her cheeks, the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips, her hair gleaming silver in the moonlight. For a heartbeat, she was Cardea, unseen by all the world except him—the beginning and the end, the past and the future. The present.

As beautiful as the night sky.

“I love this,” she said, the words strong and full of passion. “I love the freedom of it. I love that no one knows we are here, secrets in the darkness.”

“You like the darkness,” he said, the words coming out graveled, like wheels on the cobblestones below.

She looked to him, a twinkle in her eye. “I do. I like it because you wrap yourself in it. I like it because you so clearly love it.”

He tightened his grip on his walking stick, tapped it twice against the toe of his boot. “I don’t love it, as a matter of fact.”

Her brows rose and she lowered her arms to her sides. “I find that difficult to believe, as you reign over it.”

He climbed to the peak of the roof, making a show of considering the drop to the next one, so that he did not have to look at her when he said, “I feared the dark as a child.”

A beat, and then her skirts rustling over the roof tiles as she approached. Without turning, he knew she wished to reach for him. To touch him. And he did not think he could bear her pity, so he kept moving, down to the roof below, and up the iron steps to the next. And all the while, speaking—more than he’d ever said to anyone before—thinking to stop her from touching him. To stop her from ever wanting to touch him again. “Candles were expensive, and so they did not light them at the orphanage,” he said, stilling on the next rooftop, his gaze fixed on a lantern swinging outside a tavern far below. “And in the rookery, we did everything we could to avoid the monsters that lurked in the darkness.”

Still, she advanced, his name like a prayer on her lips.

He tapped his walking stick on the red roof tiles marking the gable of the roof beneath his boot, wanting to turn and face her, to say, Don’t come closer. Don’t care for me.

“It was impossible to keep them safe,” he said to the city beyond.

She stopped. “Your brother and sister are lucky to have you. I’ve seen the way they look at you; whatever you did, you kept them as safe as possible.”

“That’s not true,” he said, harshly.

“You were a child, too, Devon,” she said at his back, the words so soft he nearly didn’t hear his name in them. Lie. Of course he heard it. His name on her lips was like salvation.

One he did not deserve. “Knowing that does not help the regret.”

She reached him then, but did not touch him, miraculously, instead, she sat at his feet on the roof’s peak, staring up at him. “You are too hard on yourself; how much older could you possibly be?”

He should end the conversation there and take her down, through the door inset in the roof below, to his offices. He should send her home. Instead, he sat next to her, facing in the opposite direction. She put her gloved hand to the roof between them. He took it in his own, pulling it into his lap, marveling at the way the moon turned the satin to silver.

When he replied, it was to that silver thread, somehow magically spun in this darkness he loved and hated. “We were born on the same day.”

A beat. “How is that—”

He traced her fingers slowly through the glove. Up and down, like a prayer. “To different women.”

Her fingers twitched beneath the touch. Beneath the words. “But the same man.”

“Not Grace.”

“Grace,” she said, her brow furrowing. “Dahlia.”

He nodded. “She has a different father. Which is likely why she is better than the rest of us combined.” His fingers found the buttons on her glove and began to work at them.

Together, they watched the skin of her wrist revealed, before Felicity said, softly, “I thought you said you did not know your father.”

“I said my father did not wish to claim me when my mother died.”

“But later?”

He nodded, refusing to look at her face, instead removing the satin glove in a long, slow slide that made his mouth water. “Later, we became useful.” He paused. “When he realized Grace was all he would get.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. She wasn’t his daughter.”

“He was married to her mother, though. And willing to accept her as his, so desperate he was for an heir.”

An heir meant . . . “He was titled.”

He nodded.

It took all her energy not to ask him which title they discussed. “But . . . he had sons. Why not wait? Why not try for another? A legitimate one?”

“It wasn’t possible. He’d never get another.”

Confusion flared. “Why?”

She had the most beautiful skin. He turned her palm up and traced circles in it. “Because he couldn’t sire heirs after Grace’s mother shot him.”

Her eyes went wide. “Shot him where?”

He did look to her then. “In a place that made it impossible to sire heirs.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. “And so he was left with a girl. No heir.”

“Most men would have given up,” he said. “Let the line die out. Pass to some distant cousin. But my father was desperate for a legacy.”

Her hand closed around his finger, capturing it with her warmth, making him wish she would stay with him forever and keep the cold at bay. “You and Beast.”

He nodded. “Whit.”

She offered a small smile at Whit’s real name. “I prefer that, if I am honest. Devon and Whit,” she said, releasing his fingers and raising her bare hand to his face. He closed his eyes, knowing what she was thinking before she touched him, letting the soft pads of her fingers trace down the long white scar on his cheek. “And the one who did this.”

“Ewan.” He captured her hand in his, leaning into the touch as he told the story for the first time in his life—at once hating himself for resurrecting the past and taking remarkable pleasure in speaking of it, finally. “I thought I was saved when he turned up at the orphanage—my father.” She nodded, and he went on. “My mother had left a few coins, but the family that took me in while they waited for word from him took room and board.”

“For a babe?” Her shock was palpable, and it occurred to Devil that there were some things he would never tell her—things he would protect her from ever knowing existed in the world.

He reached into his trouser pocket and extracted a scrap of fabric. Threadbare and worn. Her gaze fell to it as he rubbed his thumb over the embroidery, the tin pin attached. She wanted to take it, he knew. To investigate it. But she didn’t, and he was torn between giving it to her and hiding it away—at once wanting to share it and terrified of it, of the proof that he would never be enough. He settled for holding it in his palm, revealing the once-fine red M, now faded to brown and barely able to hold together. His talisman.

His past.

He wanted her to understand. “I was ten when he came—at night, ironically. They came to fetch me from the boys’ quarters and I can still see the light of the dean’s candle.” He squeezed her hand without knowing. “I thought I was saved. My father brought me to the country, to an estate that rivaled anything I’d ever dreamed. He introduced me to my brothers.” He paused, then repeated, “And I thoug

ht I’d been saved.”

Her grasp tightened, her fingers threading through his own, as though she could already see the past.

“I hadn’t been,” he said. “I’d exchanged one kind of darkness for another.”

Devil could feel Felicity’s keen focus, razor-sharp and without cease. He did not look at her. He couldn’t. Instead, he continued to speak to her hand, turning it over, running his thumb over her knuckles, savoring the feel of the peaks and valleys of them. “The day of our birth should have been an embarrassment of riches for a father. Four children. Three boys and a girl.” He shook his head. “I should not take glee from it, knowing as I do how the story ends, but I am proud to say that all my father wanted that day was an heir, and he did not receive one. The only one he might have been able to pass off as heir was born a girl. And the others—” He looked to the starlit sky. “We were all bastards.”

He tried to release her, but she wouldn’t have it. Her hand clasped his ever more tightly as he continued. “But my father was nothing if not shrewd. And for him, name was more important than fortune. Or future. Or truth. And he claimed an heir had been born. A son.”

Felicity’s eyes went wide. “That’s illegal.”

Not just illegal. Punishable by death when the heir would inherit a dukedom.

“No one discovered it? No one said anything?” It was impossible to believe, Devil knew. Late at night, he often struggled with the memory of it, certain he had it wrong. The house had been filled with servants. So many should have noticed. Should have spoken up.

But he’d been there. And the memories did not lie.

He shook his head. “It never occurred to anyone to go looking. Grace was kept in the country—never brought to town, something her mother was more than happy to allow, as Grace, too, was a bastard. A handful of old, loyal servants were allowed to stay with them. And my father had a plan. After all, he had three sons. By-blows, certainly, but sons nonetheless. When we were ten, he collected us. Brought us to the country house, and told us his plan.

“One of us, you see, would be heir. Rich beyond measure. Educated in the best schools. He would never want for anything. Food, drink, power, women, whatever he wanted.”