Wicked and the Wallflower: Bareknuckle Bastards Book 1

by Sarah MacLean

  He interrupted her thoughts. “What are you doing here?”

  I came to learn how to win you. “I have an invitation.”

  “Yes, and my sister is lucky I did not decide to put her into the Thames for extending it to you.” He was so close, and speaking so quietly in the shadows. “Now I’m going to ask you one more time, my lady, and you’d do best to tell me the truth. What are you doing here?”

  For the first time in her life, as she heard the words my lady, she wondered what it would be to actually, honestly be someone’s lady. What might it be like to stand by his side? To touch him at will? To have him touch her?

  She wanted it.

  But instead of saying so, she said, softly, “You told me I couldn’t come to you any longer.”

  He closed his eyes a breath longer than he should. “Yes.”

  The reply grated. “You want to have your cake and eat it, too, and I shan’t allow it. You may either wash your hands of me or attempt to be my keeper, Devil, but you may not have both. And I’m not in the market for a keeper, anyway.”

  “As you are standing in the middle of a Covent Garden bordello, I think you absolutely should be.”

  “I am in the middle of a Covent Garden bordello because I am through with keepers, and there is a wide world of things I’d like to learn.”

  “You should go home.”

  “And what will I learn there, how to be a sacrificial lamb? How to marry a man I do not love? How to save a family I find I resent more than I should?”

  Another low growl. “And what do you think this place will teach you?”

  How to win you.

  She swallowed. “All the things you refuse to.”

  He narrowed his gaze on her. “Do you remember what I told you about passion, Felicity? I told you it is not like love—it is not patient or kind or whatever else Scripture likes to tell us. It is not want. It is need.”

  Heat was coming off him in waves, wrapping itself around her with the promise of his words. What would it be like to be needed by him? Would it be as heady as how it felt to need him?

  Because she was beginning to feel she needed him.

  Surely that was why it had hurt so much when he’d left her.

  Not because she loved him.

  And then he added, “Passion comes with the worst of sin far more than it comes with the best of virtue.”

  She heard the guilt in his words, and could not stop herself from lifting her hand, from putting her fingers to his cheek, wishing her gloves gone. Wishing she could feel him, skin to skin. “You know about sin, don’t you, Devil?”

  He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch, sending a flood of pleasure to the core of her. “I know more about sin than you could possibly dream.”

  “You told me once you could see my sin,” she said.

  His beautiful eyes opened again, dark and knowing. “It is envy. You envy them their place. Their lives. Their acceptance in society.”

  Perhaps that had been the case once. Perhaps there had been a time when she would have done anything to have the life the rest of society had. The happiness. The acceptance. No longer. “You’re wrong. That isn’t my sin.”

  It was his turn to lift a hand. To touch her, his magnificently warm fingers against her cheek. “What is it, then?”

  “It is want,” she said, the words barely there.

  He cursed softly in the darkness, so close. So impossibly, beautifully close.

  She pressed on, knowing she shouldn’t. Unable to stop. “I want you, Devil. I want to woo you. I want to be your flame. But I fear . . .” She paused, hating the way he watched her, as though he saw every word that was coming before she formed it. And perhaps he did. It didn’t matter. “I fear I am your moth, instead.”

  His fingers moved, sliding to the back of her neck, into her hair, pulling her to him, and setting her on fire.

  There was nothing tentative about the kiss—which only added to the heady fog that came over her with it. One moment, she was sure that he wanted to be rid of her, and the next, he was stealing her breath and thought and sanity, one hand cradling her face, the other arm wrapping around her back to keep her steady and pull her close to the heat of him. His mouth played over hers, sending wave after wave of sensation rocketing through her, rough and perfect, his tongue warm and lush against her own.

  It might well be the last time he kissed her, and it was magnificent.

  She could happily live here, in his arms, in this stairwell, forever.

  Except a throat cleared behind him, from what seemed like a mile away, and panic flared at being discovered. She pushed at his shoulders, and Devil lifted his lips from hers in a slow, lingering disengagement, as though he had no reason whatsoever to disengage.

  “What?” he asked, without looking away from her.

  “You’ve broken my door,” Dahlia said from below.

  He grunted his acknowledgment of the words, still not looking away from Felicity, whose cheeks were blazing. His free hand ran down her arm to take her hand in his.

  “We’ve rooms for things like that, you know,” Dahlia added.

  Devil’s beautiful lips flattened into a straight line. “Bugger off.” He leaned in and kissed Felicity again, quick and thorough, leaving her breathless when he lifted his head and said, “Come with me.”

  As though she could do anything but that.

  They climbed the stairs, one flight, and the next. He didn’t hesitate—didn’t slow his pace, not even when Felicity craned to see down the beautiful, mysterious hallways that promised adventure and sin. Instead, he led her higher and higher, Felicity’s heart pounding harder and harder until he stopped in an almost pitch-black narrow stairwell, with nowhere else to go.

  He released her then and set his hands to the ceiling, rings gleaming in the darkness mere inches above his head, and pushed open an inlaid door, lifting himself up and out, leaving Felicity gaping at his beautiful body, silhouetted against the starlit sky.

  When he reached back and offered her a hand, she did not hesitate, and he pulled her out into the night, where he reigned.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He took her to the rooftops.

  He knew he shouldn’t. He knew he should pack her into a hack and return her to Mayfair—untouched, to the home that had been in her family for generations. He knew he was wrong to bring her to this world that was all his and nothing of hers, that would do nothing but soil her with it.

  But if Felicity’s sin was want, so was Devil’s. And Christ, he wanted her.

  He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything, and Devil had spent much of his youth hungry and cold, poor and angry. He might have been able to resist his desire—but then she’d confessed her own: I want you. I want to be your flame . . . but I fear I am your moth instead.

  And all Devil wished was to take her somewhere so they might burn together.

  He closed the door after he pulled her up onto the roof of Grace’s club—rising from the task to discover her staring out into the night, the city below and the stars above, as clear as his view of the future.

  The one he would spend without her.

  But tonight, he would share this world with her, even as he knew he would regret it forever. How could he resist?

  Especially when she reached up and removed the mask she’d been given inside, revealing herself to the warm night. She turned in a slow circle, eyes wide as she took it in. And then she raised her gaze to his, and the breathless smile on her face threatened to send him to his knees. “This is magnificent.”

  “It is,” he said, his own breath coming harshly.

  She shook her head. “I never think of the rooftops.”

  He extended his hand to her. “They are the best way to travel.” She settled her hand in his, giving her trust over to him before he led her from one building to the next, down a long, curving city street, up and over the roofs, from ridge to ridge, around chimneys and over broken tiles.

  “Where ar
e we going?”

  “Away,” he said.

  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 thought 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.”

  Her grasp threatened to stop the circulation of his blood through his fingers. “Devil,” she whispered.