Wicked and the Wallflower: Bareknuckle Bastards Book 1

by Sarah MacLean

  “Interestingly, he had no intention of marrying me, either, so for once, you and your brother were not at odds.” Blood rushed in Devil’s ears.

  Brother.

  She knew.

  “How did you know?”

  A beat. And then, “I know because you are the same.”

  No. “We are nothing like the same.”

  Her gaze narrowed on him. “Bollocks. You are more alike than you can imagine.” She didn’t know how the words would sting. How they would rage in him. How they would whisper truth.

  “Neither of you thought twice before using me. Him, to summon you from the darkness, to find you after twelve years of looking. But here is the truth of it . . .” She paused, and he knew the blow was coming. Knew, too, that he could not escape it. “I don’t care about him. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t bare myself and worse—my heart—to him. And so, while his past sins are no doubt monstrous . . . while he more than deserved the blow I delivered . . . while I wish him ill beyond measure . . . his sin is nothing in comparison to yours.”

  She turned away from him then, rounding his desk and going to the window at the far side of the room, the sound of her skirts brushing against the carpet like gunfire. He hated watching her leave him. Hated the way the air seemed to cool with every one of her steps, as though he might be left cold and frozen without her.

  And he would be.

  She stilled at the window, lifting a hand to a mottled pane of glass, small and barely transparent. It wasn’t worth filling Covent Garden windows with decent glass, and watching Felicity dressed like a queen and running her fingers down the windowpane only underscored everything Devil knew to be true. He could not have her.

  Her discovery tonight was for the best.

  She was not for him.

  “Do you love me?” The question, so forthright, came like a blow. “I ask because two nights ago on the roof of this very building, you told me you could not love me enough to marry me. And I thought it was a shield you’d thrown up to protect yourself from your silly belief that I wanted that world instead of this one.”

  It had been. Christ. He should have told her then, when he had the chance.

  Except they’d still be here. And it would hurt all the more.

  As though it could hurt more.

  “So I ask you now, tonight, do you love me at all?”

  He would not survive this. “Felicity.”

  He moved toward her, coming around the desk, but she did not look at him. She remained at the window, looking out at the distorted Covent Garden rooftops, all he could give her. “I begged you to love me. I begged you to believe I was enough for you. That I was enough for this place.”

  You are. You always were.

  “Felicity.” Her name was like gravel in his throat.

  “Of course,” she said, a smile on her lips. Ashamed. “I asked all of that because I did not know the truth. I did not know how well I had played into your plans.”

  His heart stopped, then roared to a thunder. “Felicity.”

  “Stop saying my name,” she said, the words cold and angry. “You don’t have the right to my name.”

  That much was true.

  “Felicity Faircloth, you whispered when you came into my bedchamber all those nights ago and made me promises no man would ever be able to keep. You mocked my fairy-tale name, telling me you could give me the fairy tale. Promising it to me. Knowing it was all I ever wanted.”

  “I lied,” he said.

  She laughed, harsh and unamused. “So I have divined. You thought you could tempt me into your game with promises of being loved again. Of being accepted again. Of being a part of that world. And I went, blindly. Happily. Because I believed you.” He loathed the words. The affirmation of her desire to return to her tower and play princess once again.

  “And then you made it worse. You showed me a wide world that I wanted more than anything I’d had before. You showed me a life worth living. And you presented me with a man worth—”

  She stopped, but he heard the end of the sentence nonetheless. A man worth loving. He heard the words she would never give him. Not now that she knew the truth.

  She shook her head. “You are worse than them all. I would rather have the cut of every member of the aristocracy than your lies. Your manipulative promises. I wish—” She shook her head and stared out the window. “I wish you never knew my name. I wish it had been a secret. Like yours.”

  “No longer a secret,” he said. “I told it to you.”

  “Yes. You did. Devon Culm. Named for the past.”

  “That is the truth.”

  She nodded. “He told me you intended to seduce me out from under him. To use me to teach him a lesson.”

  He nodded. “I did.”

  She laughed without humor. “I shall tell you this, you are the only person I have ever met whose truth is all lies. You didn’t tell me your name because you cared I know it.” It wasn’t true, but he didn’t say it. “You didn’t tell me for any reason but to tempt me further. To make me your pawn. You knew the story would break me. You knew your past would link me to you. And you preyed upon me with that knowledge, all while you planned my demise.” She paused, anger and regret warring in her eyes. The first, Devil could manage—he’d always been able to manage anger. But the latter—it was a knife to the gut to think of her regretting him. “All while making me love you.”

  The words threatened to crush him.

  “Our arrangement. All those nights ago. You were to have given me the duke, and I was to have given you a favor. What was the debt you planned to collect?”

  “Felicity.”

  “What was it?” Her fury was like a blow.

  “One night.” Christ, he felt like a monster. “Your ruination.”

  A beat. Then, softly, to herself more than him, “No heirs.” She laughed, humorless. “I don’t know which is worse,” she said, and he heard the sadness in her voice. “The fact that you intended to ruin me for sport, or . . .”

  “It wasn’t sport.”

  “Revenge is sport. It isn’t important. Nothing changes in the end, and double the wrongs have been committed.” She paused. “And innocent people have been hurt. I have been hurt.” Guilt slammed through him as she spoke, as she turned her beautiful brown eyes on him and said, “I have been hurt a thousand times, and none of them have mattered in comparison to this . . . in comparison to you. Devil, indeed.”

  He ran a hand over his chest, where an ache had settled—one he did not expect to ever be rid of. “Felicity, please . . .”

  She did not hesitate. “What is worse than that, though—than your stupid plan—is that I would have given you a thousand nights. And all you had to do was ask.” She looked away from him. “What a fool I was, thinking I could go up against the Devil.”

  “Felicity.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You’ve made me foolish long enough. You and your pretty words. You are important, Felicity . . .”

  Christ, she was.

  “You’re beautiful, Felicity . . . You’re so far above me I can barely see you, Felicity . . . What utter rubbish.”

  Except it wasn’t. God, he hadn’t meant for it to be.

  “And then . . . No, Felicity, we can’t. I shan’t ruin you . . .” She paused. “That one is my favorite. How very, very rich, when that was the plan all along. To ruin my engagement. My future. Me.”

  No. Not on the roof. By then . . . all I wanted was to protect you.

  By then, all he wanted was to love her.

  She turned and looked at him, her eyes glistening with anger and frustration and unshed tears. “You know, I actually started to believe it. I started to believe that I was more than all of it. I started to believe that Finished Felicity could be Fearless Felicity. That Mayfair Felicity could be reborn on the rooftops of Covent Garden. At your hands.”

  Every word was a blow, like Whit’s knives, thrown one after another, into his chest, making him want to get down o
n his knees and tell her the truth. Except, she was giving him the chance to give her the life she deserved. All he had to do was stomach losing her. All he had to do was choose her over himself.

  Sadness edged into her gaze, and he willed himself not to look away. Not to reach for her. Not to move. “I worked the plan for you, didn’t I? I made the decision for you. I chose ruination, thinking it was going to bring me happiness.” She scoffed. “Thinking I could convince you, in it, that we could be happy. That I didn’t want any of that if I could have this. If I could have you. How you must have laughed. How you must have rejoiced.”

  No. Christ, no. Nothing about the night on the roof was about revenge. None of it was about his brother. It had been about her, and about him, and about the knowledge that she was all he’d ever wanted, laid bare before him. Forever.

  She hadn’t been the one reborn on the roof, he had been.

  But if he told her that, she would stay. And he couldn’t have her stay. Not here. Not when he could give her the rest of the world.

  Sadness gave way to anger. Good. Anger was good. She could channel anger. She could survive it. And so he would stoke that anger. “Shall I tell you something true?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he hated the word on her lips . . . that word that had echoed in his ear as he’d made love to her. That word that meant they were together. That they were partners. The word that marked her pleasure and their future.

  But there was no shared future. Only hers. He could give her a future. He could give her the present. And she deserved it. She deserved all time.

  “Tell me,” she said, letting the words come, angry and forceful. “Tell me something true, you liar.”

  So he did the only thing he could do. He cut her loose from this world that did not deserve her. He set her free.

  He lied.

  “You were the perfect revenge.”

  She went still, her eyes going narrow with a hot loathing that was nothing close to the one he had for himself—the one that seeped through him, settling in muscle and bone and stealing every shred of happiness he might ever have.

  Loathing was good, he told himself. Loathing was not tears.

  But it also was not love.

  He’d stolen that from her, like a thief. No, not from her. From himself.

  And his love, his beautiful, spinster, wallflower lockpick, she did not cry. Instead she lifted her chin and said, calm as a queen, “You deserve the darkness.”

  And she left him to it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The next morning, instead of heading to the warehouse to oversee the movement of the ice from the shipment that had just come in, instead of preparing for that evening’s delivery of nearly two tons of untaxed, illegal goods, instead of heading for the docks of the Thames or the Bastards’ rookery warehouse, Devil donned his coat and hat and went to see Arthur, Earl Grout, heir to the Marquessate of Bumble.

  He was, it would come as no surprise to anyone, turned away at the door by a butler who could have stepped out of any number of toffs’ houses for the skill he exhibited in looking down his nose at a man no fewer than six inches taller and five stone heavier than he was.

  The Earl Grout, Devil was told, was not receiving.

  Which, no doubt, was the result of Devil’s calling card saying just that. Devil.

  “Fucking Mayfair,” he grumbled as the door shut firmly in his face, nearly removing his nose. Did no one on this side of town realize that men like Devil were often richer and more powerful than they could dream, and therefore good allies?

  Not to Felicity.

  He pushed the thought to the side.

  Goddammit. He had to find another way in. For her.

  Walking around the back of the house, he investigated a variety of different avenues: he could break a window to enter the ground floor; he could climb the ivy-covered back wall to God knew what was in the third-floor window above; he could go back to the door and strongarm the butler; or he could climb the tree that had a prominent branch leading to a second-floor balcony.

  A balcony not unlike Felicity’s at Bumble House.

  As he’d had good luck with that particular balcony, Devil chose the tree, making quick work of scaling it before setting down gently on the wrought-iron Juliet, quietly testing the door, which was open.

  All aristocrats were idiots. It was a miracle no one had robbed this house blind.

  Just before he stepped into the room, he heard a woman’s voice from within. “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t wish you to worry.”

  “It did not occur to you I would begin to worry when you started leaving the house before I woke and returning after I took to bed? It did not occur to you that I would notice that something was terribly wrong when my husband stopped speaking to me?”

  “Dammit, Pru—it’s not for you to worry about. I told you, I would take care of it.”

  Devil closed his eyes and turned his face to the sky. He appeared to have discovered a bedchamber, in which Grout and his wife were having a lovers’ quarrel.

  “Not for me to worry about . . . you’re mad if you think that I shan’t take interest in our life.”

  Devil remained quiet, listening. By all accounts Devil had found in his reconnaissance on Felicity’s family, Lady Grout was quite dull, largely interested in books and watercolors, but one half of a long-time love match. Grout had married her when they were both twenty, after which they’d lived happily in town while he amassed a fortune in good investments, before they had their first child, a son, five years earlier. The lady was increasing once more, Devil had been told.

  “You can’t take care of this, Arthur. Not by yourself. You’re at a loss. And while I haven’t two crowns to rub together, I’ve a brain in my head and a willingness to help, despite your cabbageheaded decision to keep secrets from me.”

  The bit about Lady Grout being dull appeared unreliable.

  “I have shamed us! And my parents! And Felicity!”

  “Oh, idiot man. You made a mistake! As did your father. As did your sister, I might add, though I imagine she had more than a decent reason to strike the duke and I would dearly like to know it.”

  There was a long pause, and then a quiet, gutted “This is my job, Pru. To keep you happy. Safe. Comfortable. To provide for you. That’s what I agreed to when we married.”

  Devil understood the frustration in the words. The sense of desperation that came with wanting to keep one’s love safe. Was that not why he was here? To keep Felicity safe?

  “And I agreed to obey! But I am rather through with doing that, I’ll tell you, Arthur.” Devil’s brows rose. The lady was not happy. “We are either partners in life or we are not. I do not care if we are poor as church mice. I don’t care if all of London refuses us entry to their homes. I don’t care if we’re never invited to another ball as long as we live, so long as we are together in it.”

  I’m not the same. I don’t care about Mayfair and balls.

  “I love you,” the countess said, quietly. “I’ve loved you since we were children. I’ve loved you rich. And now I love you poor. Do you love me?”

  Do you love me?

  The question had been echoing through Devil since Felicity had asked it, six hours earlier. And now, spoken on another set of lips, it threatened to put him on his knees.

  “Yes,” said the earl within. “Yes, of course. That’s why I have made such a hash of everything.”

  Yes.

  Yes, of course he loved her. He loved everything about her. She was sunlight and fresh air and hope.

  Yes. He loved her wildly.

  And he’d ruined that. He’d used her and lied to her and turned her against him. He’d betrayed her and her love. And he would suffer his own damnation by living his days wildly in love with her, and living without her.

  Which was likely best, because love did not change the fact that Felicity would always be Mayfair, and he would always be Covent Garden. He would never be goo
d enough to stand in her sunlight, but he could absolutely protect her from the darkness.

  More than protect her. He could give her everything she’d ever dreamed.

  It was time for Devil to walk into a second Faircloth bedchamber and offer its inhabitants everything they wished. And this time, he did not intend to fail.

  When he was through speaking to the earl and countess, Devil returned to the warehouse, where he continued his bruising work, preparing the hold for a new shipment, grateful for the ache in his muscles—his hair shirt for sins committed against the woman he loved.

  Punishment for his lies.

  He worked tirelessly, alongside half a dozen other men who were rotating in shifts to avoid spending too long in the freezing temperatures. Devil embraced the cold as he did the darkness and the pain, accepting it as his punishment. Welcoming it as such. The dozen or so lanterns hung high against the ceiling were not enough to keep the darkness at bay, and he ignored the thread of panic that came every now and then when he looked the wrong way and found infinite blackness, just as he ignored the sweat soaking his clothes. Not long after he’d begun to work, he removed his coat and draped it over one of the high ice walls to allow greater freedom of movement.

  Long after he’d lost the ability to recall how many shifts had rotated through the hold, Whit arrived, closing the great steel door behind him to keep the cold in. He wore a thick coat and hat, and boots to the knee—which had been helpful as he’d spent his day in the ice melt at the dock.

  Whit watched Devil hook and lift several immense blocks of ice before he growled, “You need food.”

  Devil shook his head.

  “And water.” Whit extended a skein toward him.

  Devil moved to the pile of ice at the center of the hold and picked another cube. “I’m surrounded by water.”

  “You’re soaked with sweat. And the cargo is on its way. The men will need you strong enough to help when it arrives.”

  Devil did not reveal his surprise at the information; if the cargo was on the move, the sun had set and darkness had fallen in truth, making it near midnight, hours since he lowered himself into the dark hold and began his work.