The Vixen (Wicked Wallflowers Book 2)

by Christi Caldwell

  Why had her sister always been so blasted perceptive?

  She studied the long, narrow treats, made for those equally narrow wineglasses. She desperately wanted liquid fortitude now. For there was little point in lying to one as perceptive as Cleo.

  What was more . . . Ophelia had tired of lying. To her siblings . . . to Connor.

  Her gut clenched; her mind shied away from all the truths she knew she needed to reveal to him.

  “He seems like a nice enough gent,” Cleo observed, dogged in her pursuit of information from Ophelia.

  “Cleopatra,” Gertrude snapped.

  Their youngest sister shifted back and forth on the bench. “For an investigator, that is,” she mumbled.

  “He is,” Ophelia said softly. To give her fingers something to do, she picked up a biscuit and took a bite. The flaky morsel sat like clay upon her tongue, and she forced herself to choke down that swallow. “He’s not like the other investigators or constables we’ve dealt with,” she defended, needing her sisters to know that about Connor. “Connor is a man who has known the same strife as us but who, with his career, seeks to make life better for others.” Her voice grew impassioned. “He’s fair and kind and good to children and . . .” At her sisters’ piercing stares on her, Ophelia let her words trail off.

  “Why do I take it you’ve known your Mr. Steele before?” Gertrude asked.

  “Because I did.” Her voice emerged faint. She set down her unfinished biscuit with hands that trembled. “I was a girl. He was . . . the one who got away.”

  Her sisters’ mouths fell open. Cleo shook her head. Was it shock? Disbelief?

  Ophelia nodded. “Connor O’Roarke. I found him . . . several times.” Three. She kept her eyes trained on the nicked wood table, unable to meet Gertrude’s gaze for the familiar guilt sweeping through her.

  “You came across him and you didn’t turn him over.” An undeserved pride coated Gertrude’s pronouncement, and Ophelia wanted to blot her hands over her ears to push back those misplaced sentiments.

  Would she still be so proud when she learned what Ophelia’s decision had cost her? Nonetheless, she’d been a coward too long. Her eldest sister had been deserving of the truth long ago. “The last time I saw him, I let him go. Went on my way to steal a purse.” She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I was s-sloppy.” Ophelia paused a fraction of a heartbeat. “I was caught by a constable and the nob.” Even years later, shame in admitting that misstep filled her.

  So much shame. It was a stinging, burning, unwelcome sentiment that had grown increasingly familiar.

  Cleo’s gasp filled the kitchens. “But how . . . ?”

  “How did I escape?” Toying with the plate, Ophelia searched for the strength to tell her sisters everything. “That night, Connor came forward. He took ownership of my crime and went in my stead.”

  “He sacrificed himself for you,” Gertrude said softly.

  “He did,” she whispered. It was the greatest, most generous gift one had to give in St. Giles—that of one’s life. And Connor had offered his over to her. It hadn’t mattered the end result had found him safe and secure in a nobleman’s home as a beloved adopted son; it mattered that he’d taken her place and marched on to what would have been any other person’s grim fate of Newgate and a hanging. “He was adopted by that same lord. Given a home and a new beginning.”

  “The Earl of Mar.” Cleo slid that detail into place.

  What a life Connor had made for himself. He hadn’t become the indolent, roguish, privileged child of a nob. Rather, he’d embraced a chance to begin anew, establishing a career as one of the most respected, successful investigators in England. He worked when the peerage looked down at those who made a living with their hands.

  What did my family do? We operate the most wicked, scandalous den of sin in London. Coins a’plenty, respectability for none. Ophelia dropped an elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand.

  “You love him.”

  You love him.

  There they were: three words that ripped through the heart of why Ophelia lay ravaged inside. I do. I always did. Tears pricked at her eyes. “Does it matter?” she asked, her tone sharper than she intended. “Oi ’ave to marry—”

  “To satisfy Broderick’s wishes.”

  “To save me,” Gertrude quietly put forward.

  “Yes. No.” Because of both.

  A thick pall fell over the kitchens. The revelries from deep within the establishment filled the rooms, the sounds muffled.

  Gertrude was the first to again speak. “All these years you’ve all sought to look after me. Broderick, Stephen, Cleo, and you, Ophelia.”

  They had. When Ophelia had stumbled into their hovel, bruised under her tattered garments and riddled with terror, she’d hated Cleo. Hated both her sisters for failing to look after her. Hated herself with an equal ferocity for being unable to look after herself.

  “Neither of you have ever realized . . .” A sad smile played on her lips. “I do not need you to look after me. I never did.” The narrow lines of Gertrude’s face contorted into a paroxysm of hurt. “And certainly not at the expense of your own happiness.”

  Ophelia swiped a hand over her face. “It has never been because I’ve doubted you,” she said hoarsely. Even with her sister’s dubious look, she still struggled to utter those words aloud.

  Tell her.

  “The last time I freed Connor, Diggory promised I’d s-suffer.” Her voice cracked. “And I did. Just not in the ways I believed. In the ways we’d come to expect.” Tears flooded Ophelia’s eyes, blurring Gertrude’s visage. “He beat you that day. Clubbed you in the head as a lesson to me. I—I am the reason you are partially blind.” Her shoulders shook with the force of her silent tears. Remorse and heartache brought teardrop after teardrop.

  Soft, tender hands collected Ophelia’s coarser ones.

  Gertrude squeezed her palms. “Do you truly believe I would hold you responsible for a single act that monster committed?” Hurt wreathed that question.

  Another sob ripped from Ophelia. “I chose Connor.” Unwittingly at the time. And God help her, then or now, she could not say she’d ever have done anything different. She wept all the harder.

  “No,” Gertrude said, vehement. “You chose goodness. Despite fear . . . despite knowing Diggory would undoubtedly beat you or worse . . . you defied him.” Her voice caught. “There is only good in that, Ophelia.”

  She released her hands, came around, and took Ophelia in her arms. Just held her. In Gertrude’s embrace, with Cleo silently watching on, there was at last a warm, healing peace. It slipped into Ophelia’s heart, freeing and strengthening. Until her tears dissolved into a watery hiccup.

  She rubbed her eyes against her sister’s shoulder. “I am so—”

  “Do not,” Gertrude clipped out. “Your apologies imply there is something so very wrong with me.” Yet that is how they’d each, in their quest to help Gertrude, inadvertently treated her. “Now, what of your Mr. Steele? And your nighttime disappearance?” her eldest sibling urged after she’d broken their embrace.

  Tears welled anew. What in blazes was becoming of her? She angrily brushed them away. “He is not mine. He can never be mine.”

  Cleo frowned. “Because of Broderick?”

  Worse. Because if it were only their brother and his grasping attempts at noble connections, she’d have thrown them over, just to have Connor in her life.

  Restless, she jumped up. “Because of who I am.” She owed him the same explanations and truths she’d given her sisters this night. Even when she did . . . which invariably she would, the divide between them was insurmountable.

  Gertrude bristled. “What is wrong with who you are?”

  Ophelia stopped, her back presented to her sisters. She stared at the unlit fireplace. “Diggory made him an orphan.”

  The air slipped past the lips of one of her sisters on a noisy hiss.

  “Precisely that,” she whispered, grippi
ng her arms about her waist.

  And there was the matter of Stephen, and Connor’s investigation.

  How was it possible for one person’s entire life to crumple so very quickly?

  “It is not to be.”

  “Alas, it is.”

  At that peculiar reply, she turned back.

  Cleo brandished a thick sheet of velum. “This arrived earlier this evening. An invitation to an intimate dinner party . . .” She paused. “With the Earl of Mar and his family.”

  Oh, God. Ophelia’s stomach muscles clenched. She was being invited to his father’s household.

  Happiness glowed in Gertrude’s pale-green eye. “He is presenting you before his father.”

  “You simply need to tell him,” Cleo said with such a matter-of-factness that the thin thread of control Ophelia had on her emotions splintered.

  “You speak as though it will not matter to him. As though the fact that our father killed his father and raped his mother, before killing her, too, are minor infractions.”

  All the color drained from her sisters’ faces. Good. Airing those words aloud should ground them in reality. “This is not make-believe. This is not ‘pretend,’ like the Gothic novels Gertrude reads.”

  “Adair forgave,” Cleo intoned.

  “Did Diggory make Adair an orphan?”

  That effectively silenced both sisters.

  “Ya’re ’ere!”

  They spun to the entranceway.

  “All of ya!” Stephen stood framed there, a joyful glimmer in his gaze and a smile on his lips—an honest, unrestrained one that was such a marked copy of the one in Connor’s sketch that tears flooded her eyes all over again.

  In three long strides, Ophelia was at his side and had him in her arms.

  His little arms folded around her, tearing a silent sob from her throat.

  Just like that, he transformed into his usual belligerent self. “Wot now?” he groused, shoving against her. “None o’ that. The crying nonsense or the hugs.”

  Ophelia only held him all the tighter. She ignored the confused glances exchanged by her sisters.

  “Wot’s the matter with ’er?” Stephen begged their sisters.

  “I’m just so happy to see you,” she whispered, at last allowing him the space he craved.

  Eyeing her carefully, he retreated a step. “Wot’s going on ’ere?”

  No one said anything for a long moment.

  “We just missed you and wished to see you,” Cleo supplied for them.

  He snorted. “Do ya think Oi was born on Tuesday? Oi’ve ’eard Broderick ’as men out searching for ya.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where were ya?”

  “I was coming here.”

  “But before she did,” Cleo improvised, “she came to visit . . .” Her brow scrunched up.

  “Eve and Calum Dabney,” Gertrude added to the lie.

  Stephen scratched at his golden curls. Those same sun-kissed strands in the miniature painting.

  Mayhap she was wrong. Mayhap a lifetime of having only the worst happen was responsible for the suspicions that had sent her into flight, seeking out the club and her youngest sibling.

  Oh, God, I cannot take this.

  Ophelia crossed over and grabbed the sides of his fine lawn shirt.

  “Wot in ’ell are ya—?”

  She yanked it up, scraping her gaze over his small chest and belly.

  And finding it.

  A birthmark to the right of his navel.

  With numb fingers, Ophelia let the fabric fall back into place.

  “Ophelia?” Cleo pressed.

  “Forgive me . . . I . . .” She gave her head a shake. “Forgive me.” It was all she could manage. Stephen belonged to another family . . . sired by a man other than Diggory.

  “Where in blazes have you been?”

  Broderick.

  The Killoran quartet looked to the entrance of the kitchens.

  With matching glares, her siblings filed past him.

  Cowards.

  “My God, Ophelia,” he snapped. “I have had guards scouring the streets of London. Questions have circulated as to where you’ve been. If a single gentleman learned of your disappearance, your reputation would be ruined.”

  “How important that is to you,” she said, sadly eyeing him. “Titles, connections, rank, and prestige. What of family?” What of Stephen?

  A ruddy flush marred his cheeks. “Is that what you believe?” he snapped. “That I do not care about you?” A wounded edge underscored his question. “That you don’t matter?”

  For a long moment, she studied him—the brother who’d entered her life, first a hated stranger who’d gone on to protect her and her siblings from Diggory’s cruel machinations. “I do not doubt your love.” His flush deepened. Because regardless of truth being valued, one didn’t speak of sentiments such as love . . . or any feelings or emotions. “And yet . . .” She took a step closer. “The first thing you spoke to was my reputation and how it affected a match.” Surely he saw that.

  His mouth tightened. “I’ll not have us speak in the kitchens.”

  Without waiting to see if she followed, Broderick spun and marched from the room. From the moment Diggory had learned Broderick’s value—one who could read, write, and speak like a gent—his rank had been elevated, and not a single soul—Ophelia and her sisters included—had dared question Broderick’s authority.

  She followed at a sedate pace behind her brother, passing guards stationed throughout the corridors. Another time she’d have gone toe-to-toe with Broderick, and witnesses be damned. Her stomach, still queasy, threatened to revolt at the discovery she’d made. Minutes ago? Hours? A lifetime? Time had ceased to mean anything or matter in any way.

  What her respectability-driven brother didn’t know . . . couldn’t know . . . was that soon, no match would be possible. Their club, and their reputations, would never survive the charges they’d be held responsible for. That it had been Diggory who’d captured a nobleman’s child, and that Ophelia and her siblings had been unknowing of his treachery, would be overlooked. They’d be held complicit.

  As soon as they were shut away in Broderick’s office, he folded his arms. “Have you been hurt?”

  She opened her mouth.

  “If some gentleman has”—fire flared in his eyes, a lethal glitter that would have terrified a battle-hardened warrior—“hurt you in any way . . . I’ll have them taken care of.”

  Killed. He’d have them killed.

  “It is not that,” she demurred, rubbing at her arms.

  “Steele?”

  So he had been closely following the reports in the gossip columns speculating on Ophelia’s relationship with Connor. But then, should she really be surprised, given how enamored he’d always been with the ton?

  “Not Connor,” she finally said, struggling to bring the admission forth. For once it was breathed into existence, everything would change. And they would lose a sibling. Tears filled her eyes. “Not in the ways you are worrying.”

  Broderick stilled.

  A black curse exploded from his lips. “I’ll kill him.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You used his Christian name and cried when I can’t think of a single day you’ve ever wept before me,” he said in lethal, hushed tones that spoke of a violence she’d not believed him capable of. “That is all you needed to say.”

  “He’s been a friend to me, Broderick.” He’d allowed her to see she was so much more than that one night in an alley.

  Her brother recoiled.

  Despite the severity of their situation, a sliver of droll humor tugged at her. “Why do I believe you’d have preferred I say he hurt or offended me?”

  “Do not be silly,” he muttered, his color deepening. “I’ve never wanted you hurt. I’ve only sought to make our family more powerful so we have the security you deserve.”

  Her grin faded.

  He worked his eyes over her face. “What is it?”

&n
bsp; Ophelia drew in a breath. “You are aware of Connor’s investigation into the nobleman’s missing child.”

  “I am,” he said succinctly.

  “He’s allowed me to view his files. He’s spoken freely of his findings.”

  When previously no other man, including the one before her, had allowed her true power: within the club, over decisions made, over any aspect of life.

  “And?”

  Of course, Broderick would hear more in her words.

  Ophelia briefly closed her eyes. When she opened them, she spoke in quiet tones. “And I’ve determined the child’s identity.”

  Broderick sharpened his gaze on her. “Well?”

  “It is Stephen.”

  That admission sucked the life, energy, and sound from the room, leaving in its place a tense silence.

  Broderick shook his head.

  She nodded.

  He gave another shake.

  “It is true, Broderick.” Ophelia proceeded to reveal everything to her brother. By the time she’d finished, he was silent once more, his face carved of granite, his chiseled cheeks a sickly ashen hue.

  He stalked over to his sideboard and poured himself a brandy, and with his back to her, he downed it. He filled another glass. When he faced her once more, color had been restored to his cheeks, and he had his usual, fully composed, master-of-his-emotions facade in place. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not. You know I’m not.”

  “I know no such thing.” He slashed the air with his spare hand. “So Stephen has a mark on his belly—”

  “And his knee.”

  “It in no way confirms that he’s—” Broderick wisely cut himself off and eyed the doorway. Yes, one never knew when someone was lurking about. “It confirms nothing.”

  He was seeing what he wished to see. Nor did she doubt his reason for doing so.

  Ophelia joined him at the sideboard. “I love him, too, Broderick,” she whispered. “I don’t want him to leave, but—”

  “He is not leaving,” he rasped.

  “He belongs to another,” she continued over him.