The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers Book 1)

by Christi Caldwell

  His breath lodged in his chest, and with Cleopatra distracted, he took in the sight of her. The diamonds in her tiara shimmered with a light to match the one in her eyes. Her hair hung in loose waves about her narrow shoulders, and God help him, in the madness of this stolen interlude, he was completely and thoroughly bewitched by her. The need to brush those strands back and expose the delicate length of her neck was like a physical hungering. “I never noticed before,” he said quietly. Her. I never noticed her outside her name and my own hatred for her family.

  “A shame not to,” she said with her usual matter-of-fact admonishment, bringing him to. She glanced over suddenly, and he was grateful for the cover of darkness that hid his blush.

  By God, blushing. What in hell had happened to him?

  She eyed him peculiarly, and to stave off any questions about his earlier study of her, he jerked his chin. “There aren’t many stars in London.” He chuckled. “As a boy, I didn’t even believe we had a moon.”

  “But there’s the wonder in it.” With her youthful exuberance, she showed glimpses of the young woman she might have been had she been born to a fancy lord and lady. She slid her gloved palm into his and tugged him down until they lay on their backs, so close their shoulders met. “Look.”

  “It’s a night sky,” he said, angling his head to see her.

  Cleopatra pointed a finger overhead. “I said, look.”

  He grinned. She’d the ability to lead and command better suited to the head of the King’s Army. “What am I looking for?”

  “There,” she murmured, pointing her white-gloved fingertip to a grayish-white cloud moving across the sky. “One learns to follow the clouds.” They shifted, revealing a handful of lone stars, twinkling overhead. A moment later, another drifted, concealing those flecks of light. “It was always like opening a gift,” she said softly, letting her arm fall to her side. Her fingers covered his, and out of the corner of his eye, he looked at their connected digits. “Far more special than if they’d always been there,” she went on, seemingly unaffected.

  “Hmm,” he murmured, reexamining the night sky. “I never thought about it that way.” Just as he’d never considered Cleopatra to be anything different from who or what she was.

  “If I stared up at the sky long enough, I forgot it all.” She stretched her palms up overhead. “This got me through those darkest days.”

  They’d all had their dark days. Every person born to the streets was indelibly marked by the struggle of it. Adair, Calum, Niall, Ryker, and Helena had all been tortured by Diggory in their own ways. What suffering had belonged to this woman? Suddenly, he who’d always hated her for her connection to that man wanted to remain thinking of her as one who’d not known cruelty and suffering at his hands.

  “He hurt you,” he forced himself to say into the nighttime quiet. That truth redefined the whole way he’d allowed himself to look at her and her family.

  With her elbow, she nudged him lightly in the side. “Did you think you were the only one to know hurt at his hands?”

  He wasn’t fooled by the lightness in her husky voice. As one who’d become a master of schooling his own emotions and feelings, he recognized that skill all too easily in another. He’d painted her as one of them . . . when in truth, Cleopatra had been more like Adair and his siblings than the monster Diggory.

  “He was a monster,” Adair said somberly. When she said nothing, his frustration mounted. “You won’t confirm or deny that?” Again, did that speak to her loyalty to him?

  “What is there to confirm or deny? Everyone knew and now remembers Diggory for precisely what he was.”

  “Then why did you remain with him?” It came out as a plea, for her answer mattered too damned much.

  Cleopatra flipped onto her side and propped her head on her elbow, so she faced him. “Should I have fled? As you, Black, Marksman, and Dabney did with your sister?”

  Why did that feel more an indictment than anything?

  She turned another question on him. “You’ve lived on the streets. Tell me what options there were for me and my sisters, one who is partially blind?”

  He started. He’d not known that about her. But then, these past days had revealed how little he truly knew about the Killorans.

  “Your sister had you, and you looked after her. Well, we had Broderick.”

  “He could have taken you all and fled.” Just as Adair and his siblings had.

  A cynical laugh spilled past her lips. “You don’t know anything about my brother.” Nor did her tightly pressed lips indicate she intended to share anything further about Broderick Killoran.

  It occurred to him how little he truly knew about Cleopatra or any members of her family. She was one of three sisters. The options and futures were dark and limited for all of their station, but even darker for women. Most found themselves whoring on the streets, others inside brothels, a handful married, and the remaining unfortunate souls—dead.

  “They’re the reasons you’re here.”

  She nodded once.

  She’d make a match with one of the nobs when her antipathy for those men fairly seeped from her person.

  He turned onto his side, mimicking her body’s position so their gazes were in direct line. “Then why did you leave the ballroom”—full of potential suitors—“and come here?” With her peculiar flight and disappearance, she’d set the household into an uproar.

  “They’re looking for me,” she guessed. “Is that why you’re here? Searching for the Killoran who’s surely come to kill and steal while you’re all otherwise distracted?” Under the disgust-laden deliverance, there were also undercurrents of hurt. With a sound of annoyance, she made to stand.

  Adair swiftly levered himself upright and, catching her by the forearm, prevented her flight. “My brothers worried about foul play,” he admitted. “My sister-in-law is worried about you.”

  She lifted her chin mutinously. “And what about you?”

  What about him? “I was more curious what had sent you fleeing the ballroom.” How had he gone from jeering and taunting the woman before him to simply trusting there was nothing underhanded about her presence here? It was the height of foolishness. By God, she was on Ryker’s bloody roof. And yet . . . he just knew.

  Through her smudged lenses, she peered at him.

  “Here,” he murmured, plucking them free of her nose. He tugged out his shirt and wiped her spectacles with the fabric. “You would be able to do far less squinting if you cleaned your lenses on occasion.”

  Her even, pearl-white teeth flashed bright in the dark. “Oi was searching you for a lie.”

  He paused in his efforts. “I know,” he said on an exaggerated whisper. “I was merely jesting.”

  She whistled. “Didn’t think you were capable of it.”

  Adair handed her glasses back over. “Well, it would seem we both know far less about one another than we previously believed, doesn’t it?”

  Hesitantly, Cleopatra accepted the delicate wire-rims and put them back on. “It does,” she said gruffly.

  He glanced out at the night sky. “His name was Oswyn.”

  Confused eyes lifted to meet his.

  “You asked who betrayed me. His name was Oswyn, a man who’d been with us since we broke free from Diggory, and the first person we ever hired for our club. He turned Diana over to Diggory.”

  She searched his face, silent for a long while.

  “Ya offering me friendship, Thorne?”

  Friendship. He silently tested that word both on his tongue and in his mind. Friendship implied trust and emotions. It entailed caring after another person and trusting oneself over to them in return. Could one be friends with a person he’d been trained to hate? Or with a woman he ached to kiss, who was destined for a fancy lord who’d one day no doubt grace the seats inside Adair’s club? It had been wrong to shut her out.

  Her brow creased.

  “Friendship,” he repeated back, stretching his fingers out in the fir
st true offering of peace between them.

  Cleopatra grinned . . . and took his hand.

  Chapter 15

  Over the next fortnight, there were several certainties for Cleopatra.

  One: for all the wealth she could bring to a marriage, the money itself was not enough to tempt lords in desperate need of funds.

  Two: she still truly, and of course only secretly, yearned to dance during every ball she’d been forced to suffer through as an oddity to Polite Society.

  Three: she could always count on Adair Thorne being near.

  And four: despite the fact that a still-dubious-of-her Ryker Black had assigned Adair to watch after her, Cleopatra was incredibly glad for his presence and even sought him out. Daily.

  It’s only because you enjoy the discussion on his building plans for the Hell and Sin . . .

  “That is it,” she muttered, stepping out of her room. She paused.

  She saw an unfamiliar servant staring at her through street-hardened eyes. He raked a disdainful glance up and down her person. By his scarred visage and inability to dissemble as a proper servant, he was anything but liveried staff. Another guard assigned her by Black, then. Cleopatra drew the door shut with a decisive click. Not that she blamed him for his wariness, but still, there was something annoying in having one’s footsteps watched as closely as they’d been in the streets of St. Giles.

  “Where ya think you’re going?” the guard snarled from behind her.

  Cleopatra stiffened. His coarse Cockney confirmed everything she’d already gathered about his origins and role here. Angling her head, she favored him with a condescending sneer. “I don’t answer to you,” she said in flawless tones her brother had insisted she perfect, and in this, she reveled in the power they gave her over this man. “A mere . . . footman,” she taunted.

  Hatred circled in the depths of his blue eyes. “Whore,” he spat.

  She’d been called so much worse in the course of her existence that insults had ceased to matter to her, and yet the vitriol in his utterance had ice skittering up her spinal column. She flattened her lips into a coolly mocking grin. “Born the son of one, I expect you think you might have experience in recognizing one.”

  He went still; then his eyebrows shot to his hairline.

  Claiming victory, she yanked her skirts away and started forward.

  “You bitch,” he hissed in her wake.

  Dismissing the guard outright, she reached Adair’s door, and even though every morning they went through the formalities of her lightly rapping, this time, eager to be free of the nameless street thug, she let herself in.

  Seated behind his mahogany desk, with a pencil in his hand, Adair looked briefly up from his design plans. “You’re late,” he observed with a grin that eased some of the tension from her previous exchange.

  “I didn’t realize you’d hired me to work for you.” Closing the door behind her, she hurried to join him at his desk, where a familiar seat that had come to be hers was already positioned. “If so, we failed to negotiate the terms of my payment,” she drawled, settling into the oak Carver chair.

  He rolled his shoulders. “And here I thought you were just eager to have anything to do with a gaming hell,” he said, reminding her of her own words.

  Carefully studying the changes he’d made that morning, she avoided his eyes. Afraid he’d see too much. Afraid he’d know that she enjoyed his company and wanted to be here. Adair resumed making notes on his pages, and she studied him in silence for a long while. “Your brothers don’t take up much time with the new plans,” she observed. She’d only ever seen Adair in this room overseeing the details regarding the Hell and Sin.

  Weeks earlier, he would have no doubt told her to go to hell with her questioning; now he drummed the tip of his pencil in a distracted staccato. “The role of head has . . . fallen to me.” His words and eyes revealed nothing but for an infinitesimal pause. Her interest stirred.

  Ryker Black, one of the most feared men in the streets of St. Giles, had ceded control of his club . . . to Adair? For the easy relationship she’d struck with him, she didn’t expect he’d give her the answers to all those questions. He’d take it as probing, on her part, for Broderick. “I never thought I’d witness the day Black turned control over to anybody,” she ventured, curiosity making her throw her hesitation to the wind.

  Adair grunted noncommittally.

  He trusted less than anyone she’d ever known in the whole of her life, which given the people she’d either dwelled with or called family, was saying a good deal, indeed.

  Letting go of her curiosity, she devoted her focus to the sheets before them. “You took my advice, then,” she observed, pointing to the private-quarters gaming rooms he intended to set up inside the redesigned Hell and Sin.

  “You were correct.” Adair tossed his pencil down and cracked his knuckles. “It was a waste of valuable space to not add tables. Lost revenue that we hadn’t been able to recoup.”

  Cleopatra leaned forward, intently studying it. She’d spent her whole life hating Adair Thorne and his family. And yet, when presented with the opportunity to grow his fortunes on the backs of desperate women or take a loss in profit, he’d opted for the latter. Those weren’t the actions of an enemy; they were the mark of a good man.

  “You’re quiet.” He spoke with the familiarity of one who’d come to know her over these past three weeks.

  “I’m always quiet,” she said, fiddling with the edge of the desk. Catching that nervous movement, she swiftly lowered her hands to her lap.

  “More so than usual. Do you disapprove?”

  “And would it matter if I did?” she returned.

  He flashed his even teeth in a heart-stopping grin. “Three weeks ago, I would have said no.” How much had changed in three weeks.

  “And now?”

  Stretching his legs out, he crossed them at the ankles in a negligent pose. “Now I see how clever you are in matters of gaming and business, and I’d be a fool to not take your suggestions under consideration.”

  He’d not only contemplated her ideas, but he’d acted on them, making design changes to his club. Her heart instantly sang. In a world where women’s opinions went unsolicited and unwelcomed, Adair appreciated her mind and insight. And it was heady stuff, indeed.

  He stared contemplatively over the top of her head. “Certainly more intelligent than I’d ever credited a Killoran with being.”

  He hated you for sharing Broderick’s blood. But you’re not a Killoran, that taunting voice in her mind reminded her, shattering the moment.

  She was grateful when Adair shifted their discourse back to the Hell and Sin. “What are your thoughts on the space I’ve designated for the additional gaming tables?” Straightening, he shoved aside the pages they’d been looking over and grabbed the one underneath. He laid it out before her.

  Cleopatra shifted her gaze about the page and, with the tip of her index finger, counted off the marked whist, hazard, and faro tables. The transformed suites previously used for the prostitutes and their clients had been converted. “What of the women who used to . . . sleep there? I trust you’ve had to turn many of them out.” How many women had Diggory once deemed too old to serve in their original capacity, and then simply shown them the door to the alley?

  Adair shook his head. “We’ve turned no one out.” He fished a cheroot from his jacket. “May I?”

  He was asking her? Not a single man in her brother’s employ or patron to their hell had ever hesitated to drink, wager, or smoke in her presence. Speechless, she waved her hand, following his languid movements as he rose and lit the small white wrapper at a nearby sconce. “We didn’t turn out any of the women once the changes were made,” he clarified, coming forward. He paused and drew an inhalation from the cheroot. “They served as dealers, serving girls, servants,” he said after he’d exhaled a small white cloud.

  “That didn’t help your bottom number.”

  Adair blew smoke out from the
corner of his mouth. “It didn’t.”

  While he continued smoking, Cleopatra looked at the page. “Why did you do it?” she blurted, the question spilling from her lips. At his creased brow, she continued hurriedly. “You know you cannot compete with the Devil’s Den as long as we offer prostitution to our members and you don’t. Even with the decline in your business and the rise of our club, you still chose to do away with it. Why?” she asked, needing to understand.

  Adair flicked his ashes into a small crystal dish. “My brother . . . Ryker,” he elucidated, “made the overall decision after being so persuaded by his wife.” Any other day the fact that Black had been cowed by a young lady would have commanded Cleopatra’s amusement. Not now. “Given how our numbers have declined”—his mouth tightened—“changed, I doubted how wise the decision was for the hell.”

  Abandoning the sheet in her hands, she waved her palm, wafting about the smoke so she might better see him. “You doubted it, and saw the decline in profits, and yet you’ve been”—by his own words—“placed in charge of the club. You could have reinstated the club’s previous policy and offered whores for your patrons. You chose not to. Why?”

  Because, ultimately, her own brother cared about nothing more than the money coming into the Devil’s Den. Everyone and everything could be sacrificed, as Cleopatra’s presence in Black’s household was proof of.

  Adair took another pull from his cheroot. “I thought about it,” he admitted somberly. “I’ve even debated my brothers in the past about the changes Ryker and his wife enacted.”

  One move or word from Cleopatra, and he’d say not another word. She’d come to know him that well. Cleopatra waited.

  “In the end,” he began quietly as he stubbed the remaining embers out in the crystal dish, “I thought of when I was a boy just orphaned.” She froze, afraid to move and stymie the flow of his words. “I was a boy on my own. Diggory”—her insides twisted at the hated name—“made me one of his gang. Fed me.” He grimaced. “The food we were given was barely edible.”