The Vixen

by Christi Caldwell

  Furrowing her brow, she studied him, searching her mind. A wide smile wreathed the gentleman’s face, an expression unrestrained and sincere in its warmth.

  Had he been a member of the Devil’s Den? There was an odd air of familiarity to him that she could not place.

  She scoffed.

  Don’t be silly.

  Of course she didn’t know the nob. Bored in her examination, she shifted her attention out and sighed.

  So this is why her sister had sneaked out and returned home after her presentation to Polite Society. It had made sense before, but it made even more sense now on a level Ophelia could personally commiserate with.

  Praying for a swift end to the night, Ophelia searched out the ormolu clock atop the mantel. A different gentleman, tall and smartly dressed, stood between her and that piece that could provide her a glimpse of just how much more of this misery she’d have to suffer through. Ignoring the bald stares shot her way, Ophelia angled her head.

  Move, will you, already?

  She arched her neck back and forth.

  The gentleman touched a surprised hand to his chest, and then a pleased and pompous grin curled his lips.

  “Move,” she mouthed.

  His smile froze in place.

  “Move,” she repeated, and then when he remained motionless as a lackwit, she made a slashing gesture across her throat.

  Blanching, the gentleman scurried out of her way, allowing Ophelia an unfettered view of the clock.

  Ten minutes.

  She and her sister and brother-in-law, and former enemy, had been here ten minutes. Her eyebrows shot to her hairline. That was all? She knew even less than nothing about Polite Society and the silly events they assembled, but she’d wager her family’s club that those affairs lasted a good deal longer than—Ophelia stole another peek—eleven minutes. Now, eleven minutes.

  Ophelia tamped down a groan.

  After a week’s time of living with her sister Cleopatra and her husband, Adair, it could be worse.

  Liar.

  “It could be worse,” a voice whispered against her ear.

  Gasping, Ophelia spun to face her sister Cleo. “Bloody hell, Cleo,” she muttered, her neck burning hot. That curse earned several censorious stares, which both sisters ignored. She’d been caught. It was an unpardonable sin to commit, even with one’s own sibling. Tasked with presenting Ophelia before the ton, who in St. Giles would have wagered that it was the ruthless Cleo Killoran who would pave Ophelia’s proverbial way? “You do not go sneaking up on a woman,” she groused. “Any person,” she amended, lest her sister had forgotten all the ways of the streets.

  A wicked glimmer danced in Cleo’s eyes, and she winked slowly. “And you certainly don’t allow yourself to be sneaked up on.”

  Of course, her sister was right. A wise person bent on survival didn’t let his or her guard down—be it an alley in St. Giles or outside the theatres at Covent Garden . . . or in this case, Calum and Eve Dabney’s Mayfair residence. Not unless one wished to find oneself cut down by one’s enemy. Her stare collided with a slender, dark-haired woman eyeing her from over the rim of her fan. The stranger swiftly snapped it shut and jerked her attention elsewhere in a clear redirect.

  There could be no doubting . . . there were enemies all around, and of every station.

  Cleo looped her arm through Ophelia’s, and startled, Ophelia stared down at that unexpected contact. Her sister had never bothered with shows of affection—and certainly not public displays. “It really could be,” Cleo explained through her surprise. “Worse, that is.”

  “I rather doubt that,” Ophelia mumbled.

  “Oh, certainly,” her sister said, demonstrating her lifelong irascibility. With her spare hand, she proceeded to mark off a list on her fingers. “You could find your first foray in Polite Society to be a ball full of leering lords”—yes, that would have been a good deal worse—“but only after you are formally presented to all, with the entire room’s eyes upon you.”

  Ophelia shuddered. “I concede the point.” Cleo was correct. It was, however, a possibility that would become an eventuality.

  Cleo arched an eyebrow. “It does bear mentioning that such a fate was the one I suffered through when I was presented to the ton, and I was not in the presence of a sibling or friend . . . but rather alone. On my own. With our enemy.”

  “Very well, your point has been made,” Ophelia cut in to that accurate and humbling set-down.

  Cleo grinned and fell silent.

  They stared at the guests assembled thus far for the Dabneys’ dinner party.

  With the exception of her sister and kin by marriage, there wasn’t a soul she recognized within the room. It was an odd occurrence for a Killoran to not identify a single patron.

  “They are all reformers,” Cleo said, following the precise thoughts her mind had wandered to. For the first time in the whole of their sisterly existence, her sibling avoided her eyes.

  “What kind of reformers?”

  But then, were there any other kind? Cleo gave a negligent roll of her shoulders. Making contact with her husband across the room, she lifted her hand in greeting.

  Anticipating the step before she even took it, Ophelia shot a hand out, capturing her forearm. “What kind of reformers?” she repeated, a warning there.

  “Ones against spirits.”

  Ophelia released her sister and jammed her fingertips into her temples. So this was why not a single person here, outside the Black family, was familiar. “What else?” she gritted, because as skilled as her youngest sister had always been at dissembling, Ophelia knew that look in her eyes.

  “And they might be opposed to . . . gambling,” Cleo mumbled. “Are opposed,” she reluctantly corrected herself. “They are opposed.”

  Mad. The world, her kin included, had all gone mad, and Ophelia was the last Killoran to have maintained her sanity. “We are keeping company with . . . r-re-re—?” She choked.

  Her sister patted her on the back. “Reformers,” she repeated with far too much tolerance, by Ophelia’s way of thinking.

  “S-surely you see the absolute ridiculousness in this,” she hissed.

  “Hush,” Cleo muttered, slapping her all the harder, this time in warning more than an effort to help.

  Through tear-filled eyes, Ophelia glared at her sister. These were the manner of people her sister sought to introduce her to? Men and women who’d not only look down on their livelihood but also seek to destroy them?

  “You are mad,” she whispered. Clutching her sister by the elbow, she dragged her from ear’s reach of a gaping matron. “You are attending events hosted by—”

  “By the Dabneys,” her sister protested with a frown.

  “By our rival, who’s given up his gaming club?” Now his reasons for doing so made sense. She blanched.

  God would cart her off to Newgate to pay for her crimes the day she sold her soul on the altar of the peerage.

  From across the room, Adair stopped midconversation with his brother, Calum, and met Cleo’s eyes. There was both a tenderness and possessiveness to that stare that Ophelia had to look away from. “Your husband awaits,” Ophelia said.

  Cleo held her elbow out, but Ophelia waved her off.

  “I’ll join you later.” After she settled her outrage at the discovery tossed out in this public setting.

  Except instead of rushing off, her sister lingered, and when she spoke, there was a newly acquired hesitancy there. Sadness slipped in, chasing off her earlier annoyance. It served as just one more mark of the ways life in Mayfair had wholly changed her sister and made them more strangers than anything. “Those who live here . . . the lords and ladies of the peerage, they are not all bad. Some are good.”

  You little street slut . . . open your legs . . . you want it . . . you always want it.

  Bile climbed up the back of Ophelia’s throat, and through it she forced a grin, wanting her sister gone, needing to be alone—as one might manage in a stra
nger’s parlor filled with guests. As her sister reluctantly took herself off, she stared after her.

  Ophelia had fended off attacks from strangers in the streets; she could certainly make it through a dinner party.

  Hovering at the edge of the parlor, Ophelia forced her feet to remain rooted to the Aubusson carpet of Calum Dabney’s Mayfair residence and made herself as still as possible. If one made oneself still, the world forgot to pay note, and one was spared attention and notice.

  With the festivities continuing in a whirl around her, and she on the fringe of it all, how eerily similar this moment was to so many of her past: on the outside, surrounded by nobles.

  Nay, that wasn’t altogether true. She was not surrounded solely by fancy lords and ladies with fancy titles that went back to the first king of England.

  As if in mockery of her own discomfort, a full, unrestrained laugh bounced around the room, echoing off the walls, bringing Ophelia’s attention to the owner of that joyous expression.

  Cleo.

  Only Cleo as Ophelia had never seen her. As she’d never known her. Comfortable, casual, engaging in discourse with those same privileged peers she’d once vowed to gut if they stepped too close.

  And smiling . . . she was also . . . smiling.

  It was a warmer, softer, more tender version of her sister.

  Amidst a room full of strangers staring baldly back, Ophelia had never felt more lonely.

  In that instant, she confronted her own ugliness as a person and as a sister, for she resented Cleopatra. Resented her for fitting in this world they’d once hated with equal measure.

  So that is what love did?

  It melted a person’s hatred and turned them into a vague shadow of the person they’d always been.

  Just then, Cleopatra’s husband, Adair, whispered something in her ear, earning a blush.

  A bloody blush? Not the soft, pink, so-faint-it-might-be-nothing-more-than-a-play-of-the-lighting blush . . . but the crimson, fiery sort.

  Ophelia choked on her swallow.

  What in the Devil alternate world was she living in?

  In the past they’d been unsuspecting of her presence. Now, they knew of it. When before she’d only been invisible to them. And knew it in the way the ladies curled their lips in disdain and whispered around their delicate satin fans.

  It could be worse. It could be worse.

  Those words rolled around her mind, a silent mantra.

  It could be—

  Connor entered the room.

  Ophelia went absolutely still.

  Surely her eyes were merely playing tricks in the candles’ light.

  After all, she had been gripped by thoughts of their embrace since she’d fled his presence. Her pulse quickened. Hot energy speared through her, burning her with the memory of those hard lips on hers. The taste of him. The corded power of his muscles. His . . .

  “Mr. Steele,” the butler thundered in his roughened street tones.

  Well, bloody hell, she’d been otherwise wrong—the evening had just gotten worse.

  Why in blazes was he here, of all places?

  Why else do you think he’s here? He’d discovered her attack of a lord that night. Her assault of the man had been splashed upon the gossip columns, warning the nobility of the peril in the streets. No. No. There could be any number of reasons he was here. He could . . . or he might . . . There could be no other explaining his presence.

  With all the stares now securely reserved for the beautifully rugged guest at the front of the room, Ophelia searched for an escape.

  Tall and in command, he strode deeper into the parlor with purposeful steps, a man on more of a mission than any soldier in the King’s Army. Ophelia darted her gaze about as a flurry of whispers followed Connor’s wake.

  That strangely familiar gentleman alongside Calum Dabney approached him.

  It was with years of relying on another’s unspoken body movements to survive that she noted the easiness of that trio’s exchange: the lack of tension as they shook hands, the older man’s laugh . . .

  Why . . . why?

  Ophelia furrowed her brow.

  He knows them. There was a familiarity with which that group spoke. As she watched on, her mind raced.

  Connor O’Roarke, the Hunter, an investigator feared throughout London, had been invited by Calum Dabney.

  Which meant he was going to be dining at the same table she was.

  Swallowing a groan, she searched the room, the urge to flee even stronger. All of a sudden she found herself preferring his formal questioning to a sure-to-be-mocking reaction to her attending an event hosted by Polite Society.

  Nodding his head at something one of the pair speaking with him now said, whatever Connor’s reply was earned a laugh from Calum Dabney.

  She edged backward, wanting to slip behind the curtains.

  Just then, he looked up, and his eyes collided with hers.

  Even with the distance between them, she registered the surprise in his gaze. A slow grin tipped his lips at the corners. He winked.

  She flared her eyes. “Did you wink at me?” she mouthed. That almost-taunting-but-wholly-teasing gesture. Damn her heart for tripping an erratic beat.

  He responded with another wink before his attention was called by the kindly looking gentleman who’d snagged Ophelia’s notice earlier.

  Ophelia stood there in silent tumult.

  Before Broderick had taken over control of Diggory’s streets, everyone had been too terrorized to feel any emotion except hatred and fear. After that miserable blighter had kicked up his heels, the men within the gaming hell had treated her and her sisters as though they were of an exalted station.

  Yet Connor had teased Ophelia. Had done so when no one else before him had.

  Ophelia found Connor precisely where she’d last spied him, along with the familiar stranger and their host, and now the addition of a new person.

  This one . . . a lady.

  Taller than many, Ophelia had always thought herself to be of a considerable height. She’d lamented it as a child for the fact that she’d not possessed the small stature of her sister Cleo, who’d been stealthy in her thievery because of it. The woman, two inches shorter than Connor’s six feet four inches, was a veritable giant.

  Only a slender, small-hipped sort.

  Her thick black curls, elegantly gathered and held in place with diamond butterfly clips, were a perfect complement to the man beside her. They were a gypsy couple in full command.

  And by the way the woman periodically swatted at his arm and leaned into him, they were very much a couple.

  Who was she? His lover? Moving freely about the gaming hell floors over the years, Ophelia was certainly no innocent to the ways of the ton. Lords visited their clubs and bedded their whores while their wives took on with others. Is that what Connor was? Some noblewoman’s lover?

  It would just be another sign that Connor O’Roarke thought himself better than the world he’d been born to, carrying on with a lady. It was surely that which accounted for the uncomfortable sentiments swirling in her gut . . . ones she could not name or identify, nor wished to . . . in Calum Dabney’s parlor, no less.

  “Dinner is served,” a servant announced from the front of the room.

  Dinner with her childhood nemesis Connor O’Roarke and his noble friends . . . and his fancy lady.

  Panic mounting, Ophelia darted into the adjourning room. The echo of the other guests’ voices grew increasingly distant until Ophelia was left alone with a safe silence.

  She paced, cursing Connor’s reappearance in her life as an age-old resentment for him was kindled anew.

  He’d been the boy who’d gotten away and thought himself better than anyone. He’d only grown into an equally pompous man. It had been resentment of that fact that had pulled the bitter reply off her tongue. The work Connor did now for men of power, and his attendance at ton events, flirting with ladies and chatting with lords, only highlighted that exalted
place he’d always claimed for himself in St. Giles.

  In the days when she’d allowed herself to think of Connor and her role in ensuring his freedom, she’d alternated between revering him for what he’d accomplished . . . and hating him.

  Ophelia stopped abruptly, her skirts swirling angrily about her legs.

  Is it really Connor you hate? Or yourself for having sacrificed one sibling to secure his future?

  Because each time she saw him again, she was confronted by all the ways she’d failed her sister.

  Ya found ’im and let ’im go . . . ya’ll pay for that . . . now how to make ya pay.

  A fine sheen developed over her eyes, and she furiously blinked it back. Bloody dust. There was no other way to account for her blurred vision. For she certainly wasn’t one given to waterworks. She dashed a hand angrily over her eyes. One would expect a duke’s daughter, even one married to Calum Dabney, to have servants to see to the blasted dusting.

  Yet if Connor were the pompous bastard she’d always taken him for, what was to account for the offense he’d taken at her words? Nor could there be any mistaking those sentiments before he’d stood and stalked off.

  In the silence of Calum Dabney’s room with all the guests thankfully gone, she accepted the needling in her belly for what it was—guilt.

  You bloody fool. What in blazes did she have to feel guilty for?

  The facts remained:

  One, Connor O’Roarke had escaped St. Giles and somehow made a life for himself outside of East London.

  Two, he worked for those same fancy lords who thought nothing of battering and abusing the children who lived on those streets.

  Three, he’d sought to force her hand in his investigation by threatening her club . . . and through that, her family.

  She wrinkled her nose. Was there a fourth? Ophelia fished around her brain . . . and came up empty.

  There needn’t be any more than that. The latter reason alone had been enough to hate him outright.

  I wouldn’t be so foolish as to laugh at the Jewel of St. Giles.