Wicked and the Wallflower

by Sarah MacLean

  He licked at the soft skin, loving the way it puckered beneath his touch. She hissed at the sensation and he pulled back from her. “Are you cold?”

  She shook her head. “No. No. No. No.” Her fingers tightened at his head and she rose toward him, closing the distance between them. “Again, please.”

  Anything she wants. Everything.

  He groaned and pulled the line of the dress lower, revealing her nipple for his lips and tongue, scraping it with his teeth as he tucked his hard length against her, his trousers suddenly too tight. She cried out when he suckled, light and then harder as she whispered his name in the darkness. “Devil.”

  Devon, his mind whispered back, and he pushed the thought aside, refusing to allow it purchase. No one called him by his given name. Certainly no woman. And he wasn’t about to let Felicity Faircloth be the first.

  But he would let her do other things—he would let her touch him, let her direct his mouth to where she wanted it, let her press closer to the long, throbbing length of him even when she didn’t know what she was tempting. What she was asking. “I want—”

  “I know,” he replied, rocking against her, letting her taste the pleasure he could give her. She quickly got the hang of it, and Devil let her use him. He growled and sucked deeper, loving the cry she let loose against his hair as he worked her with tongue and lips. As she worked herself on him. She was fire.

  And he was aflame.

  All he wanted was to lie her back on this slab of ice and worship her with his hands and mouth and cock until she’d learned the thousand ways he could bring her pleasure. She would let him. She was lost to pleasure, rocking against him, begging him for it. “Please.” She sighed.

  Not tonight.

  He stilled at that, raising his lips from her breast, staying the movement of his hand on her thigh where it played at the seam of her undergarments.

  Not yet. Banns haven’t been posted.

  The whisper came from deep within, from the place that had planned revenge against his brother. From the place that had hated his brother for twenty years. From the place that had hated his father for far longer.

  Hate had no place with Felicity Faircloth.

  It would. There would be a time when she would hate him.

  A heavy pounding on the steel door to the room punctuated the thought, and they both turned toward it. It wasn’t locked, but Whit and Nik would know better than to enter without permission. They’d also know better than to knock in the first place unless something had gone wrong.

  He pulled away abruptly, her fingers releasing his head as he lowered her skirts, dropping them over her legs and stepping back—putting room between them as their heavy breaths echoed through the cavernous space.

  She reached for him, like a goddess.

  He shook his head, somehow finding the will to refuse her. “No,” he whispered. “No more tonight, Lady Flame.”

  “But—” He heard the frustration in the word—the same frustration that crawled through him. She wanted him. She wanted all of it. But Felicity Faircloth didn’t know how to ask for it, thank God, and so she settled on, “Please.”

  Christ, he wanted to give it to her.

  Not tonight. Too soon.

  He shouldn’t give it to her ever.

  A knock again. Urgent and unwilling to be ignored.

  He righted her bodice and pulled his coat tight around her when she shivered, the cold finally finding her. “Come,” he said, and she did, following him back through the ice to the steel door.

  Behind it, Nik. “It’s London Second. Again.”

  Devil cursed. “It’s been what, an hour?”

  “Long enough to clear the rookery,” she said. “They were waiting for us. Stopped just before crossing Long Acre. Headed for Mayfair.”

  They were already through the steel door, letting it clatter behind them, unlocked as they headed down the long, dark corridor to the hatch that let them up into the warehouse.

  “What’s happened?” Felicity asked at his elbow. “Is it the Crown?”

  He looked to her, half grateful she knew the truth and half irritated she knew the truth. “What would the Crown want with ice?” Then, without hesitating, he looked back to Nik. “The boys?”

  “Dinuka is returned.” One of the outriders. “He fired on them. Thinks he winged one. Niall and Hamish are shot.”

  “Goddammit, we changed the route.” It was the third hijacking of the same delivery in two months.

  Felicity’s gasp drowned out his curse at the news. “Shot by whom?”

  Nik looked to her. “We don’t know.”

  If they knew, Devil would have run them through already. He swore again as Nik reached the ladder and set to climbing. Niall was one of the Bastards’ best drivers; the Scotsman had been with them since he was a boy. Hamish was his brother—barely out of boyhood, hadn’t even grown his first beard.

  “Alive?” he shouted up to Nik as she turned to help Felicity out of the hold.

  The Norwegian looked down at him. “We don’t know.”

  Another curse as he passed up the lantern, Felicity leaning down to take it from him as though she’d done this a hundred times instead of once. “Devil,” she said, softly, and he hated the pity in her tone, as though she understood the rioting emotions in him. These were his boys. Every one of them, his to keep safe.

  And tonight, three of them had been threatened.

  He turned away from her gaze, looking back toward the ice hold.

  Mistake.

  There was darkness everywhere now that he’d handed up the lantern, and its nearness, the way it crept into the corners of his consciousness, was too much. He scrambled up the ladder, desperate to escape it. Except he’d never been able to escape it. He lived in darkness.

  But there, on the surface, was Felicity, light and hope and everything he would never have. Everything he’d once been promised. Everything he’d once imagined might be his, in a brilliant, beautiful package.

  The concern in her eyes was nearly his undoing.

  He barked an order to Nik to close the hatch to the ice hold.

  What had he been thinking?

  What had he been doing?

  She didn’t belong here—in this place or in his life. He shook his head once and started across the warehouse, toward the door she never should have come through, where Whit stood sentry, dark eyes seeing everything, lingering at a place near Devil’s thigh. Devil’s hand flexed under his brother’s watchful gaze, and he realized Felicity’s was in his grasp.

  He hadn’t even noticed.

  Devil dropped her hand, catching the cane sword Whit tossed before he was through the door and calling for John, who leapt down from the roof, rifle in hand. Waving back at Felicity without stopping, Devil ordered, “Take her home.”

  Felicity’s inhale was loud as a gunshot in the warehouse courtyard. “No.”

  Devil didn’t look at her.

  John nodded. “Aye, sir.”

  “Wait!” She chased after Devil. “What’s happened? Where are you going? Let me come. I can help.”

  She had to leave here. She was in more danger every moment she lingered. She was more danger to him every moment she lingered. What if she hadn’t been here? Perhaps he would have decided to drive the rig. Then Niall wouldn’t have a bullet in him.

  His gaze met Whit’s, calm and collected and absent of judgment, but Devil felt the judgment anyway.

  What the hell was he doing, playing at passion in the ice hold while men with lives and families and futures were shot at in his name? Christ. He never should have let her in. Hadn’t Whit said it? Hadn’t Devil known it?

  What a fucking mess.

  He repeated his order to John. “Take her home. Shoot anyone who gets in your way.”

  “Aye,” John replied again, reaching for her arm. “My lady.”

  She pulled away. “No.” The word was firm and John hesitated. “Devil. I can help. If it’s the Crown—no one hurts a marquess�
�s daughter.”

  Devil stopped then, turning to her, unable to keep his frustration from rising. “You think for a moment that if someone comes at you with a rifle, they’ll care if you’re a marquess’s daughter? You think they’ll care that you’re a lady who embroiders and speaks two languages and knows where to put the goddamn soup spoon and is engaged to a fucking duke?”

  Her eyes went wide, and he should have stopped, but he didn’t. He was angry. At himself, but at her as well, for her fresh-faced innocence and her certainty that the world wasn’t bitter and cruel. “They won’t. Not for a second. In fact, they’ll aim for you, looking like sunshine and smelling like jasmine, because they know men raised in the dark will do anything for light.” Her jaw dropped, and he cut her off before she could speak. “You think you can help us?” He gave a little, humorless laugh. “What will you do, pick their locks?”

  Her back went stick-straight, and he hated the thread of guilt that came with the hurt in her eyes. “You’re no kind of help. You think this is a game; you think the darkness a shining new toy. Well, here is your most important lesson—the darkness isn’t for princesses. It is time for you to return to your storybook tower. Don’t come back.”

  He turned his back on the wallflower, leaving her in silence and taking to the horse at the center of the yard, saddled and waiting for him.

  Felicity Faircloth wasn’t ready for silence.

  “So you renege?” she called after him, her voice strong and steady, a siren’s call. He wheeled the mount around so he could see her in the shadows of the lanterns strewn about the yard, wind rustling her skirts and several locks of errant hair he’d released from their moorings when he’d kissed her.

  His chest tightened at the image—at the straight line of her shoulders and the proud jut of her chin. “You have your duke, don’t you?”

  “Not the way you promised.”

  Fucking passion, like nothing he’d ever experienced. He never should have come near that request, because right now, he was willing to do anything to keep her from sharing air with his brother—let alone sharing herself with him. “You should know better than to believe the promises of a man like me. The deal is done. Go home, Felicity. You are not welcome here.”

  For a long moment, she watched him, and every inch of him knew that he should turn from her before she spoke again. But he couldn’t. And then she spoke, her words taunting and as stinging as a whip. “Tell me, Devil, what shall you do to keep me away? Lock the doors?”

  What in . . . Was she provoking him? Did she have any idea who he was? What kind of man he was? He moved to dismount. To approach her and—

  Christ. He wanted to kiss her senseless.

  What the hell had he done?

  “Devil,” Whit warned, atop his own mount, staying Devil’s movement.

  There were more important things than teaching Felicity Faircloth a lesson. He stared down at her from his great black horse—delivering her the cold, icy look that had terrified larger, stronger men.

  Not stronger.

  “Take her home,” he said, without looking at John.

  She did not look away from him as his man approached her. Indeed, one mahogany brow rose in beautiful defiance.

  Devil spun his horse around to face Whit, who was watching him, stone-faced. “What?” Devil snarled.

  “Smelling like jasmine?” Whit said, his tone dry as sand.

  Devil’s curse was lost in the wind as the Bastards spurred their horses into motion, heading for Fleet Street to rescue their fallen men.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “He could be dead.”

  Felicity stabbed her needle into her embroidery hoop two mornings later with a violence that matched the thought, barely missing drawing her own blood—not that the threat served to slow her next stitch. Or the next. “I don’t care if he’s dead,” she added, speaking to the Bumble House sunroom at large despite it being empty of living creatures. “He was unkind, and it won’t matter a bit if he’s dead.”

  Except, before Devil had been unkind, he hadn’t been unkind at all.

  Before Devil had been unkind, he’d been altogether the opposite of it.

  He’d kissed her and touched her and made her sigh in ways she did not know a person was able to sigh. He’d made her feel things she’d never felt before. “Not that any of that matters, as he ultimately became very unkind and is likely dead,” she repeated, stabbing her needle into her embroidery hoop again, with wicked force.

  He wasn’t dead.

  The words whispered through her mind as she continued her project, resisting the urge to find a piece of paper and send him a note telling him in great detail what he could do with himself if he were dead. Resisting the more pressing urge to toss her whole embroidery hoop into the fire and make her way back to Covent Garden in broad daylight and see his dead body for herself.

  It occurred to Felicity that a woman should be able to sense the death of a man if she’d nearly ruined herself with him in an ice hold beneath a warehouse mere hours earlier. And yet she sensed no such thing. The universe was frustrating, indeed.

  She set her hoop on her lap and heaved a sigh. “He’d better not be dead.”

  “Goodness, Felicity, of course he’s not dead!” her mother sang from the doorway, her trio of dachshunds barking excitedly to punctuate the declaration, startling Felicity from her talkative reverie.

  Felicity turned. “I beg your pardon?”

  The marchioness waved a hand in the air and laughed in that way that mothers laughed when they didn’t want their daughters embarrassing them. “He is decidedly not dead! He’s clearly had business to attend to since last you saw him.”

  Felicity blinked. “I’m sorry, Mother. Who is it who is not dead?”

  “The duke, of course!” her mother said, and one of the dachshunds barked, then promptly tipped over Felicity’s embroidery basket and began to gnaw upon the handle, prompting the marchioness to add, in dulcet tones, “No, no, Rosie, that’s not good for you.”

  The dog growled and continued to chew.

  “I wasn’t suggesting the duke was dead,” Felicity said, “but I might say, Mother, that it’s not an impossibility. After all, we haven’t seen the duke in several days, and so we don’t know he is alive.”

  “We do assuming he hasn’t perished in your father’s study in the last five minutes,” the marchioness replied before reaching down to pluck the dog from the basket—which did not work as planned, as the dog simply tightened her grip and brought the whole thing with her into her mistress’s arms.

  “Father is here?” Felicity’s brows rose. If the Marquess of Bumble was at home, something serious was happening, indeed.

  “Of course he is,” Felicity’s mother said. “Where else would he be with your marriage in the balance?” She tugged on the basket and the dog growled. “Rosencrantz. Drop it, darling.”

  Felicity rolled her eyes and stood, needlepoint in hand. “Is that what they’re discussing? My marriage?”

  Her mother smiled. “Your duke is arrived to save us from a life of poverty.”

  Felicity stilled at the words, honest and somehow flippant. An echo of Devil’s words two nights earlier. Your family will never be poor enough to fear poverty.

  She had been defensive when he’d said it, as though he didn’t take her seriously.

  But here, as the words echoed beneath her family’s roof, as they wore their fashionable frocks surrounded by her mother’s dogs, who ate better than the children in the rookery where Devil made his life and were safer than the boys who worked for him—she understood them.

  What had his life been like?

  She might have been manipulated in recent months—pushed to marry without being told why, leveled with disappointment without reason—but she’d never doubted her family’s love for her. She’d never feared for her safety, or her life.

  But Devil had—she knew that as clearly as she knew his kiss. As she knew the feel of his touch. And the thou
ght consumed her.

  Who had saved Devil from his past?

  Or had he been forced to save himself?

  Her mother interrupted the thoughts. “Well done. Landing the hermit duke is a cracking good job. I knew you could do it.”

  Felicity’s attention snapped to the marchioness. “Well, if one is thrown into the path of enough dukes, one is bound to win one of them, I suppose.”

  Her mother’s brows rose. “Surely you aren’t unhappy about the match. This one is infinitely better than the last.”

  “We don’t know that,” Felicity replied.

  “Don’t be so silly,” the marchioness huffed. “The last one was already married.”

  “At least the last one showed emotion.”

  “He offered to marry you, Felicity.” Her mother’s tone was getting more and more curt. “That’s emotion enough.”

  “As a matter of fact, he didn’t offer,” she replied. “He said I was convenient. That I made the search for a wife easier.”

  “Well. I don’t see the lie in that. Indeed, it might be the first time you’ve ever been accommodating,” the marchioness retorted. “And lest you forget, it’s not as though you’re a trial . . . you are daughter to a marquess, sister to an earl!”

  “And I’ve excellent teeth.”

  “Precisely!” the marchioness replied.

  But she was more than that. Didn’t her mother see? She wasn’t simply the wallflower at the ball, desperate to do whatever necessary to win herself a husband and save her family’s finances. She looked like sunshine and smelled like jasmine.

  The thought sent a wave of heat through her. When he’d said it two nights ago, it had taken all she had not to make him explain himself. It hadn’t seemed like a compliment even as it had sounded like the most beautiful compliment she’d ever heard.

  Men raised in the dark will do anything for light.