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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.
