He raised a brow. “You don’t know what made you a wallflower?”
“I don’t,” she said softly, confusion and sadness in her tone. “I wasn’t even near the walls. And then, one day”—she shrugged—“there I was. Ivy. And so, when you ask me what I seek?”
She was lonely. Devil knew about lonely. “You want back in.”
She gave a little, hopeless laugh. “No one gets back in. Not without a match for the ages.”
He nodded. “The duke.”
“A mother can dream.”
“And you?”
“I want back in.” Another warning sounded from Whit, and the woman looked over her shoulder. “That’s a very persistent nightingale.”
“He’s irritated.”
She tilted her head in curiosity, but when he did not clarify, she added, “Are you going to tell me who you are?”
“No.”
She nodded once. “That is best, I suppose, as I only came outside to find a quiet moment away from supercilious smirks and snide comments.” She pointed down the line of the balcony, toward the lighter stretch of it. “I shall go over there and find a proper hiding place, and you can resume your skulking, if you like.”
He did not reply, not certain of what he would say. Not trusting himself to say what he should.
“I shan’t tell anyone I saw you,” she added.
“You haven’t seen me,” he said.
“Then it shall have the additional benefit of being the truth,” she added, helpfully.
The nightingale again. Whit didn’t trust him with this woman.
And perhaps he shouldn’t.
She dipped into a little curtsy. “Well, off to your nefarious deeds then?”
The pull of the muscles around his lips was unfamiliar. A smile. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled. This strange woman had summoned it, like a sorceress.
She was gone before he could reply, her skirts disappeared around the corner, into the light. It took everything he had not to follow her. To catch a glimpse of her—the color of her hair, the shade of her skin, the flash of her eyes.
He still didn’t know the color of her gown.
All he had to do was follow her.
“Dev.”
His name returned him to the present. He looked to Whit, once more over the balcony and at his side in the shadows.
“Now,” Whit said. It was time to return to their plan. To the man he’d vowed to end should he ever set foot in London. Should he ever attempt to claim that which he had once stolen. Should he ever even think of breaking that decades-old vow.
And he would end him. But it would not be with fists.
“We go, bruv,” Whit whispered. “Now.”
Devil shook his head once, gaze fixed to the place where the woman’s mysterious skirts had disappeared. “No. Not yet.”
Chapter Two
Felicity Faircloth’s heart had been pounding for long enough that she thought she might require a doctor.
It had begun pounding as she’d slipped from the glittering Marwick House ballroom and stared at the locked door in front of her, ignoring the nearly unbearable desire to reach into her coif and extract a hairpin.
Knowing she absolutely mustn’t extract a hairpin. Knowing she absolutely shouldn’t extract two—nor insert them into the keyhole not six inches away and patiently work at the tumblers within.
We cannot afford another scandal.
She could hear her twin brother Arthur’s words as though he were standing with her. Poor Arthur, desperate for his spinster sister—twenty-seven and high on the shelf—to be released into the care of another, more willing man. Poor Arthur, whose prayers would never be answered—not even if she stopped picking locks.
But she heard the other words even more. The sniggering comments. The names. Forlorn Felicity. Fruitless Felicity. And the worst one . . . Finished Felicity.
Why is she even here?
Surely she can’t think anyone would have her.
Her poor brother, desperate to marry her off.
. . . Finished Felicity.
There had been a time when a night like this would have been Felicity’s dream—a new duke in town, a welcome ball, the teasing promise of an engagement at hand with a new, handsome, eligible bachelor. It would have been perfection. Dresses and jewels and full orchestras, gossip and chatter and dance cards and champagne. Felicity would barely have had free space on her dance card, and if she had, it would have been because she’d taken it for herself, so she might enjoy her place in this glittering world.
No more.
Now, she avoided balls if she could, knowing they offered hours of lingering around the edges of the room rather than dancing through it. And there was the hot embarrassment that came whenever she stumbled upon one of her old acquaintances. The memory of what it had been like to laugh with them. To lord with them.
But there was no avoiding a ball bearing a shining new duke, and so she’d stuffed herself into an old gown and into her brother’s carriage, and allowed poor Arthur to drag her into the Marwick ballroom. And she’d fled the moment he had turned the other way.
Felicity had fled down a dark hallway, her heart thundering as she’d removed the hairpins from her coif, bending them carefully, and inserted one and then the other into the keyhole. When a quiet snick sounded, and the latchwork sprang like a delicious old friend, her heart had threatened to beat from her chest.
And to think, all that thunderous pounding was before she’d met the man.
Though, met wasn’t precisely the correct word.
Encountered did not seem quite right, either.
It had been something closer to experienced. The moment he’d spoken, the low thrum of his voice wrapping around her like silk in the dark spring air as he tempted her like vice.
A flush washed across her cheeks at the memory, at the way he seemed to draw her in, as though they were connected by a string. As though he could pull her to him and she would go, without resistance. He’d done more than pull her in. He’d pulled the truth from her, and she’d offered it with ease.
She’d catalogued her flaws as though they were a change in the weather. She’d nearly confessed it all, even the bits she’d never confessed to anyone else. The bits she held close in the darkness. Because it hadn’t felt like confession. It felt like he’d already known everything. And maybe he had. Maybe he wasn’t a man in the darkness. Maybe he was the darkness itself. Ephemeral and mysterious and tempting—so much more tempting than the daylight, where flaws and marks and failure shone bright and impossible to miss.
The darkness had always tempted her. The locks. The barriers. The impossible.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? Felicity always wanted the impossible. And she was not the kind of woman who received it.
But when that mysterious man had suggested that she was a woman of consequence? For a moment, she’d believed him. As though it wasn’t laughable, the very idea that Felicity Faircloth—plain, unmarried daughter of the Marquess of Bumble, overlooked by more than one eligible bachelor because of her own ill fortune and properly unfit for this ball, where a long-lost handsome duke sought a wife—might be able to win the day.
The impossible.
So she’d fled, returning to her old habits and stumbling into the darkness because everything seemed more possible in the darkness than in the cold, harsh light.