“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.