Wicked and the Wallflower (The Bareknuckle Bastards, #1)

by Sarah MacLean

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.

After all, no one liked a spinster less than the world that made her.

She wanted a man who could . . . she didn’t even know. A man who could do more than marry her and leave her alone for the rest of her life, certainly.

Everything about this man was unsettling and strange and vaguely infuriating. “I don’t like you.”

Hope was a wild, panicked thing.

“When I tease you, love, you shall know it.”

“Are you certain you wish a favor from the Devil?” “It seems that would be a far more useful favor than one from someone who is perfectly good all the time,”

no one likes a rich man like a poor man with the same beginnings.

She had to blame something for it, you see, as Felicity Faircloth, aging spinster wallflower, did not kiss men. What’s more, she absolutely did not kiss men who lived in Covent Garden and carried cane swords and were named Devil.

“Let me tell you about passion, Felicity Faircloth. Passion is obsession. It is desire beyond reason. It is not want, but need. And it comes with the worst of sin far more often than it comes with the best of it.”

And we need an aristocratic chit under our protection like a dog needs diamonds.”

There had been shoes and stockings and gloves and undergarments—she blushed at the memory of them, each piece edged with ribbons in a pink so vibrant it seemed scandalous. I like pink, she’d told him earlier in the week. It felt sinful to wear those underthings, silk and satin and stunning, knowing they came from him.

“Because the rookeries are no place for pretty girls with a breathless anticipation of adventure.”

Everyone was always on about women’s décolletages and how corsetry was growing more salacious by the minute and skirts clung too close to women’s legs, but had any one of those people seen a man without a coat? Good God.

She didn’t know what he would say. She supposed he might tell her it reminded her of someone or something—whatever it was that had turned him into this odd man. She might have imagined that he would tell her he had an affinity for nature—after all, he was a notorious London recluse, having spent his whole life in the country. It would not have surprised her if he’d told her he cared for a particular species of bird in sight, or a weed sprouting below. But she absolutely did not expect him to extract a boy from the hedge.

She made a man want to fly right to her. Not like a moth. Like Icarus.

“They reveled in each other,” he replied. “Gloried in having finally found the other being in all the world who could see them for who they were. They are never apart—Janus, forever the god of the lock, Cardea, forever the goddess of the hinge. And the Earth keeps turning.”

I am so far beneath you that I soil you with my very thoughts.”

And I’m not in the market for a keeper, anyway.” “As you are standing in the middle of a Covent Garden bordello, I think you absolutely should be.”

“I shall always give you whatever you wish.” It was a lie, of course, and she knew it.

I am soiled beyond repair. And I am so far beneath you that I have to strain to look at you.”

“I don’t care about him. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t bare myself and worse—my heart—to him. And so, while his past sins are no doubt monstrous . . . while he more than deserved the blow I delivered . . . while I wish him ill beyond measure . . . his sin is nothing in comparison to yours.”

“Enough!” Arthur said. “I’m putting locks on all the doors.” “We have locks on all the doors, Arthur.” “I’m putting more locks on the doors. And using them.

“Introduced himself all polite—despite the fact that he’d climbed a tree and broken in.” “He does that,” Felicity said. “Does he?” Pru asked, as though they were discussing Devil’s penchant for riding. “We’re going to have to have a talk about how you know that, eventually,”

Devil had found a skilled artisan who understood complex lockpicking, which seemed the kind of thing that should not exist . . . but he specialized in things that did not exist, and so she was unsurprised as she knelt in the dirt outside the warehouse door.

“I haven’t much. I was born with nothing, was given nothing. I haven’t a name worthy of you, nor a past I’m proud of. But I vow here, in this place that I have built, that used to mean everything and now means nothing without you, that I will spend the rest of my life loving you. And I will do all that I can to give you the world.”