She didn’t seem old.
“Plain.”
Plain had occurred to him, but she wasn’t plain. Not really. In fact, she might be the opposite of plain.
“Uninteresting.”
That was absolutely not true.
“I was tossed over by a duke.”
Still not the whole truth. “And there’s the rub?”
“Quite,” she said. “Though it seems unfair, as the duke in question never intended to marry me in the first place.”
“Why not?”
“He was wildly in love with his wife.”
“Unfortunate, that.”
She turned away from him, returning her gaze to the sky. “Not for her.”
Devil had never in his life wanted to approach another so much. But he remained in the shadows, pressing himself to the wall and watching her. “If you are unmarriageable for all those reasons, why waste your time here?”
She gave a little laugh, the sound low and lovely. “Don’t you know, sir? Any unmarried woman’s time is well spent near to unmarried gentlemen.”
“Ah, so you haven’t given up on a husband.”
“Hope springs eternal,” she said.
He nearly laughed at the dry words. Nearly. “And so?”
“It’s difficult, as at this point, my mother has strict requirements for any suitor.”
“For example?”
“A heartbeat.”
He did laugh at that, a single, harsh bark, shocking the hell out of him. “With such high standards, it’s unsurprising that you’ve had such trouble.”
She grinned, teeth gleaming white in the moonlight. “It’s a wonder that the Duke of Marwick hasn’t fallen over himself to get to me, I know.”
The reminder of his purpose that evening was harsh and instant. “You’re after Marwick.”
Over my decaying corpse.
She waved a hand. “My mother is, as are all the rest of the mothers in London.”
“They say he’s mad,” Devil pointed out.
“Only because they can’t imagine why anyone would choose to live outside society.”
Marwick lived outside society because he’d made a long-ago pact never to live within it. But Devil did not say that. Instead, he said, “They’ve barely had a look at him.”
Her grin turned into a smirk. “They’ve seen his title, sir. And it is handsome as sin. A hermit duke still makes a duchess, after all.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s the marriage mart.” She paused. “But it does not matter. I am not for him.”
“Why not?” He didn’t care.
“Because I am not for dukes.”
Why the hell not?
He didn’t speak the question, but she answered it nonetheless, casually, as though she were speaking to a roomful of ladies at tea. “There was a time when I thought I might be,” she offered, more to herself than to him. “And then . . .” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what happened. I suppose all those other things. Plain, uninteresting, aging, wallflower, spinster.” She laughed at the list of words. “I suppose I should not have dallied, thinking I’d find myself a husband, as it did not happen.”
“And now?”
“And now,” she said, resignation in her tone, “my mother seeks a strong pulse.”
“What do you seek?”
Whit’s nightingale cooed in the darkness, and she replied on the heels of the sound. “No one has ever asked me that.”
“And so,” he prodded, knowing he shouldn’t. Knowing he should leave this girl to this balcony and whatever future she was to have.
“I—” She looked toward the house, toward the dark conservatory and the hallway beyond, and the glittering ballroom beyond that. “I wish to be a part of it all again.”
“Again?”
“There was a time I—” she began, then stopped. Shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve far more important things to do.”
“I do, but as I can’t do them while you’re here, my lady, I’m more than willing to help you sort this out.”
She smiled at that. “You’re amusing.”
“No one in my whole life would agree with you.”
Her smile grew. “I am rarely interested in others’ opinions.”
He did not miss the echo of his own words from earlier. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
She waved a hand. “There was a time when I was a part of it. Right at the center of it all. I was incredibly popular. Everyone wished to know me.”
“And what happened?”
She spread her hands wide again, a movement that was beginning to be familiar. “I don’t know.”
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.
And he’d seemed to know that, too, that stranger. Enough that she almost hadn’t left him in the shadows. Enough that she’d almost joined him there. Because in those few, fleeting moments, she had wondered if perhaps it wasn’t this world she wished to return to, but a new, dark world where she might begin anew. Where she might be someone other than Finished Felicity, wallflower spinster. And the man on the balcony had seemed the kind of man who could provide just that.
Which was mad, obviously. One did not run off with strange men one met on balconies. First off, that was how a person got murdered. And second, her mother would not approve. And then there was Arthur. Staid, perfect, poor Arthur with his We cannot afford another scandal.
And so she’d done what one did after a mad moment in the dark; she’d turned her back and made for the light, ignoring the pang of regret as she turned the corner of the great stone facade and stepped into the glow of the ballroom beyond the massive windows, where all of London shifted and swirled, laughing and gossiping and vying for the attention of their handsome, mysterious host.
Where the world she’d once been part of spun without her.
She watched for a long moment, catching a glimpse of the Duke of Marwick on the far side of the room, tall and fair and empirically handsome, with aristocratic good looks that should have set her to sighing but in fact made no impact.
Her gaze slid away from the man of the hour, settling briefly on the copper gleam of her brother’s hair on the far side of the ballroom, where he was deep in conversation with a group of men more serious than their surroundings. She wondered what they were discussing—was it her? Was Arthur attempting to sell another batch of men on Finished Felicity’s eligibility?
We cannot afford another scandal.
They couldn’t afford the last one, either. Or the one prior. But her family did not wish to admit that. And here they were, at a duke’s ball, pretending that the truth was not the truth. Pretending that anything was possible.
Refusing to believe that plain, imperfect, tossed-over Felicity was never going to win the heart and mind and—more importantly—the hand of the Duke of Marwick, no matter what kind of potentially addled hermit he was.
There had been a time when she might have, though. When a hermit duke might have collapsed to his knees and begged Lady Felicity to notice him. Well, perhaps not so much collapsing and begging, but he would have danced with her. And she would have made him laugh. And perhaps . . . they might have liked each other.
But that was all when she’d never even dreamed of looking at society from the outside—when she’d never even imagined society had an outside. She’d been inside, after all, young and eligible and titled and diverting.
She’d had dozens of friends and hundreds of acquaintances and invitations for visits and house parties and walks along the Serpentine in spades. No gathering was worth attending if she and her friends weren’t in attendance. She’d never been lonely.
And then . . . it had changed.
One day, the world had stopped glittering. Or, more aptly, Felicity had stopped glittering. Her friends faded away, and worse, turned their backs, not even attempting to shield her from their disdain. They’d taken pleasure in cutting her directly. As though she hadn’t once been one of them. As though they’d never been friends in the first place.
Which she supposed they hadn’t. How had she missed it? How had she not seen that they never really wanted her?
And the worst of all questions—why hadn’t they wanted her?
What had she done?
Foolish Felicity, indeed.
The answer did not matter anymore—it had been long enough that she doubted anyone even remembered. What mattered was that now barely anyone noticed her, except to look upon her with pity or disdain.
After all, no one liked a spinster less than the world that made her.
Felicity, once a diamond of the a
ristocracy (well, not a diamond, but a ruby perhaps. A sapphire, surely—daughter of a marquess with a dowry to match), was a proper spinster, complete with a future of lace caps and invitations offered out of pity to look forward to.
If only she’d marry, Arthur liked to say . . . she could avoid it.
If only she’d marry, her mother liked to say . . . they could avoid it. For as embarrassing as spinsterhood was for the spinster in question, it was a badge of shame for a mother—especially one who had done so well as to marry a marquess.
And so, the Faircloth family ignored Felicity’s spinsterhood, willing to do anything to land her a decent match. They ignored, too, the truth of Felicity’s desires—the ones the man in the darkness had instantly queried.
The truth. That she wanted the life she’d been promised. She wanted to be a part of it again. And if she couldn’t have that, which, frankly, she knew she couldn’t—she was not a fool, after all—she wanted more than a consolation of a marriage. That was the problem with Felicity. She’d always wanted more than she could have.
Which had left her with nothing, hadn’t it?
Felicity heaved an unladylike sigh. Her heart wasn’t pounding any longer. She supposed that was positive.
“I wonder if I might leave without anyone noticing?”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the massive glass door leading into the ballroom opened, and out spilled half a dozen revelers, laughter on their lips and champagne in their hands.
It was Felicity’s turn to press into the shadows, tucking herself against the wall as they reached the stone balustrade in breathless, raucous excitement. Recognition flared.
Of course.
They were Amanda Fairfax and her husband, Matthew, Lord Hagin, along with Jared, Lord Faulk, and his younger sister, Natasha, and two more—another couple, young and blond and gleaming like new toys. Amanda, Matthew, Jared, and Natasha liked to collect new acolytes. They’d once collected Felicity, after all.
She’d once been the fifth to their quartet. Beloved, until she wasn’t.
“Hermit or not, Marwick is terribly handsome,” Amanda said.
“And rich,” Jared pointed out. “I heard he filled this house with furnishings last week.”