The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers Book 1) Read online

  He slipped a hand between her legs, finding the thatch of curls there. She went taut at the intimacy of his touch, and then a shuddery gasp burst from her lips as he parted her folds to caress the slick nub there. Of their own volition, Cleopatra’s hips lifted, arching higher as yearning drove back all reservations, and she was capable of nothing else but feeling. She clamped down hard on her lower lip as he slid a finger inside and began to stroke her. In and out. Over and over until Cleopatra was reduced to incoherency. “Adair,” she keened his name, and it became a litany. A pressure continued to build at her aching center, and he slipped another long digit inside. She increased the frantic gyrating of her hips.

  And then he stopped.

  She cried out and stretched her arms up to drag him back to her.

  But he only stood, and with stiff, frantic movements, stripped his shirt overhead, then tossed it aside. Her mouth went dry, and she roved her gaze over his heavily muscled chest, lightly matted with tight coils of dark curls and marked with jagged scars. He epitomized a warrior’s beauty.

  Adair tugged free first one boot, then the other, letting them fall beside him. He moved his hands to his waist and then slowly shoved the dark breeches off.

  Her whispery gasp was lost in the noisy rustle of the garment hitting the floor. She stared on in wonder. His thick, tall manhood jutted proudly toward his flat belly. It throbbed under her scrutiny. Wordlessly, she reached her hand out and lightly folded him in her fingers.

  A sound better suited a wounded bear ripped from Adair’s throat, and she paused, looking up. “Oi’m sorry,” she said, instantly lightening her grip. She’d kneed, kicked, punched, and grabbed enough assailants in that very region over the years to know it was given to pain.

  “No,” he rasped, guiding her back to his length.

  She hesitated. “Oi didn’t hurt you?”

  “Only in the best possible way,” he squeezed out between clenched teeth.

  Cleopatra explored him tentatively at first, and emboldened by his groan, she deepened her strokes. He was like heated steel in her hand.

  “Stop,” he entreated, staying her movements.

  She looked questioningly up at him, but he immediately shifted over her, taking her mouth again in a kiss. They tangled with their tongues in a primitive dance that increased the sharp ache at her core until incoherent pleas were falling from her lips.

  She dimly registered Adair settling between her thighs, and she let her legs fall wider. His shaft pressed hard and thick against her damp curls.

  “Please,” she begged, not knowing what she pleaded for, only knowing he could assuage the ache at her center.

  He responded by palming her there. Biting her lower lip as the desperate hunger built, she looked at him wildly. All these years, she’d believed this act was a dirty one that stripped a woman of pride and strength. Only to be set gloriously free, under the power of his touch. “I need . . . more,” she breathed, reveling in that new freedom, abandoning everything she’d erroneously believed as a woman. There was no shame in this. Only wonder.

  He slipped two fingers inside her sopping channel, slowly torturing her with his ministrations.

  An incoherent plea spilled past her lips. “Please,” she moaned. She had no pride where this man was concerned. He entered her slowly, inch by agonizing inch, stretching the tight virginal walls.

  The chiseled planes of his features tightened, and a sheen of sweat formed on his brow. “I’ve never felt anything like this,” he rasped, stopping when his manhood reached the thin flesh she’d preserved in the streets of St. Giles.

  For him. I saved myself for this man and only him . . .

  “Oi don’t want to hurt you,” he said in low, guttural tones.

  Cleopatra held him close. “I want this,” she panted. Before she left him, she needed to know him in this way. Wanted to take every memory of Adair Thorne she could.

  He clenched his eyes and pressed forward.

  A scream tore from her lips, and Adair instantly covered her mouth with his, swallowing the sound of her pain.

  He stilled inside her, going absolutely motionless.

  Breaking his kiss, Cleopatra tightened her arms about him. As one who’d been punched, kicked, and burned, she’d thought herself largely immune to pain, only to find she was still human, after all. “That ’urt,” she acknowledged in ragged tones.

  Adair touched his lips to the corner of her mouth, then trailed a tender path of butterfly-soft kisses to her brow. “Oi’d rather cut myself with my own knife than cause you pain.”

  She didn’t want to think of his suffering. Cleopatra focused on evening her breaths. “Oi’m fine,” she finally said.

  The ghost of a smile dimpled his cheek, and Adair gently shoved her spectacles back into their proper place. “Cleopatra, are you trying to reassure me?”

  “Ya look loike you’re going to toss the contents of your belly, Thorne. Green like you just—” He reclaimed her lips in a tender joining that rekindled the fluttering inside her belly.

  And then he began to move. She held herself stiffly at the slow drag of him. The dull throbbing of pain receded, and in its place was the familiar ache of desire. Their chests moved together with the force of their breaths.

  Cleopatra laid her palms on the side of Adair’s neck so she could retain his gaze, wanting to see him as he made love to her. He leaned down and caught her mouth. Then the slide of his tongue between her lips matched the pace he’d set for them.

  She gasped and lifted her hips, meeting his movements as he filled her again and again. “Yes,” she rasped as he dragged her back up to that precipice where she’d hovered before. The pulsing between her legs intensified, so she could focus on nothing but the feel of their bodies joining together.

  Adair gripped her hips and stroked her harder. Faster. “Come for me,” he urged.

  “Yes,” she whimpered. “I want . . . I want . . .” Cleopatra went taut, and then he pulled free and thrust home once more. She softly screamed, exploding in a blur of white light.

  With a hoarse shout, he came inside her in long, rippling waves. Rapturous shudders racked her body as she took all of him. His chest heaving, Adair collapsed. He caught his weight with his elbows, anchoring them on either side of her head.

  Tears pricked behind her lashes as their ragged breaths filtered around the quiet of the room. She tried to speak. “I never felt . . . I didn’t know . . . I . . .” Cleopatra struggled to find adequate words to capture what she was feeling—and failed.

  Adair kissed the tip of her nose, that gesture so achingly tender, her heart filled all the more with her love for him. “This isn’t why I brought you here,” he said, a smile in his voice.

  In one fluid movement, he rolled her from under him. She gasped as he reversed their bodies’ positions and brought her atop him. The crisp curls matting his chest tickled her cheek. Cleopatra struggled herself into a semiupright position and propped her chin on him. “I would not mind if you did,” she teased.

  He gave her a teasing swat on her backside, eliciting a sharp laugh. “Minx.” Adair opened his eyes, and her own dazed, silly smile reflected back in his eyes.

  When have I ever been this happy? This trusting? With anyone? Having kept even her own sisters out, she’d believed herself incapable of this closeness with another person.

  And he’d despise you if he knew who you really are.

  It was the ultimate secret she’d convinced herself Adair didn’t need to know because she was only a fleeting presence in his life.

  “Why so somber all of a sudden?” he murmured. He stroked a palm over her back in smooth, calming circles that only made her want to cry.

  And she didn’t cry. I’m not Cleopatra Killoran. I’m . . .

  Tears blurred her vision, and she swung herself upright. Reluctantly, she shifted onto the tiny sliver of space at the corner of the sofa, needing some distance between her and Adair . . . and her inherent weakness for him.

 
From the corner of her eye, she watched him.

  He stood, beautiful in his naked splendor, and gathered his garments. Grateful for his diversion, she sought to put together a shattered heart. Futile. It is futile. She wanted what she could never have—him. Too much divided them. It had divided them from the moment she’d come squalling into the miserable world that was St. Giles, and it had only grown in time.

  Her relief was short-lived. Adair fished a white kerchief out of his jacket and returned to her side. He dropped to his haunches beside her and proceeded to wipe the remnants of his seed and her blood from between her thighs.

  Averting her gaze . . . praying he believed it was false modesty, she took the cloth from him and finished the task. She set it down on the floor and jumped up. She winced at the soreness there. Ignoring the discomfort, she scrambled into her garments. At her back, the rustle of clothing indicated Adair went through those same rituals.

  After she’d finished, Cleopatra glanced at the opposite wall.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She blinked slowly. Had she uttered that aloud?

  “I should not have touched you,” Adair said hollowly.

  Let him believe that is what compels your silence. Then, there would be no questions. There’d be nothing more than his own guilt. And she’d certainly caused others enough pain and suffering in her existence where a misunderstanding on Adair Thorne’s part was the least of her crimes. She pressed her hands to her face. Who would believe she, Cleopatra Killoran, was incapable of that lie?

  “I wanted this, Adair,” she insisted, turning about to face him.

  “You have regrets.”

  Not for the reasons he believed. Not even about what he believed. Don’t be a coward. Tell him. Mayhap it wouldn’t matter.

  You’re a fool if you believe that.

  She needed to tell him. Needed to have it out between them—who she, in fact, was. Cleopatra strolled over to the doorway and looked out at the mess that was the main rooms of his gaming floor. Given their connection to Diggory, Adair was certainly right to have his reservations where she and her family were concerned. She rested her cheek against the smooth doorjamb. “I’m so sorry.”

  Feeling him beside her, she looked up. He held himself whipcord straight, but revealed nothing.

  “About your club.” She searched for evidence of the same fury that came with any reminder of the blaze. “We did not do this.” She needed him to know that—more . . . to believe it. Just as she needed one thing to not matter to him.

  A grimness settled over his features. “That’s not why I’ve brought you here,” he murmured, and regret pulled inside that he should still doubt her word and whom her family were as people.

  She planted her feet, digging in. “Mayhap it’s not. But we’ll have the discussion. You don’t know the manner of man my brother is.”

  “I know precisely the type he is,” he said flatly, pulling his jacket on. “I’ve dealt with him and men of his ilk since I was a boy of seven.”

  The idea that the two men she loved most in this world hated one another as they did gutted her.

  “Ya can woipe those thoughts from your head,” Cleopatra said tightly. “’e was . . . is the best brother.”

  “You’d defend a man who’d sell you at the marital altar.”

  She recoiled. “That is . . . was . . . will be my decision,” she said quickly, her words rolling together, as just the mention of marriage sent fear surging through her.

  Cleopatra rushed forward, until just a foot of space divided them. “You think he’s selling me for a title—”

  “I know that’s what he’s doing.”

  “But he looked after me. He stood up to Diggory when no one else did to protect my siblings and I.” She paused. “He gave me a name and lived to see another day for it.”

  That revelation brought him up short. “He named you.” She didn’t know what to make of that halting statement.

  Cleopatra nodded. “And he fought Diggory when most others who’d tried, failed,” she added as an afterthought. “He called me Cleopatra”—she dared him with her eyes to make light of her name—“and told me I didn’t have royal blood in my veins, but I was as fierce and as clever as that queen herself.” An Egyptian woman Cleopatra had never even heard of until her brother entered her life with his fancy words and love of books.

  “It is a name befitting queens and warriors,” he said, almost as if to himself. “It suits you.”

  Unnerved by that husky acknowledgment, she doffed her spectacles and cleaned the lenses. “He swore that someday we would have connections to kings and lords.” She’d laughed at him then. The sheer lunacy to believe street brats like Cleopatra and her sisters would ever be looked at as anything more than women those toffs might one day want to take up against an alley wall.

  “And that’s so important to him . . . and you?” Heavy recrimination coated that query.

  “Security is important,” she countered. “After . . .” Say it. Say her name. Adair, in opening the window into Cleopatra’s past, had given her the strength to do so. “After Joan was killed, Broderick came along,” she shared, putting her spectacles back in place. She’d not allowed herself to think of that woman who, when she’d burned to death in that hovel, hadn’t been many years older than Cleopatra was now herself.

  She walked on wooden legs over to a nearby worktable and stared beyond it. The back of her nape pricked with the feel of Adair’s stare upon her. What was it about Adair that made her able to speak about those darkest times in her life? About Joan and her sister being beat into blindness and the agony of fear and . . . She pressed her eyes closed, fighting for a semblance of control. Cleopatra concentrated on drawing in slow, even breaths.

  “What happened to Joan,” Adair said quietly from just over her shoulder, “was not your fault.”

  Her breath came all the faster. Stop talking. Please, stop talking. She was going to splinter apart with the pain of that past.

  Adair rested a strong, reassuring palm upon her right shoulder. “It was an evil that belonged only to Diggory. You’re incapable of the evil he forced upon you.”

  I’m not. Because I have evil pumping in my veins . . . Her throat thickened, and she couldn’t get out that truth.

  “You’ve taken over the care of your sisters,” Adair continued, “looking after everyone else . . . and never yourself.”

  The unexpectedness of his words held her frozen. “I want to take care of them,” she said belatedly, curling her fingers until the nails dug sharply against the branded D on her left palm. She did. Ophelia, Gertrude, and Stephen were her everything. And now, Adair is, too . . . Oh, God.

  “You feel you have to take care of them,” he challenged, bringing her about to face him. “Because of Joan.”

  She wrenched away, her heart knocking loudly in her ears. She wanted to stick her fingers in her ears until his words were nothing more than muffled silence. Because he only spoke the truth . . . You’ve spent your life after Joan trying to be everything and everyone to your siblings . . . “You know nothing about it,” she rasped.

  “I know everything about it,” he said bluntly. “We all live with the guilt of what we’ve done in the streets.” He took a step toward her. “But marrying a fancy gent”—a man you don’t love—“will not ease the pain of what you and Joan lost that night.”

  Cleopatra skittered a panicky gaze about, but he persisted.

  “It will only result in you sacrificing your own happiness for your sisters.”

  “But that is what you do when you love someone,” she cried out. She tossed her hands high. “I had to sacrifice Joan—”

  “And now you’re sacrificing yourself,” he said quietly.

  “Why are you doing this?” she implored.

  “Because I love you.”

  The shock of his graveled pronouncement ushered in a blanket of silence. Cleopatra fluttered a hand to her chest. “You . . .”

  Adair opened and closed
his mouth. He gave his head a slow, befuddled shake. “I love you,” he repeated, making that profession all the more real.

  He loves you on a lie. That taunting voice whispered around the chambers of her mind. She closed her eyes tight, and Diggory’s face was there. His evil smile, pockmarked visage . . .

  Cleopatra whirled away from him. “Ya love me,” she spat. “Ya don’t know anything about me . . .” Whereas Cleopatra knew everything about who this man was. Knew he was good and honorable and that he put thoughts of the women inside his club above profit, sparing them from a life of prostitution.

  “I know so much.”

  She could hear the gentle smile in his voice.

  But not the most important part.

  “You’re fearless and clever and strong and—”

  “Diggory was my father.”

  Adair froze midsentence, his rugged features forming a frozen mask. Was it shock? Horror? Disbelief? Mayhap it was all three etched there?

  “What?” he asked, taking a step back.

  She followed that slight, but telling, movement, and her heart shattered, falling into a million useless pieces at his feet. Damn you for loving him. And damn you for caring that it matters to him. An agonized laugh bubbled in her chest, and she forcibly fought it back. After the terror Diggory had inflicted upon Adair’s family, how had she been naive enough to believe it might not matter to Adair? “Diggory was my father,” she repeated, watching his features closely. “’e sired me. Gave me life.” How many ways could she say it that it might sink into his confused state?

  Horror flashed to life in his green eyes. “Your father,” he echoed dumbly.