Chapter Twenty-One
T he ride to the house was short and quiet. Kitty was not sure what to say. Should she make idle chatter? Should she discuss the extraterrestrial band of blue-skinned warriors from a popular chapbook series? Or Malcolm, a ship’s captain turned pirate? None of her usual topics of conversation were appropriate. Which was not to imply they had ever been appropriate to begin with. But this was something different.
Devil sat quietly watching her as though she were worth watching. As though he saw her. And still meant to keep her safe.
He did not know what she was capable of, what she had nearly done to her closest friend. This would all go away when he truly knew her.
“Does it hurt?” he asked softly.
How she had treated Clara? How angry she was with her father? She opened her mouth, snapped it shut. He meant her ankle, of course. “It’s fine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The carriage pulled up to her house, a single window soft with lamplight. The rain continued to fall, gilding the glass, the puddles on the road. Devil insisted on carrying her to the door, setting her gently down only when no one answered his imperious knock.
“Where’s your butler?” Devil asked when she opened the door and still no one came to greet her.
Kitty laughed. “We haven’t had a butler for years now.”
“Footmen?”
She shook her head, smiling at him like he was being ridiculous.
“Not a one?” He finally sounded shocked, he who was shocked by nothing. He ran an actual, literal den of iniquity, but this had him scandalized. It was endearing. “You’re alone in there?”
“There’s my father and my aunt.” She had the sudden feeling she was going to wake up with half a dozen more Winchesters on her front stair by morning. She was tired, achy. Vulnerable. She could not withstand any more kindness from him. She might shatter. “Good night, Devil.”
He gripped the door handle, keeping her from going inside. He raised a brow expectantly. Patiently.
“Good night, Rhys ,” she amended.
“Good girl,” he murmured in her hair. “I’ll be right back. You’ve had a long night, but I haven’t forgotten my promise,” he added roughly.
“What promise is that?”
“To make you come until your legs give out.”
And just like that, she was on fire from the top of her head straight down her spine. Her nipples puckered in response. She grew wet right there standing on her front step.
He really would have to follow through on his promise soon, or she would never get anything done. This kind of attraction was distracting.
“Lock the door, firecracker.”
The floaty-sparkly feeling lasted all of three minutes. And then her aunt charged out of the parlor. “Was that Lord Birmingham?”
“Yes, Aunt Priscilla.”
“Did you not invite him in?”
“He is a busy man.” And Kitty could not think of many things she wanted less than Devil in her house with her father and her aunt buzzing around him like wasps.
“He has yet to ask your father’s permission, you know.”
“As I am laughably beyond my age of majority and have no dowry, Father is not involved in this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The least you can do is have him forgive your father’s debt.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” If he even held a debt of her father’s. She had not asked directly. Part of her did not want to know. There were already too many tangled, complicated threads between them. And because she didn’t want to know. Even if that made her a terrible daughter.
And any debt her father owed to Devil would, frankly, not make a difference. There were too many of them owed to too many men. He hadn’t a considerable sum available for him to lose in a long time. It was all dripping away like rainwater through a crack in the roof.
That was not a metaphor, unfortunately.
“Ask him for pin money, then,” Aunt Priscilla said.
“We aren’t even married yet,” Kitty pointed out. Nor would they be. And then any favors asked would sit oddly, chafing. One disaster at a time. If she said it often enough, maybe some benevolent spirit would indulge her.
“Useless, as always. Bewitch him if you must, though I can see how that might pose a problem.” She shook her head. “You are starting to look like a street urchin. Ladies do not go about with ink on their fingers and mud on their hems.”
Walking through London, literary tour notwithstanding, was messy business. Walking anywhere in London was generally messy business.
Nearly getting abducted was not much better for one’s sartorial splendor.
Her dress was dusty, her hair coming loose of its pins, as it always did at the end of a long day. She was not fit for a drawing room. It did not appear to bother Devil any at present, but surely he would change his mind. At the moment, she was a unique taste of something different, not a full meal. And he had every banquet and feast available to him.
“Catherine, are you listening to me?”
She was suddenly so very, very tired.
She glanced at the door longingly, wondering if it was worth walking back to the shop on her sore ankle in the rain in order to sleep in the one comfortable chair in her reading room.
The door swung open as if by magic.
And it was not an angel come to save her.
It felt wrong to leave Kitty, even for a moment. Not even here across the river in Lambeth, on Hercules Street, with terraced brick houses overgrown with ivy. But he had caught the movement in the shadows across the street when he set her down.
He knew when someone was lurking.
And he knew when it was not one of his men. They would never be so sloppy. They had learned their tricks on battlefields and hidden camps from Spain to Waterloo. A rainy street in London was nothing.
He paused behind his carriage to retrieve his walking stick, the one with the silver swan head his brother insisted on stealing at every opportunity. He nodded to Dean, who had also spotted the man lurking in view of Kitty’s front window and was ready. His brother Michael was perched at the back of the carriage, as usual, armed to the teeth.
The brothers Winchester had been on the Continent with him as well, and as they preferred riding through the night on temperamental horses even then, they chose the mews instead of the Sins. But they were both trusted and well trained and vicious enough to watch over Kitty for a quarter of an hour.
That was all the time he estimated he would need to fix this particular problem.
He waited for another carriage to pass, using it to hide until he was safely across the street. And then he was on the man in moments, driving him back further into the darkness. One solid, brutal punch to the nose had him reeling back, smashing his head on the brick wall in the process. He grunted, spat blood, and was slow to react. Devil got in another strike to the stomach. A blow glanced his jaw, not close enough for any real damage. Another hit before he had to duck a fist the size of a Christmas goose.
As he was spoiling for a proper fight, it made him smile.
Even the flash of the pistol aimed at him did not make his smile falter. He brought his walking stick down, smashing it over the man’s wrist. There was a crack that could be heard even with the rain falling on them. The pistol hit the ground.
The man’s eyes widened when he recognized Devil, saw the infamously ruthless green eyes. “Devil,” he said. “Ain’t got no beef with you. No trouble.”
“You’re lurking outside the house of my betrothed. So I can assure you, there is, indeed, trouble.” Devil knew what he sounded like: chillingly, icily merciless. He felt worse. He felt unmoored with the fury inside his chest over even the suggestion of danger to Kitty. He pressed the walking stick across the man’s throat until he choked. “Did Portsmouth send you?”
“He’ll kill me.”
“ I’ll kill you,” Devil said. He increased the pressure of the walking stick across his windpipe. “Die today or die tomorrow. Roll the dice.”
The man shivered at whatever he saw in Devil’s face. “I never saw him, but yeah. I get messages and payment through the Blue Lion. That’s all I know, I swear.”
Devil contemplated another threat, decided it wasn’t needed. As he had no intention of leaving Kitty here, Portsmouth could send as many men as he liked.
This one, though…
“Were you at the Golden Griffin tonight? Did you put your hands on her?”
He shook his head, going pale. “No! I never touched her! I’ve been here since morning. Ask the lamplighters.”
“Who, then?”
“There’s three of us meet at the Lion. But we stay on this side of the river. The others I don’t know. Fancy ones, from your part of London.”
“You don’t work for them anymore,” Devil said. “Am I making myself clear?”
The man gulped, nodded.
“I’ll know everything there is to know about you within the hour,” Devil added. “Don’t cross me.”
Another nod, and then a grunt when Devil knocked the out cold. He slid down the brick wall with a satisfying thud.
Devil crossed the street, heedless of the rain and the puddles and everything that was not Kitty and her safety. “Follow him when he wakes up,” he called to Michael, who jumped off his perch. “When you know enough about him, let him see you.”
Michael nodded with a grim, glittering smile. Memories of army encampments, muddy battlefields. Blood. Nothing’s forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.
Devil’s temper was not improved by overhearing Mrs. Bartley’s strident voice, which carried with all the subtlety of a rain of bullets through the open window. Her words were just as bad. Worse. That Kitty had to listen to vitriol daily at her shop and then again in her home where her family ought to be caring for her infuriated… The tired droop of her shoulders through the glass and the way she favored her twisted ankle filled him with incandescent rage. The kind that no one walked away from unscathed. He had already knocked a man out tonight. He could do so much more.
Although Kitty might not thank him for burning this house to ash as punishment.
It was still tempting. Too tempting.
The door was locked, as he’d ordered. He didn’t have the patience to wait for it to be opened or the composure to watch Kitty limp with pain because no one else would answer it.
So he kicked it in.
That did help his temper. Enormously.
He stalked into the house, knowing that his expression was stone and iron, the one even his brother did not try to tease him out of. It was a warning. The only one he was going to give.
Kitty’d aunt shrieked. He speared her with a glare that had once made a grown man wet himself. “Quiet.”
She swallowed thickly. “Lord Birmingham.”
“You do not talk to her that way,” he said, very clearly, with every word like the slice of a sword. She had called Kitty stupid. Useless. Blood should have been pooling at his feet in retribution. There were consequences when someone came for one of his own. “Ever.”
“It’s fine,” Kitty said haltingly. Haltingly. His firecracker .
“It is not fine.” He didn’t take his eyes off Priscilla. “Where’s the baron?”
“He…” She was flustered, unaccustomed to this kind of command. Or the front door hanging off its hinges, letting in the rain. “That is…”
“You wanted me to speak to him,” he said. “Fetch him.”
She hurried away, and Kitty sent him a dry smile. “I’ve never seen her move that fast, even the time a rat got into the carriage.”
“Are you hurt? Did she hurt you?”
She was taken aback. A simple question over her wellbeing bewildered her. The rage sharpened. Her family had a lot to answer for. By his estimation, they should be weeping with gratitude for the care she took of them. He noticed the hole in the wall behind her head, only partially covered by a watercolor sketch of a hedgehog. The illustrious Galahad.
He knew exactly what it looked like when someone punched through a wall with fist or pipe. And why such a someone might do so in the front hall of the house of this particular baron.
“Send your maid to pack your things,” he told her.
She rolled her eyes, even though she was still pale with the kind of fatigue that itched at his bones. The soul-deep weariness that had no business touching her. He wanted to bring her tea again. Why was he obsessed with giving her tea? “I don’t have a maid, Rhys.”
Rhys.
She might not know it yet, but she had just welcomed him into her life in a way that had nothing to do with stolen wagers or pretend betrothals or her sister. In a way he had not realized he needed until he had it. And now he would not give it back.
She had given ground to him, and he would not lose it.
“Get your things,” he said softly. “You’re not staying here.”
“I live here.”
“She’s not staying here.” Devil raised his voice, turning to spear the baron and his sister as they scurried down the hall.
“You can’t just take her,” Kitty’s aunt blustered. “It’s not done.”
“Why not?” Kitty asked quietly. “You tried to do it to Evie.”
“Don’t be so stupid. You—”
“I told you not to speak to her that way.” Devil interrupted coldly. He was through with warnings. “It would be a shame if Society’s doors all closed to you. Every one.”
Priscilla’s mouth worked like a fish. She nudged her brother, but everyone in London knew the baron was a weak man, never mind everyone in this particular house.
“Kitty will be staying with me from now on.”
“But the gossip…”
“I have a chaperone in Mrs. Dimitriou, as well as my brother in residence. I will invite as many guests as make Kitty comfortable. But she’s not staying here with you two for one more night. You’ll have to make your own supper.”
The baron gave a start, as if that was something so very difficult to figure out. “Kitty is a fine girl. She does her duty.”
“Yes, and it’s time you did yours.”
“She—”
“Should anyone ask, you will be enthusiastic in your support of our betrothal. Am I being understood?” Devil paused. “I know exactly what you owe, and to whom.”
The baron blinked, hovering between selfishness and fatherhood. “As to that, Birmingham, perhaps you could talk to that hell on the Strand for me? I only owe a—”
“Father, please.” Kitty closed her eyes with barely concealed mortification. Something else glinted in them when she lifted her lids: hurt, anger, sorrow.
Devil hated it.
“The money you stole from my shop today should be enough to buy food for the week.”
Devil thought he had felt all the variations of anger there were to be felt. If not in the last hour, then certainly in the last decade. Napoleon, the ineptitude of officers in the army who did not care for their own men. His brother dragging himself home with blood in his mouth.
Someone trying to shove Kitty into a carriage. The brittle way she had smiled earlier this evening; the way she held herself as though she were full of needles and knives. Because of her father.
“You stole from her?” Devil asked evenly. So evenly that everyone flinched.
“I…” the baron blustered. “She’s my daughter. She should—”
“You’re right.” Devil cut him off, because if the man said anything else, he might actually murder Kitty’s own father right in front of her. “She’s your daughter.”
“I have every right—”
“For God’s sake, Francis,” Priscilla snapped. “Shut your mouth.”
“Excellent advice,” Devil said. “I suggest you take it. Immediately.” He glanced at Kitty, her damp hair curling around her wide gray eyes. “Evie’s not here,” Devil murmured to her. “You don’t have to protect her from them. Not tonight.”
He saw the moment Kitty realized it, the real moment it dawned on her. Some battles were not worth fighting when you had too many other fronts to protect.
She nodded, once.
“Get your things,” he said again. “Please.”
It was the please that did it.
The ominous commands and power emanating from him might be enough to fire her senses, but it didn’t cloud her mind completely. Taking orders from Rhys set a bad precedent. Anyone could see that.
But a simple please? From a man who was seething with anger on her behalf?
That, she could not resist.
Which was how she found herself back inside his plush carriage with a beaten-up trunk stuffed with her clothing and all of her books. Priorities. She didn’t own that many dresses anyway. The carriage swayed, the lantern light adding a soft glow as they went from crowded streets across the river to the manicured estates of Mayfair.
She was completely out of place.
She rubbed her breastbone, willing away the burning there, as if she had drunk lemon juice. Evie was facing marriage to Lord Portsmouth, so Kitty could certainly face this. She dropped her hand in her lap.
“Good girl,” Devil said as if he knew how she felt. As if he had learned her mannerisms. As if he knew the hot little shiver that bloomed when he said it, despite herself.
“You broke my front door.”
“I did.”
It should not have been as thrilling as it was. The crack and splinter of the frame, a furious Devil dripping rainwater and rage.
And blood.
She probably ought to be scared of him.
Mostly she wanted to bite his incongruously delicate upper lip. His jawline. The swell of muscles on his forearm.
The carriage drew to a halt before she could embarrass herself. Any more than she already had, that was.
“This is probably a bad idea,” she said. “Even I know this sort of thing is not done. My aunt is right, though I will eat your hat before saying that to her.”
“ My hat? Eat your own.” That languid drawl, the spark of something underneath it. Not just something. Everything. “I can take you somewhere else if you prefer. Just don’t ask me to take you back to that house.”
“Why does it bother you so much?” She was genuinely curious. Her family was far from perfect, but they were not the worst in London. They weren’t even the worst on their street.
“You don’t deserve it.”
She thought of Clara and what she had done to her friend. Her smile faltered. “You don’t know me, Devil. Not really.”
He snorted. “Did you commit murder?”
“No.” She paused. He did not look the least bit concerned. “Did you ? Tonight?” she clarified.
“No, more’s the pity.”
“Would it matter if I had?”
“No.” He sounded very sure, very nonchalant about her imaginary violence. “In or out, firecracker?”
She worried at her lower lip, told herself she was being a coward and a fool, and then nodded. “I’m in.” She poked him in the knee when his mouth opened to speak. “If you call me a good girl again, I’m going to kick you someplace you will not like.”
“Vicious.” But when he said it, it sounded like a compliment.
Devil’s townhouse was suitably imposing, clearly the work of several generations’ worth of Birmingham earls. It soared five stories high with gleaming white stone and black ironwork. Unlike the more common terraced houses, Birmingham House was bordered by walkways and gardens behind tall fences. Windows gleamed and glittered, not a single one boarded up by his grandparents to save on taxes. The Golden Griffin had several boarded-up windows, as did most of the buildings on the street.
The marble floor was laid out in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, polished so expertly that her own reflection stared back up at her. She did not need to look at it to know she was woefully underdressed for such a house. A white statue of a Roman lady stood at the bottom of the curved staircase, easily ten feet tall.
Kitty was shown to a bedchamber the size of her entire bookshop by the housekeeper, who did not blink an eye at a spinster moving in so late at night and hobbling on one foot. Until Devil swept Kitty up in his arms again and insisted on carrying her up the stairs.
“I can walk,” she whispered against his chest.
“I like carrying you,” he said simply.
And there was nothing she could think of to say back to that. Because she liked him carrying her too. A lot. Too much.
Devil summoned a doctor, who confirmed her ankle was not sprained, and when he suggested ice and a comfrey wrap, Kitty smirked at Devil smugly. He also confirmed that the cut on Devil’s arm was healed and would not trouble him further, because Kitty refused to present her ankle until Devil presented his arm.
Devil also sent word to Yelena that she should join them as a chaperone. He looked charmingly helpless when he asked Kitty if he should invite anyone else to stay with them in order to safeguard her reputation.
Safeguarding reputations was not exactly what he was known for.
She only shrugged at him just as helplessly. It was not exactly her area of expertise either. She was the daughter of a disgraced minor baron. She was firmly on the shelf. Evie would have known. She’d read all of the etiquette books when she was not devouring volumes on the insects and venomous snakes of Ancient Egypt.
Kitty would rather poke herself in the eye. There were so many other books to read. Decorum made her sleepy.
A slight miscalculation on her part, perhaps.
She limped across the polished floors, dotted with hand-knotted rugs in a rich, dark blue that matched the curtains and the bedspread. Porcelain candlesticks painted with white roses stood on the mantel and on the table by the chair. A bench draped with lace sat next to the bed with another candle and a dish of sugared violets. The ceiling was a mural of the sky swirling with stars, a glowing moon overlooking it all. The whole chamber was like a still, dark winter’s night.
She loved it. It was peaceful. Dark in a way that was more comforting than froth and sunshine.
She still could not sleep.
The idea was laughable. She felt as though she had drunk the equivalent of the Thames in tea and then added a trough of coffee. Devil was just across the hall, doing whatever it was devils did when night fell. He had promised to do lovely, filthy things to her, but that was before the attempted abduction, before he broke down her door, before her family. Before the scramble to find a chaperone, which she still found ridiculous. Not only was she nearly thirty years old, but chaperones had to sleep like everyone else. It was laughably easy to work around them and sneak from bed to bed if one so wished. She would never understand Mayfair.
And she would not have to.
She was not really marrying Devil.
That was the entire point of not ruining her. So he would not be forced to marry her. She did not blame him. And so she would not fight the occult rules of the ton .
As if staying even one hour under the Devil’s roof was not enough to thoroughly ruin her.
In fact, she looked forward to it. If nothing else, she would have delicious memories that were just for her. It would have to be enough when Evie was safe and settled and Kitty went back to being a spinster who ducked rotting fruit professionally.
And anyway, she had more pressing problems, surely. Such as Lady Carolie. Or at least Agnes. Was it really only this morning that she had stolen a book from Lord Tadworth?
When it all threatened to overwhelm her, she left her rooms in favor of lurking about the house. A walk would do her good. It would siphon off some of the jagged energy swimming under her skin. Her ankle already felt much better. She was barely hobbling.
She headed for the library, because she always headed for the library.
It did not disappoint: it was filled with books and marble busts of Roman emperors. It smelled like wood smoke and roses and the sweet vanilla scent of paper.
And it was presided over by its king.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Devil said quietly from the shadows of a leather armchair. The candle burning at his elbow cast him into suitable relief, like a carved Hades. He wore a black dressing gown. His damp hair curled, slightly too long and entirely perfect. She wanted to feel it between her fingers.
“Devil,” she said uselessly. She could not call him Rhys, not when he was so thoroughly Devil , from the shadows to the glint of his otherworldly eyes. She could easily imagine his ruling over hell. Or as a faery king. Didn’t some people consider the fairy folk to be just fallen angels under a different name?
“I thought you’d end up here eventually.”
“I can’t sleep,” she admitted.
“Is the chamber not to your liking?”
She sent him a dry look. There was no point in answering such an absurd question.
“Then you should go to bed,” he warned in a silky, whiskey-rough voice that made her swallow.
“Why?”
“Because I very much want to keep my promise to you.”