The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(27)

“I . . . I don’t know,” she finally said, revealing an unanticipated hesitation. “My brother would certainly say so.”

“I don’t care what Killoran thinks,” he said bluntly. “I’m not asking his opinion. I’m asking yours.” A marvel, in and of itself. He must be going mad. There was nothing else for it.

She gave her head a frenetic shake. “I can’t answer that.” She looked about, and then she settled her stare upon his ledgers. “Not without knowing your profits.”

So, she was of a similar mind frame as Ryker, Calum, and Niall, that some profit could be sacrificed for philanthropic good. Who would have ever expected it of this woman?

“It’s enough I’ve shown you my plans.” A far too dangerous allowance he’d made. “I’ve no intention of discussing my profits—”

“Or lack thereof,” she mumbled.

“—with you,” he said loudly over her tart reply.

“I’m not interested in your books, Adair.” By God, she was fearless. “What your numbers are or are not hardly indicate how successful your club is or will be. Your plans, however, reveal more than enough about the vitality of the Hell and Sin.”

His hackles went up. “You’d challenge the might of my club,” he said on a silken whisper, facing her squarely so that she had to crane her head all the way back to meet his gaze. “Our hell is different than yours.” The Hell and Sin and Devil’s Den had begun the same, but ultimately, they’d evolved, becoming places that powerful peers visited and lost fortunes at. The Devil’s Den, however, had surpassed them in growth through its offering of prostitution.

“No truer words were ever spoken than those,” she said with her usual arrogance. “Do you know what your problem is, Adair?”

“That your brother burned my club to a pile of ashes?” he retorted, longing for a fight that would restore them to their proper places as hated rivals.

To the lady’s credit, she didn’t rise to that bait. “Your problem is that you and your family don’t know what type of club you want to be.” She turned up one hand, and with their bodies positioned as close as they were, that action brought her palm brushing against his chest. His pulse leapt at the unwitting touch. “Is it a fancy place like White’s and Brooke’s where only fancy lords come to play?” Cleopatra lifted her other palm, the one marked with a D. “Or do you want to be precisely what you are . . . men of the streets who offer those vices we know about to lords who wanted a taste.”

By nothing more than the sheer nature of enmity that had forever existed between their gangs, he wanted to throw counter-protestations in her face . . . to point out that they were nothing alike—in any way. In this, however, Cleopatra Killoran had surely spoken the truest words to ever emerge from her plump red lips. “Our clientele is not your clientele,” he said finally. That decision they’d undertaken long ago when they’d first purchased the Hell and Sin, before his brothers had married ladies of the ton.

“We know precisely what we are and the clients we serve. You are the ones who don’t.” She touched her gaze on the fine furnishings belonging to Ryker and Penelope. “The Devil’s Den caters to men who come to sin and are comfortable in doing so. You”—she gesticulated wildly as she spoke—“don’t know if you want to cater to the nobs or be part of the streets.”

Her words flummoxed him. Given her next diatribe, with Cleopatra’s quickness and rapier tongue, he wouldn’t ever want to be caught in a knife battle with this one.

“You design your fancy club . . . in St. Giles.” With irreverent fingers, she scooped up the stack of plans. “If the lords want a White’s, they’ll go to White’s. They want Brooke’s, they’ll go there. That’s not what the Hell and Sin is, and it isn’t what the Devil’s Den is, either. The names alone say as much. If you’re looking to give them a fancy club, then you’d be better off designing an altogether different plan for a different club, in an altogether different part of London.”

Damned if the young woman’s logic didn’t make sense, too.

“Not that I believe this is necessarily the club you’ve got in mind for your patrons,” she said, casually waving that sheet. “But even if it’s got a hint of the layout here, you’re in trouble of your own making, Thorne.” She slapped the page down decisively.

His mouth fell open, and he quickly forced it closed. By God, she’d realized that. “Are you always this astute, Cleopatra?”

She hung her head slightly, that telling gesture a mark of Diggory’s response to faulty missteps. “Not astute enough if I failed to realize you were in the room I’d entered.”

For the first time, he wondered what her life had been like as one of Diggory’s whelps. He’d not considered . . . until now—until seeing that D upon her hand and her dropped shoulders—that she also might have known suffering.

His gut clenched. Or she could be as deceptive as the man who’d become Diggory’s second-in-command—a man so much like him that he’d inherited all as though he were a firstborn son.

Don’t be fooled by her downcast appearance and seeming innocence. The fact he’d caught her snooping in this room, and just fielded too many questions from her, was proof that he’d be wise to watch her far more closely than he had this day.