The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(34)

And just like that . . . his fury at Cleopatra Killoran and her rotted family surged to life. God rot them all.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and he glanced up as Ryker and Penelope, baby in arms, entered the breakfast room. Instead of making for the well-stocked buffet, they claimed their respective spots and stared pointedly back at him.

He frowned.

It was his loquacious sister-in-law who broke the quiet. “We have to bring her back.” She stared pointedly at Adair. “You have to bring her back,” she amended.

Him? After nearly taking her on his desk and then following that effrontery with a pistol pointed at her chest, he was the last person she’d care to receive an escort from. “Killoran’s sister would rather see me in hell,” he said with more confidence than anything he’d felt since the bold spitfire had entered this household.

“With good reason,” Penelope agreed. “And that is for all of us. We’ve been nothing but accusatory since the club burned down.”

Since they burned his hell down. That reminder of all he’d lost rekindled the hatred he’d long carried for the Killoran gang. It was familiar and safe. Far safer than the burning longing to know the taste of her mouth—he growled. “Let it be, Penelope.”

His sister-in-law set her jaw at a pugnacious angle. “She’s coming back.”

Adair groaned and cast a hopeful look at his brother. Ryker met his gaze with a stony determination. So, there would be no help there. They were determined to bring Cleopatra Killoran back. The tart-mouthed hellion with too-full lips and a skillfully dangerous ability to wield her limbs like weapons. “No,” he said curtly, closing his folder.

“It is the right thing to do,” Ryker said somberly, weighing in at last.

“It is not going to work.” Adair set the leather folio aside. “The girl . . .”

I’m not a girl . . .

Nor did she feel at all girl-like when you ran your hands over her lithe frame. He choked on his swallow. Lusting after a Killoran. What in blazes had become of him? “The young woman left because she had the sense enough to know that. Whether or not she was going to hurt Paisley—”

“She wasn’t.”

“You’re certain of that?” Adair paused to look at his sister-in-law. “Because you were far less so last night, Penelope.”

“Yes.” She flattened her mouth. “But I am now.”

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “It doesn’t matter either way. There is far too much mistrust between our families for this arrangement to ever work.” They’d been foolish to believe it could ever . . . even if it was to honor an agreement made.

“Regardless,” Ryker said, motioning over a servant. A young footman instantly sprang forward with a cup of coffee. What had his brother become? A man comfortable calling over servants like a titled lord born to the station . . . and conceding a point to a Killoran? “It wasn’t our place to break the terms of the contract.” There was a resolute edge that hinted that Ryker’s decision had been made.

He, however, had never been afraid to go toe-to-toe with anyone . . . including his brother. “She broke the terms when she left,” Adair insisted.

“She was wronged,” Penelope said tersely. Worry clouded her eyes. “We wronged her. And we need to make it right.”

Adair launched a full-out protest, with Penelope raising her voice over his.

Ryker held a silencing hand up. “Enough.” That gravelly, two-syllable utterance cut across the din. “The girl made the decision to leave—”

“Because—”

“Because of our . . . inhospitality,” Ryker said over his wife’s interruption. She stared angrily back. “We cannot force her to return if she doesn’t wish to be here. We can, however, make our apologies and extend an olive branch.”

Adair choked on his coffee. He sputtered as tears filled his eyes. A branch extended to a Killoran. The world had been flipped upside down, indeed.

“It is settled, Adair,” his brother said quietly. “We’ll leave now.” Shoving back his chair, Ryker came to his feet.

“Bring her back, Ryker,” his wife called out.

With all the enthusiasm of being marched to Diggory’s to account for a bumbled theft, Adair stood and followed reluctantly behind his brother.

“Adair?”

He glanced back to his sister-in-law.

She gave him a stern look. “Be nice to her.”

With a sigh, he inclined his head, and then he marched after Ryker. What his sister-in-law failed to realize in her innocence was that simply being nice would never erase the resentment. That the anger between their family and the Killorans was ingrained into the fabric of who they were.

A short while later, Ryker’s carriage rumbled along the noisy, dirty, familiar streets of East London. Having long been a man unwilling or unable to share many words—even with his siblings—Ryker stared forward, as silent as he’d been before his marriage to Penelope.

Adair took advantage of the quiet. Staring out the crystal window, he took in the passing cobblestones. Unlike the clean, even ones of Mayfair, these roads were covered in grime and dirt. They were the same streets that as a boy he’d thieved upon and raced along, in a bid to escape constables and Diggory or his men’s punishing fists. And for the danger that had, and would always, lurk here, there was also a familiarity that calmed him.