The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(40)

She glanced up.

Adair remained with his hooded gaze locked on her leg. Horror mingled with shock, and the bald emotions sent heat slapping at her cheeks. “Oi didn’t mean ta offend your delicate sensibilities,” she snarled. It didn’t matter that he’d been repelled by her too-slender limbs. Like chicken bones made to be snapped, Diggory had often taunted, and threatened.

“I was wrong.”

At that abrupt shift, she furrowed her brow in befuddlement.

“You attempted to . . .” He grimaced. “You did tell me about Ryker’s nursemaid, and I doubted you.” He lowered his voice. “At the expense of my niece’s safety,” he said solemnly, more to himself.

It was a familiar sentiment to those in the streets, an emotion greater known and experienced than love, warmth, or affection—guilt.

“Oi’m a Killoran,” she said gruffly, in a concession meant to assuage some of that sentiment. It shouldn’t matter what Adair Thorne’s opinion of her was—and yet it did.

He nodded once. “But our families also reached a truce. The Blacks will give one of Killoran’s sisters one Season, and then the terms are met.” How coolly unaffected he was. As he should be when speaking of the hated arrangement she’d gotten this family to agree to. “Listen, Cleopatra. We don’t like one another.”

Yet, nor did she hate him. She understood his way of life, and that made him . . . comfortable.

“Nor will our families ever be friendly or friends. But when deals are made, my family is not one to renege on the conditions.”

This is why he’d not only come, but handed her back her knife. To strike a new accord. Not one of friendship or peace between them, but rather to meet the terms of the concession she’d gotten them to agree to. “Ya asking me to come back with ya?” she taunted, anyway.

Had she not been studying him as close as she was, she’d have failed to see the muscle jumping at the corner of his eye.

She resisted the urge to wrinkle her nose. Where her own brother had been given to displays of temper too many times, and emotion . . . Adair remained remarkably in control, and damned if she did not find herself appreciating him for it. “I want my weapons back.”

“I just gave—”

“All of them,” she interrupted.

He was already shaking his head. “I’m not allowing a bag of arms inside the house where Black’s wife and child sleep.”

She steeled her jaw. Because for his earlier apologies and concessions, he still didn’t trust her.

“Because your weapons could find themselves in the hands of those who might have less honorable intentions.”

Cleopatra started. How had he followed the unspoken path her thoughts had taken? Quickly masking her features, she met his gaze. “You don’t trust the people on your staff?”

Another muscle leapt at his eye. “I made the mistake of trusting implicitly once. I’ll not do it again.”

Her intrigue piqued at not only Adair revealing that weakness but with questions about the man or woman who’d betrayed him and his family. Slowly nodding, she lifted her skirts and placed her dagger in its proper sheath along the inside of her calf. Feeling Adair’s piercing stare on her every movement, she snapped the fabric back into place and straightened. “Who was it?” she asked, curiosity pulling the question from her.

Adair swiftly lifted his gaze back to her face. “Do not mistake my honoring the terms of our peace for an offer of friendship,” he said tightly.

That curt dismissal shattered the seeming accord they’d struck. “Of course,” she said tersely. She forced an icy grin. “We both know anything but hatred between our families”—us—“is an impossibility.” And with the sting of shame sharp, she stalked off to make her goodbyes once more to her family, before she rejoined the frosty Adair Thorne and his family.





Chapter 11

First, he’d kissed her.

Now he’d been caught eyeing the hellion’s leg.

Twice, if he was being honest with at least himself. There had been the instance she’d entered Ryker’s household, that he’d put his hands upon her lithe frame and longed to explore her.

Living on the streets for most of his life and then owning a hell that offered prostitution, Adair had come upon whores being taken against a wall or fondled inside his club.

None of those flagrant shows, however, had borne even a hint of eroticism compared to the sight of Cleopatra lifting her skirts and working her long fingers down her calves and inside her boots. Dark boots. Clever ones—made of leather, higher than fashion dictated, and gleaming as they did—that had him conjuring wicked musings of the lithe miss in nothing but those boots and—

He groaned, grateful for the loud banging that drowned out that pathetic sound.

What’s worse was that afterward, in a bid to erect the safe wall between him and the enticing Killoran, he’d rejected an offer of friendship she’d never even extended. In that, he’d turned himself into what he’d always hated—a damned bully.

For despite the fire flashing in her eyes, there had been no doubt that Cleopatra had been hurt by his brusque dismissal. Such a fact wouldn’t have bothered him a week ago. But in a handful of days, she’d ceased to be the amorphous hellion who called Killoran kin. She’d proven herself to be a fearless, spirited woman who’d given him valuable advice regarding the renovations to his club, and who’d looked after Ryker’s daughter.