The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(53)

Their eyes collided.

Of course she’d be at the highest point, that slightly sloped portion alongside the chimney. And the damned organ in his chest resumed a wild hammering rhythm as he was filled with something he’d never believed he could feel for a Killoran—fear. He tried to make his tongue move to form words.

“You climb roofs,” she said.

She’d gone missing and risked breaking her damned, beautifully long neck, and that is what she’d say? He counted to ten, and when he still wanted to shout down the bloody slats they now occupied, he counted to another ten.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she asked, a softness in her eyes as she stared out across the streets of Mayfair. That tenderness killed the stinging diatribe he’d intended to unleash upon her ears.

Adair liked her this way. Real and open and . . . honest. He turned out, seeing what she saw.

“I always loved it up here,” she went on in wistful tones.

He clasped his hands behind him. “I never saw anything past what sent me up here,” he said quietly. To steal, to escape capture, there’d never been any beauty or peace in those actions.

Cleopatra stood, and he took a quick step toward her, but she’d already hiked her skirts up and leapt from her perch. “I disagree.”

“As you are wont to do,” he drawled with a wink to dull the seriousness of that charge.

“When you’re up here, no one can reach you. No one, unless they climb after you themselves, can come after you and force you down or hurt—”

Hurt you. His insides spasmed. She’d lived her entire life with Diggory, whereas Adair had always believed that death was preferable to serving that dark Devil.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Up here, a person is free. You’re in control. There’s no angry shopkeepers or fast-moving carriages or constables about. There’s just you”—Cleopatra tipped her head back toward the dark night sky—“and the stars and moon.”

His breath lodged in his chest, and with Cleopatra distracted, he took in the sight of her. The diamonds in her tiara shimmered with a light to match the one in her eyes. Her hair hung in loose waves about her narrow shoulders, and God help him, in the madness of this stolen interlude, he was completely and thoroughly bewitched by her. The need to brush those strands back and expose the delicate length of her neck was like a physical hungering. “I never noticed before,” he said quietly. Her. I never noticed her outside her name and my own hatred for her family.

“A shame not to,” she said with her usual matter-of-fact admonishment, bringing him to. She glanced over suddenly, and he was grateful for the cover of darkness that hid his blush.

By God, blushing. What in hell had happened to him?

She eyed him peculiarly, and to stave off any questions about his earlier study of her, he jerked his chin. “There aren’t many stars in London.” He chuckled. “As a boy, I didn’t even believe we had a moon.”

“But there’s the wonder in it.” With her youthful exuberance, she showed glimpses of the young woman she might have been had she been born to a fancy lord and lady. She slid her gloved palm into his and tugged him down until they lay on their backs, so close their shoulders met. “Look.”

“It’s a night sky,” he said, angling his head to see her.

Cleopatra pointed a finger overhead. “I said, look.”

He grinned. She’d the ability to lead and command better suited to the head of the King’s Army. “What am I looking for?”

“There,” she murmured, pointing her white-gloved fingertip to a grayish-white cloud moving across the sky. “One learns to follow the clouds.” They shifted, revealing a handful of lone stars, twinkling overhead. A moment later, another drifted, concealing those flecks of light. “It was always like opening a gift,” she said softly, letting her arm fall to her side. Her fingers covered his, and out of the corner of his eye, he looked at their connected digits. “Far more special than if they’d always been there,” she went on, seemingly unaffected.

“Hmm,” he murmured, reexamining the night sky. “I never thought about it that way.” Just as he’d never considered Cleopatra to be anything different from who or what she was.

“If I stared up at the sky long enough, I forgot it all.” She stretched her palms up overhead. “This got me through those darkest days.”

They’d all had their dark days. Every person born to the streets was indelibly marked by the struggle of it. Adair, Calum, Niall, Ryker, and Helena had all been tortured by Diggory in their own ways. What suffering had belonged to this woman? Suddenly, he who’d always hated her for her connection to that man wanted to remain thinking of her as one who’d not known cruelty and suffering at his hands.

“He hurt you,” he forced himself to say into the nighttime quiet. That truth redefined the whole way he’d allowed himself to look at her and her family.

With her elbow, she nudged him lightly in the side. “Did you think you were the only one to know hurt at his hands?”

He wasn’t fooled by the lightness in her husky voice. As one who’d become a master of schooling his own emotions and feelings, he recognized that skill all too easily in another. He’d painted her as one of them . . . when in truth, Cleopatra had been more like Adair and his siblings than the monster Diggory.