“Because it is dangerous,” he said quietly, sending a shiver of belief through her. “Because the rookeries are no place for pretty girls with a breathless anticipation of adventure.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I am.”

“No?”

“No.”

He waited for a long moment, and then said, “I think it is exactly what you are, Felicity Faircloth, in your pretty frock with your pretty hair high up on your pretty head, in your pretty world where nothing ever goes wrong.”

The words grated. “That’s not what I’m like. Things go wrong.”

He tutted. “Ah, yes. I forgot. Your brother made a bad investment. Your father, too. Your family’s poor enough to fear social exile. But here’s the rub, Felicity Faircloth—your family will never be poor enough to fear poverty. They’ll never wonder when their next meal will come. They’ll never fear for the roof over their heads.”

She turned her head then, almost looking at him, hearing the hint of truth in his words; he knew what that poverty was.

He continued before she could speak. “And you—” His voice grew lower. Darker. Thickly accented. “Silly gel . . . you come into Covent Garden like the fucking sun, thinkin’ you can take a walk wiv us and still stay safe.”

She did look at him then, cursing the shadows at his eyes, which made him a different man. A more frightening one. But she wasn’t frightened. If she were honest, the low voice and the dark profanity made her feel something very different than frightened. She squared her shoulders and replied, “I am safe.”

“You’re nothing close to safe.”

She might not know this place—she might never have known a life like the ones lived here—but she knew what it was to want beyond what she could have. And she knew that, right now, she had it in her reach—even if it was just for the night. Defiance flared and she lifted her chin. “Then we’d best get inside, don’t you think?”

For a moment, she thought he might turn her away. Stuff her into a hack and send her home, just as he’d done before. But instead, after a long stretch of silence, he reached behind her and opened the enormous door with virtually no effort, his hand coming to rest on her waist to guide her into the cavernous room beyond. It was best he did keep his hand there, as she came up short in the doorway, eyes wide and disbelieving.

She’d never seen anything like it.

What, from the outside, seemed like a large building, from the inside seemed to be the size of St. James’s Park. Around the outer edges of the single, massive room were racks of barrels and boxes stacked six or seven high. Inlaid in the ceiling at the outer edge of the racks were huge iron hooks, each attached to long, steel beams.

It was magnificent. She looked to Devil, who was watching her, more carefully than she should have liked. “It’s yours?”

Pride lit in his eyes, and something tightened in her chest. “It is.”

“It’s magnificent.”

“It is.”

“How long did it take you to build it?”

And like that, the pride was gone—extinguished. Replaced with something darker. “Twenty years.” She shook her head. Twenty years would make him a child. It wasn’t possible. And yet . . . she heard the truth in the words.

“How?”

He shook his head. That was all she would get from the Devil on that front.

She changed tack—moved back to safe ground. “What are the hooks for?”

He followed her gaze. “Cargo,” he said, simply.

As she watched, a man approached one of the hooks and swung a rope over it, pulling it toward the ground as two other men lifted a rope-wrapped crate up onto the hook. Once secured, they pushed it through the room with what looked like no effort at all. At the other end of the room, the crate was removed and placed inside one of the five wagons that stood closest to Felicity, each tethered to six strong horses. Surrounding them were dozens of men, some carrying bales of hay to the open ends of each wagon, others checking the hitches for the horses, and still more hurrying back and forth from the back end of the warehouse—which was too dark to see—holding great metal hooks carrying massive blocks of—

“It is ice,” she said.

“I said as much,” Devil replied.

“For what? Lemon treats? Raspberry?”

He smirked. “Do you like sweets, Felicity Faircloth?”

She blushed at the question, though she couldn’t for the life of her say why. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Mmm.”

The low murmur rumbled through her, and she cleared her throat. “Is it all ice?”

“Does it appear that there is anything but ice in those wagons?”

She shook her head. “Appearances are not reality.”

“Lord knows that’s true, Felicity Faircloth, plain, unassuming, uninteresting wallflower spinster lockpick.” He paused. “What do your unfortunate, terrible friends think of your hobby?”

She blushed. “They don’t know about it.”

“And your family?”

She looked away, heat and frustration flaring. “They . . .” She paused, thinking twice about the answer. “They don’t like it.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what you were going to say. Tell me the first bit. The true bit.”

She met his eyes, scowling. “They are ashamed of it.”

“They shouldn’t be,” he said simply. Honestly. “They should be bloody proud of it.”

She raised her brows. “Of my criminal tendencies?”

“Well, you won’t find criticism of criminal tendencies here, love. But no. They should be proud of it because you’ve got the future in your hands every time you hold a hairpin.”

She stopped breathing at that, her heart pounding at the calm assessment of her wild, wicked skill. He was the first person who had ever, ever understood. Not knowing how to respond, she changed the subject. “What else is in the wagons?”

“Hay,” he said. “It insulates the ice at the back, near the door openings.”

“Oi! Dev!”

Devil’s attention snapped to the growl from the darkness. “What is it?”

“Tear yerself from the girl and ’ave a look a’ the manifests.”

He cleared his throat at the impertinent question and turned to Felicity. “You. Stay here. Don’t leave. Or commit any crimes.”

She raised a brow. “I shall leave all crime committing to you lot.”

His lips pressed into a flat line and he crossed into the darkness, leaving Felicity alone. Alone to investigate.

Ordinarily, if this were, say, a ballroom or a walk in Hyde Park, Felicity would have been too afraid to approach a location so teeming with men. Aside from pure good sense—men were too often more dangerous than they weren’t—Felicity’s interactions with the opposite sex rarely ended in anything that was not an insult. Either they rebuked her presence or they felt entitled to it, and neither left a woman interested in spending time with a man.

But somehow, now, she’d been made safe among them. And it wasn’t simply that Devil had wrapped her in the mantle of his protection; it was also that the men assembled didn’t seem to notice her. Or, if they did, they didn’t seem to care that she was a woman. Her skirts weren’t interesting. They weren’t judging the condition of her hair or the cleanliness of the gloves she was not wearing.

They were working, and she was there, and neither thing impacted the other, and it was unexpected and glorious. And full of opportunity.

She headed for the wagons, larger than most, and made not of the wood and canvas that was so commonly found on London streets, but of metal—great slabs of what looked to be flattened steel. She approached the nearest conveyance, reaching up to touch it, rapping at it to hear the sound of the full cargo beyond.

“Curious?”

Felicity whirled to face a tall man behind her. No, not a man. A woman, incredibly tall—possibly taller than Devil—and whipcord lean, lean enough to be mistaken for a man as she was, dressed in men’s shirt and trousers, and tall black boots that only served to elongate her, so that it seemed as though she could reach her arms over her head and touch the clouds themselves. But even without the height, Felicity would have been fascinated by this woman—by her easy stance and her obvious comfort. By the way she seemed to stand in the dimly lit warehouse and claim it as hers. She did not need to pick a lock to gain access . . . she possessed the key.

What must it be like to be a woman such as this, head now tilted to one side, staring down at Felicity. “You can look, if you like,” the woman said, one hand waving toward the back of the wagon, her voice carrying a strange, soft accent that Felicity could not place. “Devil brought you here, so he must trust you.”

Felicity wondered at the words, at the certainty that Devil would do nothing to harm this place or the people who worked within it, and something flared in her—something startlingly akin to guilt. “I don’t think he does trust me,” she replied, unable to keep herself from looking in the direction of the woman’s wave, wanting nothing more than to follow it and look inside this great steel wagon. “I brought myself here.”

A smile played at the other woman’s lips. “I promise you, if Devil didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be here.”

Felicity took the words at their face, and moved toward the open back of the wagon, her fingers trailing along the steel, which grew colder as she reached her destination.