Page 59 of A Deal with the Devil

Crushed under the dainty foot belonging to a dainty woman with the vocabulary of a sailor and the arm of a cricket player.

When Kitty hesitated over a ring featuring a flower with sapphire petals and a pearl center, he pounced. “This is the one.”

She blinked.

“Isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Thank you.”

“We’ll take a pair of sapphire earrings to match as well,” he said to the clerk. “Have those sent to me when they’re ready.”

“Of course, your lordship.”

Kitty widened her eyes at him. He pretended not to know what she meant.

He did not pretend to not be enjoying himself immensely.

Funny that he was known for orchestrating the kind of entertainments that thrilled even bored, jaded aristocrats, from gaming hells to soirees at Vauxhall Garden to week-long house parties. Debutantes, demimonde, dukes to dairy maids. He had seen it all. None of it caught his attention. Not the way Kitty Caldecott did.

“I really don’t need earrings,” she said.

“And a necklace as well,” he decided. “Something striking. Diamonds with sapphires. Impress me.”

Kitty swallowed back a comment. She had clearly realized that every time she protested, he would add something more extravagant. More expensive. She deserved the very best. Sapphires, diamonds. Books would be better, of that he had no doubt, but they would not help protect her. They would not make the statement that needed to be made. “What about a tiara?”

“Absolutely not,” she snorted, forgetting her awkwardness. “Exactly which invitations do you think I am extended that require me to have a diamond tiara?”

Anger tightened in his chest. Anger at the people who dared throw rotten fruit at her door and insults at her person. Never again. She would be invited to the damn palace if she wanted to be.

He knew without asking that she did not want to be.

“A tiara too,” he told the clerk as he ushered her outside before she could protest. “And a gold inkwell, also with sapphires. Etched with a griffin.”

She paused, tempted.

“We do not make inkwells, your lordship,” the clerk said apologetically.

“You do now.” Devil let the door shut behind him, confident in his ability to get what he wanted.

“It’s too much,” Kitty insisted as they stepped onto the pavement, crowded with shoppers and footmen and maids running back from market. The sun picked out the amber threads in her hair and turned them molten. He wanted to toss all of her hairpins into the street.

“You can sell the lot, if you wish,” he told her. “And buy your sister a hundred more hedgehogs. Or settle a dowry on her. Buy her a house.”

“I could? I mean, I couldn’t.”

He had her. She might be uncomfortable accepting luxury for herself, but she would do anything for her sister. She took care of Evie, obviously. Enough to blackmail Devil and go up against Portsmouth. She took care of her useless father. Her acidic aunt.

But who took care of her?

And why did that bother him so much? As did the thought that she still had not had her breakfast. They would stop at a bakery on their way to the Golden Griffin. Ten bakeries.

He was too busy deciding how many loaves of sugared bread she would let him buy her that it was only long experience that registered a shout from nearby and MacLeod suddenly running toward them from the opposite direction. Devil reacted without conscious thought, purely on habit and instinct.

Danger.

It took on a sharper edge when Kitty was in the vicinity.

Unacceptable.