Page 17 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Felicity woke with the same damned headache burning behind her eyes and she muffled a groan against a hard shoulder as the pain of it penetrated the shroud of sleep that hung heavily over her still. Like fighting through cotton batting for consciousness, she—

A hard shoulder.

“Get off of me, you oaf,” she slurred as she wedged a hand between her cheek and Ian’s shoulder and shoved.

“Get off of you?” he echoed in faint tones of wry amusement. “Look where you are. You put yourself in this position.”

Her arms didn’t want to function properly, but she managed to lock her elbows and wrest herself up upon the flats of her palms, blinking in the bright new dawn. He was right, blast him—somehow, she’d migrated across the vast expanse of the bed, encroaching upon his territory so thoroughly that she was surprised he’d not fallen off the edge.

Felicity slid back down, planting her face upon one of the pillows scattered across the head of the bed, too tired still even to roll back across the bed to her own side. “It’s too damned bright in here,” she said.

“It’s not, really. I suspect your headache of evening last was merely the first symptom of illness. Butler complained of one, too.” He shifted beside her, and she heard him grapple for something. The bell pull?

Felicity groaned. “I’ve not been ill in years,” she said. “And why are you still here?” He never was when she woke. He never was when she fell asleep. If not for the disturbed counterpane in the morning and the impression of his head upon his pillow, she’d have thought he never entered this room at all.

“Because you were lying upon me, and I thought it would be ill-advised to wake you. Besides,” he said, “you were shivering like a leaf in a high wind for a while, there. Chills, I suppose. You must have been trying to get warm.”

“Well, it worked a little too well,” she muttered into the pillow. Now her nightgown clung to her back atop a layer of sweat. The counterpane, which had fallen to her hips, felt too constricting. Even the air in the room seemed stifling.

“Did it?” Ian nudged his fingers between her forehead and the fluff of the pillow. “Well. You won’t be going to the school today.”

“What? You can’t simply decree—”

“Felicity, you’ve got a fever. And if this runs its course in like fashion to the staff who’ve been afflicted, if you’re not already miserable, you soon will be.” There was the minute shifting of the mattress as Ian slid off the bed at last, and Felicity breathed a sigh of relief that the heat of his body was gone. “Be sensible. You might already have unintentionally spread this sickness to the school, if your headache yesterday was the first of your symptoms. Do you want to do it deliberately?”

Felicity pressed her face deeper into the plush pillow and made a strangled sound.

“You don’t have to like it, but you know I’m right.” There was the pad of bare feet across the floor, the rustle of fabric. A moment later, there was a soft scratch at the door, followed by the muted sound of voices. At last he padded back toward the bed. “Mary is bringing up some breakfast and willow bark tea for your head,” he said.

Felicity managed to roll herself to her back at last, and her fingers fisted in the counterpane as she settled toward the center of the bed. “The school is my responsibility. I can’t manage it from bed.”

“You’ve got a capable—and newly expanded—staff,” he said as he ran his fingers through the sleep-ruffled tousle of his hair and cinched the belt of his burgundy banyan robe tighter about his waist. “And only two students in residence at the moment, due to the holiday, correct? They’ll manage without you for a few days.”

But they couldn’t manage everything. “No, they can’t,” she said on a whine that sounded terribly petulant. “One of the girls—Dorothea—has been caught in possession of a note from a local boy. I have to sort it out before anything more untoward can come from it.”

“A note? How did she come into possession of such a note?”

“I’ve no idea. But even a note could prove damaging to her reputation. If it should progress further—”

“Will it?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated. Admitted, “I’ve caught her out of bed when she oughtn’t to be a time or two. I’m a light sleeper.”

Ian snorted. “No, you’re not. You sleep like the dead.”

In a bed that didn’t play havoc upon her spine and her neck, perhaps. Felicity ground her teeth together and gritted out between them, “Be that as it may, I have got a responsibility to her and to all the girls in my care to see that they come to no harm, even through their own folly.” She knew well enough how simple a thing it was to fall into a love affair. How devastating they were when they ended. How far the consequences of them could stretch into the future. “God willing, at least I will save Dorothea from a bad marriage.”

For just an instant, she would have sworn he appeared almost hurt by the implication that she had not managed to save herself from such a marriage. But the expression was fleeting, and erased so entirely that she found herself wondering if it had ever been there at all, or if it had merely been an invention of her feverish brain—finding the hurt there that she had meant to inflict whether or not it had ever existed at all.

“This boy who has been writing to Dorothea,” he said. “What is his name?”

Felicity huffed out a sigh, casting back through her memory. “Eli?” she ventured. “No. not Eli. Elijah? Blast—that’s not it, either.” She waved her hand in the direction of the chair before the fire. “The note is in the pocket of my coat.”

Ian stalked toward the chair, and crammed his hand into the pocket of her coat, withdrawing first the paper wrapping of last evening’s beef pasty and then the tightly-folded letter. Untucking the clever pleats the writer had used to keep the note tightly secured, Ian unfolded the pages contained therein and began to read.

One brow rose in a sardonic arch. “My dearest darling Dorothea. My heart trembles with longing for the tender touch of your hand,” he read.

Felicity grimaced.

Ian continued, “My soul longs to dance with yours in a—oh, for Christ’s sake. What does that even mean?”

“How should I know? I didn’t write it.” Truth be told, the tedious, melodramatic prose stretched across three full pages, and Felicity had largely skimmed it. “I believe he plagiarizes Byron on the second page,” she added.

“Byron and Wordsworth,” Ian said. “A man of taste, if not of any particular conscience. Ah—there it is. Elias Marchant.” He issued a short, sharp sigh as he tucked the note into the pocket of his banyan. “I’ll handle him.”

“It’s my responsibility—”

“I know it is,” he interjected. “But I know this boy. Or, rather, I know his father. He’s the owner of the bookshop on North Street, and he’s the worst sort of misogynist. While he’ll gladly take your money, he won’t thank you for taking his son to task. Nor is he likely to heed a word you say.” Ian heaved a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingertips. “Elias is twenty, or thereabouts, and still beholden to his father for his living. Your best bet would be to appeal to his father for assistance, have the man hold the threat of disownment over his head.”

“And he’s unlikely to render such assistance to me?” Felicity inquired sulkily.

“To a woman? Any woman?” Ian snorted. “Not damned likely. Let me handle him,” he said, and this time it had the tone of a request for her permission rather than a demand. “I’ve been champing at the bit for an opportunity to rake him over the coals.”

Felicity blinked, nonplussed. “Why?”

“Because he’s one of the merchants who has been fleecing your school. For a few years now, as far as I can tell. Probably he thought no one would notice.”

But Ian had noticed. Noticed—and now bore a grudge against the man for it. On her behalf? “What will you say to him?” she asked.

“What I usually say to people who have offended me,” he said. “That a man of any intelligence would not wish to make an enemy of me. That if he fails to keep his son away from Dorothea, that is precisely what I will become. And I will ruin him.”

“Can you…can you truly do that?”

“I can do that and worse. It would be a matter of a few signatures to wrest his shop from him, and a few words to the right people to ensure that no other becomes available to him. He’ll be ruined for business in Brighton.”

It might have been only a remnant leftover from her earlier chills, but the bite of frost in Ian’s voice sent a shiver sliding down Felicity’s spine and lifted the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. She had married a dangerous man. She supposed she had known it before now, in an abstract sort of way. He was beyond wealthy, and that conferred a great deal of power. But she suspected it hadn’t been only financial ruin of which he had been speaking.

The flex of his hands at his sides suggested a sort of violence she’d thought he’d left years in the past, back in those days when he’d boxed some evenings for a little extra ready coin. And he would wield it on her behalf—only because Mr. Marchant the elder had cheated her school, and by extension, her.

In the moment, something sad and very nearly wistful tugged at the corner of her heart. A sort of ache for a past that she had buried years ago.

A certain melancholic sorrow that he could evince such fierce loyalty now—but that he hadn’t when it had mattered most.