Page 18 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Budge up,”

Ian said as he nudged Felicity’s hip, urging her once more toward her side of the bed.

She’d slept most of the day—or at least, she had been sleeping on those occasions that he’d peeked in on her—but with her tendency to thrash restlessly, she’d somehow migrated to the very center of the bed.

And while there was still plenty of room for him, he felt like sprawling just now.

Christ, he ached.

Felicity made a sleepy noise, stirring just enough to pitch herself over onto her stomach, planting her face in her own pillow.

Ian sank onto the bed with a groan.

The headache had hit in early afternoon, followed swiftly by the fever.

By early evening, he’d divested himself of everything but his smallclothes in a desperate attempt to cool his overheated flesh.

He’d gulped down at least a full pot of willow bark tea, which hadn’t aided the fever, but had at least mitigated the worst of the headache.

Probably the chills would start up soon enough.

“What time is it?”

Felicity asked in a drowsy mumble.

“Midnight, or close enough to it,”

Ian muttered into his pillow.

Felicity curled in on herself, burrowing beneath the blankets.

“Have you got my letters?”

she asked.

Shit.

The letters.

They were all that she had requested to have delivered from the school.

He’d tucked them into his coat pocket and forgotten about them, and now the coat—damnation, the coat was draped over the back of a chair some fifteen feet away from the bed.

It would take at most ten strides to reach it, but at the moment it felt a journey of a thousand miles. Nonetheless he dragged himself out of bed and stumbled toward it.

“I sent a letter to Mr. Marchant earlier,”

he said as he shoved his hand into his coat pocket and withdrew a fistful of letters.

“I would have let you read it first, but you slept the day away.”

“I was tired,”

she said through the chattering of her teeth, her voice half-muffled beneath the counterpane.

Ian winced.

The damned fire was ebbing, just as it always did at this hour of the evening.

He tottered toward the coal scuttle, but his arm was weak and clumsy, his joints aching and his muscles burning as he lifted it and poured a fresh layer of coal upon the banking fire.

The racket he’d made had Felicity poking her head out from beneath the covers, a scowl of confusion scrawled across her face.

“What in the world was that?”

she asked.

“Fresh coal.”

Ian let the coal scuttle fall from his fingers some inches above the floor, and the shrill, metallic sound of the bottom striking against the stone of the hearth could have woken the dead.

“The fire is usually dying by the time I retire,”

he said as he strode back toward the bed.

“I put down a fresh heap of coal when I come to bed.”

Her dark hair, frizzy and tangled from a day spent in bed, slid over her shoulder as she canted her head to the right.

“How often?”

she asked, a pleat between her brows.

“Every night,”

he said as he collapsed once more onto the bed, letting the stack of letters fall in a jumble between them.

“You ball yourself up when your toes get cold.”

The counterpane fell to her waist as she eased her arms out, and she scraped the letters into a tidy stack once more.

“You look wretched,”

she said as she began to thumb through the letters.

“You look whatever is worse than wretched,”

Ian said, flopping onto his back. His back, slicked with sweat already, stuck to the sheet beneath him.

“Do your joints ache?”

she asked, sniffling through obvious congestion.

“Yes.”

“And your muscles, too? Are you sweating from places you’d not thought it possible to sweat from?”

Her voice had attained a rather pinched, nasal quality, and her nose had gone quite pink.

“Yes and yes.”

She’d not opened a single letter. She only glanced at the return addresses printed upon the front, her lips pinching further with each letter. She was expecting something specific, then, he assumed.

“Does your throat feel tight and sore?”

“God, yes. Every bit of me aches.”

“Good. I can think of no one more deserving of it at present.”

She lifted her nose in haughty superiority, and then promptly ruined every bit of hauteur to which she had so briefly laid claim by sneezing, loudly and wetly, into the cup of her palm.

She cast him a horrified glance, hand still clasped over her nose, which Ian assumed must now contain a great deal of mucus.

Even the weak chuckle he managed rasped in his lungs.

“There’s a handkerchief in my coat pocket,” he said.

“You could pretend to be a gentleman and fetch it for me,”

she said, her voice thick and distorted.

“I really could not,”

Ian groaned.

“Have mercy; I might be dying.”

“One can only hope.”

With her free hand she stuffed the letters that had dropped into her lap when she had sneezed beneath her pillow and crawled out of bed, tottering toward the chair upon which his jacket hung.

She muttered beneath her breath as she rifled through his pockets.

A soft sound of relief, which he assumed meant she must have found the handkerchief, and she blew her nose once, twice—and then sighed, though the breath she drew in through her nose still sounded rather congested to his ears.

At last she climbed back into bed, tucking herself back beneath the counterpane, though she was gracious enough to wrap herself in no more than the half of it that rightfully belonged to her.

Ian flopped one hand across the bed, pushing the bulk of it in her direction.

“Take it,”

he said.

“I’m boiling anyway.”

“But you just added coal to the fire,”

she said as she cocooned herself within it.

“You get cold at night.”

“So you intend to just…what? Suffer?”

That little crease between her brows was bound to become permanent sooner or later, if she kept squinting at him in baffled suspicion.

“That’s about the size of it.”

A pause, long and speculative, her green eyes piercing through the tangle of her dark hair that had fallen about her face.

He could practically hear the gears in her mind turning, considering, assessing.

At long last she made a caustic sound in her throat, heaved herself over to give him her back—though with the thick of the blanket layered around her, he could hardly tell the difference—and grunted again, “Good.”

Ian managed a chuckle that turned into a cough.

He hadn’t expected her sympathy, but if she could manage such rancor even while sick as a dog, then she was likely not in dire need of medical attention. Yet, anyway.

The pressing desire for sleep blurred the edges of his vision and sank its hooks into the corners of his mind, beckoning him down into blissful unconsciousness.

Somehow he resisted the lovely lure of it, listening instead to Felicity’s breaths ease into the rhythmic cadence of sleep, the beginnings of a sonorous snore gurgling in the back of her throat.

“I missed you,”

he said softly, and his fingers drifted across the bed toward her—halfway and no further.

“Ten years. That’s three thousand six hundred and fifty days, more or less. I missed you every one of them.”

∞∞∞

Felicity sighed as she climbed out of the bathtub and wrapped herself in a length of fluffy white toweling.

She’d stayed in the bath nearly an hour, until her fingertips had pruned up and the water had gone tepid, but the heat of it had been lovely while it had lasted.

The chills had persisted these last few days; a more or less constant condition that had led to the bed chamber growing rather stuffy, as Ian had kept the coals ablaze at all hours in deference to her relentless trembling.

But it had been less unpleasant than she might have thought.

Ian’s staff largely kept their distance to prevent the illness from running rampant through the household.

According to Nellie, the school had been spared the contagion, though Felicity had been asked to stay clear until she was thoroughly recovered.

So the last three days had been spent in seclusion, mostly sleeping, interspersed with the occasional bath, cups of willow bark tea, and meals delivered straight to the bed chamber.

She pulled a fresh nightgown over her head and scrubbed at her damp hair with the towel as she pulled open the door of the bathing room at last, shivering anew as the comparatively cooler air from the bed chamber poured in, swirling through the cloud of steam that had accumulated.

Ian had shucked off half his banyan robe and reclined against the pillows in bed, his bare chest and shoulders glistening with a mist of sweat, a flush of fever highlighting his cheeks, and his nose red and a bit irritated-looking.

He had a newspaper open, the pages rustling slightly in the faint tremor of his hands—a testament to his lingering weakness.

“What do you want for Christmas?”

he asked through a sniffle as she snatched her hairbrush off the vanity and padded toward the fire.

“I beg your pardon?”

Felicity settled on the floor before the fire, toasting her toes in the heat. Dragging her hair over her shoulder to dry it, she began to pull the brush through the damp strands carefully, wincing at the pull of tangles through the bristles.

“It’s the twenty-third,”

he said. Another rustle, as of pages turning.

“You didn’t like the garden.”

Her fingers tightened around the handle of the brush to the point of pain.

“Had you expected me to be pleased with it?”

“I thought it a faithful recreation.”

His voice had grown rather nasally again, and he bit out a foul word beneath his breath as he sneezed into a handkerchief.

“A recreation of something that was meant to be mine.”

It still stung; like the prick of a needle jabbed into her heart.

“But you took it from me. You took something precious to me and you made it your own.”

Hidden behind his house for God alone knew how long. Her garden.

A long moment of silence drew out, and she heard him draw in a breath and let it out again slowly.

“The garden is yours to do with as you please,”

he said at last, in a carefully neutral tone.

“If you have no liking for it as it is now, have it redone to suit your tastes. Have any room you please redone, if it so suits you.”

She swallowed down the raw sound of exasperation that pressed against her teeth.

“I can’t be bought,”

she said. And then because that was not quite true in the context of how she had become his wife, she amended.

“My good will cannot be bought. There is no amount of money that you could cast at me that would affect it.”

“I would welcome the opportunity to earn it instead,”

he said.

“Would you give me that?”

Taken aback at the quietly-issued question, Felicity fell silent once more, staring into the flickering flames.

“I thought not.”

There was just the tiniest curl of amusement to his voice, as if he had expected such a response—or lack of one.

“So what would you like for Christmas?”

he repeated, and there was another rustling sound as he opened his paper once again.

Resentment swirled behind her breastbone, rivalling the heat of the fire before her.

“Nothing from you,”

she snapped, wincing as the yank of the brush through her hair pulled sharply at a particularly devious tangle.

“I never intended to get anything for you, besides.”

“I know,”

he said lightly, reasonably.

“I didn’t expect anything. I have what I want already.”

Her.

The clenching of her teeth produced a sharp ache in her head, the temporary relief of the wretched congestion provided by the steam in the bathing room already fading in the wake of the sudden surge of anger, made all the more galling for the fact that these last few days had been generally peaceful.

She had attributed that to the fact that neither of them had much had the energy for anything beyond sleep, but still it had been…pleasant, not to expend so much of her limited energy on anger.

On a few occasions, she had bestirred herself to take some jab at him, to strike out with the sharp side of her tongue—but it had begun to seem as if, no matter how much she might hone that tongue to a fine point upon his hide, his only inclination was to figuratively bare his belly to give her a softer, more vulnerable target.

Perversely, it only fanned the flames of the ire that still glowed within her chest.

A fury that went unsatisfied every time it rose to the fore only to find that there was nothing sturdy to clash against.

A roiling, violent turmoil that only redoubled itself with each failed attempt to vent the pressure of it building within her.

Three thousand six hundred and fifty days—and I missed you every one of them.

She swallowed the sour sound that rose from her chest and it scraped at her sore throat on its way back down.

He’d thought she had been asleep when he’d uttered those words.

She’d pretended to be.

She’d pretended to be asleep rather a lot lately.

Probably she’d pretend it longer still, if only to avoid conversation, to avoid Ian’s unnecessarily solicitous behavior.

His consideration even in the face of the acrimony she cast at him made her feel rather small and petty—and she blamed him for that, too.

Another flick of the page. “Hm,”

he said absently.

“Interesting.”

Felicity swallowed back a sigh. It had become something of a routine, as he pored over the morning’s paper, for Ian to toss out several comments upon the news of the day in a transparent attempt to tempt her into conversation, which she largely ignored. Any moment now he would find some particularly salacious tidbit of gossip with which to—

A low whistle.

“I’ll be damned,”

he said.

“A duke has married a courtesan.”

Felicity wrenched her head around so swiftly that a sharp pain shot up her neck. “What?”

she asked, her heart hammering in her chest.

“You’re joking.”

“No,”

he said, peeking over the topmost edge of the paper, his brows knit.

“Only a few days ago, it seems.”

It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Scrambling to her feet, Felicity stumbled toward the bed.

“Give it here,”

she demanded.

Wordlessly, Ian handed over the paper, and Felicity scanned the page, searching through various announcements until—there it was.

Miss Charity Nightingale, lately of London, had wed the Duke of Warrington in a private ceremony in Kent on December the nineteenth.

Kent.

Felicity’s knees trembled, and she sat upon the edge of the bed abruptly before they could collapse beneath her.

Charity had not come because she had not received Felicity’s letter.

All this time she had been meticulously scanning the mail for a response, something that would explain Charity’s continued absence—and Charity had been buried in the countryside, preparing for her wedding to a duke.

Her sister was married.

And she hadn’t even known.

“I hadn’t thought you were so interested in such gossip,”

Ian said dryly.

“I’m not,”

she said as she flung the paper back in his direction.

“It’s only that it’s not every day a duke marries a courtesan.”

Felicity staggered to her feet once more.

“It’s not ever,”

Ian said flatly.

“It doesn’t happen, as a rule.”

And yet it had happened.

And she hadn’t known! But Mercy must have done.

Felicity couldn’t think of another reason why Charity might have married in Kent other than that it was where their half-sister Mercy lived with her husband, Thomas, and their daughter, Flora.

And Felicity had not received an invitation. How long had it been since she had last seen Charity in person?

A year? Two? And always—always—Charity had come here to Brighton to see her.

Felicity had never once gone to London.

She had never had the opportunity, never had more than a day to herself at a time.

“You’re pacing,”

Ian observed mildly.

“I’m cold,”

Felicity snapped, crossing her arms over her chest as she flounced back toward the fire and sat down before it once again, the half-brushed mass of her hair falling over her shoulder.

Ian would never understand—and she would never tell him.

Sixteen years since she’d left home, since Charity had sent her off to school to protect her from their father.

Felicity hadn’t set foot in London since.

She’d gained a proper education, cobbled together a life for herself here.

It wasn’t grand or particularly exciting, but it was hers.

And her sisters had played such small parts in it since then.

Mercy had been a recent addition, since neither she nor Charity had known of their half-sister’s existence until a few years ago.

But the sum of her relationship with both of her sisters could be reduced to the contents of a drawer; a stack of letters she kept bound in twine.

A handful of visits from Charity across the years, furtive meetings owing to Charity’s notoriety.

Their lives had moved on without her.

Both had married, and Mercy had had a daughter, and Felicity—

Felicity hadn’t merited even an invitation.

She pulled up her knees and rested her chin atop them, grateful that the general stuffiness of her nose made an adequate excuse for the raw little sniffle she gave.

She hadn’t just gained an unwanted husband.

She’d lost what remained of her family.