Page 19 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)
As Felicity blinked her eyes open, she realized that the fire had once again gone out in the night.
The vast expanse of bed lay vacant before her and the tangle of the covers slithered across it as she’d dragged them with her toward Ian’s side of the bed.
Once more she had ended up tucked up against him, her cheek pillowed against the arm wedged beneath her head, soaking in the heat of his chest pressed against her back.
She couldn’t be blamed for such an action, she knew, when one considered that it had been executed whilst she had been unconscious.
He couldn’t blame her, at least—but that didn’t stop her from harboring a shred of annoyance with herself for gravitating toward him even in sleep.
It was just that he was warm, and perhaps some small part of her left over from a decade ago longed for the comforting presence of him there beside her.
The reassuring weight of his arm over her waist.
The heat of his legs perfect for warming her cold toes.
The ridge of his arousal cradled against the softness of her bottom.
Felicity flexed her fingers and bent her arm in preparation to jam her elbow into his solar plexus and gain a crucial distance, and—
Ian snored in her ear.
Her hand relaxed.
Her arm settled once more.
A few more minutes of warmth, then, stolen while he still slept, even if he would have offered it willingly had he been awake.
She’d become accustomed to him rising quite early; so much earlier than she did, and she had long thought herself an early riser.
She had never woken before him until today.
Perhaps it was weak of her, pitiful of her to take some small pleasure in a stolen intimacy that would not survive Ian’s waking, but just lately she had felt so damned alone.
Set adrift, swept downstream by an unshakable current, flailing against the cruelties and vagaries of a fate she was helpless to change.
The ties that bonded her to her sisters were so much more frail and frayed than she had thought.
And it had been so damned long since she had been held, touched, comforted and cossetted.
There was a part of her—the exceptionally stupid part; the part that had spent the last ten years frozen in time—
that wanted to simply relax into the warmth of Ian’s body and recapture a sliver of those old feelings she’d smothered to death years ago.
An echo of them would suffice, just a fraction of that warmth that had once belonged to her, and which he had snatched away.
And while he slept still, the only one to judge her a fool for it was herself.
Just a few moments more.
Just for these few moments she could fall into the past and pretend that her life hadn’t been turned upon its head.
Just for these few moments—
Ian made a low rumble deep in his chest; a purely male sound of primitive pleasure.
His arm tightened about her waist and he buried his face in her hair, drawing in a long breath as if he had caught some scent there that he wanted to pull as deeply into his lungs as possible.
His hand flattened over her belly, slid up over her ribs, and settled heavily over one breast, cradling the weight of it in his palm.
Heat sparked between her thighs, her nipple tightening to a firm point beneath the pressure of his hand.
Unbelievable.
Felicity balled her hand into a fist, bent her elbow, and drove the point of it straight into his stomach.
Ian jerked away with a grunt of pain, nearly falling off the bed as he recoiled from the bony point of her elbow lodged in his midsection.
“What the devil?”
he said in a sleep-slurred mumble.
“What the hell was that for?”
“You grabbed my breast!”
Felicity accused, tossing herself back toward the center of the bed.
“Did I?”
To his credit, he sounded genuinely surprised—if not particularly remorseful.
Ugh. Felicity cast off the counterpane, throwing the bulk of it behind her as she scooted toward the edge of the bed, swinging her legs over the side. There was the tiniest bit of satisfaction to be had in the garbled sound he made, suggesting she’d managed to hit him in the face with the covers.
“Have you nothing to say for yourself?”
“Yes. Having been quite asleep at the time, I regret that I have no memory of it. I’m rather fond of your breasts.”
She remembered. She had once been fond of his fondness for them.
“Don’t do it again,”
she snapped as she tugged the hem of her nightgown down past her knees and hopped off the bed.
“How am I meant to agree to such a request?”
She heard the soft puff of the pillow as he resettled himself, reclining back in bed with his arms folded beneath his head.
“I can’t help what I do in my sleep any more than you can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Ian’s gaze followed her as she stalked toward the vanity to retrieve her hairbrush.
“Do you know how often I wake with you clinging to me like a limpet?”
he asked.
“Every damned morning. Every one.”
“You know I get cold!”
A few yanks of the brush through the tangle of her hair was good enough; she slammed the brush back down upon the surface of the vanity table and scraped up a few pins, winding her hair up at the back of her head and jamming the pins in to secure it.
“It’s hardly my fault you purchased such a drafty house.”
“I’ve always found it comfortable. More so, just lately.”
Ian shifted about, cramming a few pillows behind his back as he repositioned himself to sit up, the better to watch her as she headed for the dressing room.
“Large houses can be lonely.”
“Surely not with more than a dozen servants milling about.”
She stomped into the dressing room and cast about for one of her dour black dresses.
It had been too many days since she’d last been well enough to don anything but a nightgown.
But her fever had broken early yesterday, and she’d lost the wheeze that had followed each breath, and her sore throat was much improved.
It was time at last to be back about her usual business.
“It is lonely,”
he insisted, lifting his voice to carry through the dressing room door.
“In the right circumstances, one can be lonely in a crowd.”
A sigh, long and overly dramatic to her ears.
“Give a bit of grace, Felicity. I like a little warmth, same as you. It’s been a long damned time since I’ve had a woman in my bed.”
“Hah!”
Felicity said as she tied the laces of her stays and smoothed at her petticoat.
“Hah?”
he echoed, his voice rife with consternation.
There was a rustle of fabric, followed by the stomp of bare feet across the floor.
Felicity managed to drag her dress over her head, the pins she’d jammed into her hair pulling at the sharp movement, just as the door flew open.
Ian appeared, a loose sheet draped haphazardly about his waist.
“What the hell do you—”
His brows knitted, his dark gaze raking over her, the indignation which had propelled him here from his lounge upon the bed promptly forgotten.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m recovered,”
Felicity said, twitching her skirts down and reaching for the laces.
“I’ve neglected my duties too long already. I’m going to the school.”
A muscle twitched in Ian’s jaw.
“You’re the headmistress,”
he said.
“Your duties are what you say they are.”
“I say it is time for me to return,”
she said.
“The holiday will be over next week. The rest of the girls will soon be returning, and I have got a full staff to prepare in advance of it.”
She rifled through the dresser and retrieved a pair of stockings.
“I’m already dreadfully late.”
“You’re not late,”
he said.
“You’ve been ill. You won’t be expected.”
He dragged one hand through his disheveled hair, wincing at the pull of knots in his fingers.
“I won’t stop you,”
he said on a frustrated sigh.
“but I think you’re rushing your recovery.”
“I don’t recall asking your opinion,”
Felicity said as she slipped on her shoes.
“Or your permission.”
And there—she had only to grab her coat, and she would be ready.
“You’ll have breakfast first,”
he said doggedly, blocking the door as she turned toward it.
“You’ve picked at your meals these last few days.”
How could she have been expected to do otherwise, when everything she tried to eat scratched at her sore throat on its way down? She’d lived mostly on tea.
“I wasn’t aware you’d noticed.”
“I notice most everything which concerns you,”
he said.
“And you will take the carriage. The weather is still dismal.”
“I hadn’t intended to do otherwise.”
It wasn’t as though he’d be requiring it, after all, when one considered that his very presence here still suggested he was unlikely to spend the day up and about.
“You’re in my way,”
she said, with a little flick of her fingertips meant to suggest he should absent himself from his position in the doorway.
With a grumble of annoyance, Ian backed up just enough for her to slip past. But he caught her wrist in his warm fingers as she did—not tightly, but still firm enough to hold.
“I was in earnest,”
he said.
“What I told you earlier.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Ian’s dark eyes stared straight into her own, holding her captive with more than just the light pressure of his hand around her wrist.
“You were the last woman in my bed,”
he said.
“There was never—”
He swallowed audibly, and his fingers tightened just a fraction.
“There was never anyone after you.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Felicity jerked at her wrist, infuriated anew.
“What could possibly possess you to imagine I would believe it? That I would care?”
“Don’t you?”
“No!”
The denial erupted too swiftly, too impassioned to be anything but a lie, and Felicity felt her cheeks burn with the shame of it.
In a fit of pique, she jammed her heel down upon his bare toes.
Ian released her wrist with a muffled grunt of pain, and Felicity scrambled past him, all but racing for the door.
But the half-smothered chuckle of satisfaction he gave as he bent to rub his injured toes followed her out into the hall.
She might not have given him the reaction he’d expected—but she feared she had given him one he’d wanted instead.
∞∞∞
Ian shivered in his banyan as he stood out on the stonework path in the center of the garden, a small scrap of paper pinched between two fingers.
The lone remnant of the garden sketch Felicity had burned, it corresponded to the flower bed just on his right, where a row of hydrangeas stretched out against the wall of the house.
In spring, they would produce lovely and vibrant blue blossoms, though now they were just brown stalks topped with puffy bulbs and dusted with a sprinkling of snow and ice.
They taunted him now; a desolate reminder of his myriad failures.
Felicity hadn’t liked the garden.
No; she’d hated the garden.
Stolen, she’d said, as if he’d contrived to take it from her, when in fact he had meant to give it to her.
Everything she’d ever dreamed of. Everything they’d dreamed of together.
The promises he’d once made to her were worthless to her now.
The tattered scrap of paper in his fingers was proof positive that he’d done more than delayed them past the point of breaking—he’d dashed her dreams along with them.
How could she be expected to climb the mountain of resentments that lay between them when he’d littered the path with the shards of every dream she had once held so dear?
As a chilly breeze slid through the garden, Ian tucked the scrap of paper into his pocket for safekeeping, at least until he placed it back into his nightstand drawer.
Even if Felicity no longer wanted it, it remained precious to him.
“If you’re seeking a belated Christmas gift, might I suggest jewelry, Mr. Carlisle? I’ve yet to meet a woman who wasn’t fond of a pretty bauble.”
Ian jerked in surprise as he turned toward the door from which Butler had appeared. “Ah,”
he said, reaching out to take the steaming cup of cider the man offered to him and taking a deep drink from it.
“I’m afraid it would do me no good. She doesn’t even wear her wedding ring.”
Though it could not, in any traditional sense, be called pretty. It had spent the last few weeks languishing upon the nightstand, entirely forgotten. At least by its owner.
“She wouldn’t welcome anything quite so personal. What am I meant to give to a woman who wants nothing from me?”
Butler blanched. “Well, I—”
“That was purely rhetorical, Butler.”
Ian managed a bleak smile.
“If an answer to that question existed, I imagine I could treble my fortune selling it. Besides, Christmas has passed.”
Much the same as any other day had. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
Ian heaved a sigh and drained the last of the cider, which went a little way toward warding off the chill that seeped through the thin fabric of his banyan. Just a few days earlier, when he’d been in the throes of fever, this cold would have been delightful.
“Did my wife eat breakfast before she left?”
he asked as he handed the empty mug back to Butler.
“It was nearer to luncheon, Mr. Carlisle, but she did eat. And she took the carriage as well.”
Well, there was that, at least. Just a few weeks ago she might have refused to do either purely on principle, only to be contrary.
Butler cleared his throat and pulled open the side of his coat, withdrawing a stack of letters from within.
“Regrettably,”
he began.
“I had already sent out a footman to collect the mail from the school when Mrs. Carlisle decided to go herself. Shall I send it back?”
“No,”
Ian said, and held out his hand to collect it.
“She’s got a stack of it in our bed chamber anyway. Might as well put it with all the rest.”
Probably there was nothing particularly pressing; not when the bills were paid by his solicitor, anyway.
Correspondence, largely, he guessed, as he began to thumb through the stack of letters.
A few names he recognized—letters that had been sent over the holiday break from students or their parents.
About midway through the stack, there was a letter addressed to Felicity from the elder Mr.
Marchant; the father of Dorothea’s would-be suitor.
Given the tone of the letter he’d sent to the man, and the not-quite-veiled threats heavily laden within, Ian expected the response would be particularly interesting.
It would have to wait for Felicity’s return, of course, but if she was not acceptably mollified—well, then, it would be his pleasure to rake both of the Marchants over the coals.
And there, at the very bottom, one last letter without a return address.
Without even a postmark.
Only Felicity’s given name scrawled across the front in thick, black lines.
Spidery tendrils of ink feathered out from the underscoring etched beneath it.
The fine hairs at the nape of Ian’s neck lifted, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with the weather.
There was something ominous about this letter, something threatening.
It had to have been hand-delivered.
Probably shoved through the mail slot set into the door and jumbled up with the rest when someone had come to collect it.
He’d not raised the issue just lately, because in her illness, she’d not left the house…but not too terribly long ago, she’d accused him of having her followed.
And at his last inquiry, she’d refused to confide in him.
Which had been her right, but—
He couldn’t protect her from an unknown threat.
What manner of trouble was she in?
“Butler,”
he asked.
“have you noticed anything…odd within the past week or so?”
If Felicity was, indeed, being stalked by some unknown party, then surely the villain must know where she was residing. So why send a letter to the school?
Butler frowned and rubbed his thumb across his chin.
“Truth to tell, Mr. Carlisle, we’ve been running on a skeleton staff, since so many came down ill. I recovered enough to return to my duties only two days ago, so I’ve yet to speak with the whole of the staff just yet.”
Ian blew out a breath in relief. Surely, if anything untoward had occurred, Butler would have been informed immediately—
“Although,”
Butler said.
“Nancy—one of the kitchen maids—made mention that she thought we’d had a prowler a few days past.”
A shiver slid down Ian’s spine.
“A prowler?”
“Most likely some unfortunate soul looking for a bit of shelter for the evening,”
Butler said dismissively.
“It’s warmest near the kitchen. There was no harm done, or so I’m given to understand. Nancy spooked the fellow when she went to lock the kitchen door for the night, and he vaulted back over the wall right quick.”
“Over the wall,”
Ian echoed, as comprehension struck.
Someone had been in the garden.
Perhaps only inches away from an unlocked door before he’d been startled away by the presence of the staff.
Butler might have no real reason to think it threatening or even particularly out of the ordinary…but then, he was unaware of Felicity’s brush with a potential villain.
“My wife believes someone has been following her,”
he said tightly.
“I don’t know why—but I won’t take chances with her safety.”
“Mr. Carlisle?”
“I want you to ensure every door and window in the house is locked. At all hours,”
Ian said.
“If someone leaves the house for any reason, they lock the door behind them. Always.”
Butler’s brows drew together.
“Of course,” he said.
“And if there is even the smallest suggestion of a prowler again, you will inform me immediately. Is that clear?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll inform the staff as well.”
“Do,”
Ian said, and he stared down at the letter in his hand, and wondered if it was only the remnants of lingering illness which caused him to perceive the menace that seemed to seethe in the sharp slash of the handwriting across the front.
Felicity would be furious if he read her private correspondence, no doubt.
But her safety was far more important than her privacy.