Page 23 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Felicity had trembled like a leaf caught in a high wind the whole way home.

She was trembling still, seated at the edge of the bed and clad in her worn linen nightgown as the doctor examined her.

Ian scrubbed one hand across his face as he paced the floor, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows.

It was difficult only to glance at her, difficult to see that brilliant red mark covering half her cheek and jaw, and to know that someone had struck her.

Every time he looked at her, even for the briefest moment, he was struck by a flash of rage so pure and blinding that it pounded in his head.

Felicity’s legs dangled over the side of the bed, her toes flexing as the doctor examined the mark, turned her face this way and that, checked the inside of her cheek to ensure she’d not cut it upon her teeth.

“It just wants time,”

he pronounced at last, his voice faintly exasperated—as if he thought Ian’s insistent summons had been quite an overreaction.

“You can expect some soreness, perhaps some bruising, but it will heal with no lasting effects.”

“She struck her head when she fell,”

Ian barked, glaring at the man as he began to pack up his supplies.

“There are no immediate signs of concussion,”

the doctor said blithely.

“Pupils are normal, no slurred speech or confusion. I’d not recommend nodding off for a few hours just to make certain of it, but I suspect the only consequence of that tumble will be a rather nasty bump.”

He pulled a small bottle from his case and latched the bag.

“If you like, I can leave you with a vial of laudanum for the pain.”

“No, thank you,”

Felicity said through the chatter of her teeth.

“Yes,”

Ian said, immediately after.

“We’ll take it.”

He snatched the vial from the doctor’s hand, set it upon the clutter of other items which had accumulated upon the nightstand, right beside the ring she’d never shown the least interest in.

“What do I do for her?”

The doctor adjusted his spectacles on his face.

“Well. She’s had a shock,”

he said blandly.

“Of course she’s had a damned shock. She was attacked on the street.”

The words had ended up in a guttural growl.

“What do I do?”

“Keep her calm,”

the doctor said.

“Laudanum for the pain, should it become necessary. A few drops only in a cup of tea.”

Calm? Calm? He couldn’t even keep himself calm. Wrath sizzled along every nerve ending, resulting a succession of jerky, intemperate movements. Pacing with such anxious, frantic steps that even the rugs upon the floor could not muffle the slap of his feet.

Felicity shifted upon the bed.

“You needn’t speak of me as if I were not present,”

she said sourly, but her eyes—her eyes followed him.

Nervous, wary.

Eyes still red-rimmed from those heart-rending sobs that had consumed her in the carriage.

His arms still carried the memory of her fierce trembling, as if it had been seared into his muscles.

Her hair was now clean and brushed to shining damp tendrils, but his fingers remembered catching within the tangles her fall had made of it.

The way she’d winced when he’d gingerly examined that bump at the back of her head.

His ears were still filled with the awful little sounds she’d made, ragged and tortured.

She hadn’t even protested when he’d cradled her to his chest, held her tightly in the circle of his arms through the short carriage ride home.

She’d said nothing still as he’d carried her up the stairs, shouting for the servants who had come running to attend to the succession of demands he’d cast out tersely.

A bath, a mug of cider liberally laced with brandy, a fresh nightgown, the doctor—he’d lost count of what he’d demanded, and of whom.

But there had been no room in her for anything but fright—not anger, not offense, not even righteous indignation to have been handled so.

Her pupils had been blown then, huge and stark, with just the tiniest ring of brilliant green around them.

Her face pale and wan.

She’d recovered herself a bit since, if the doctor were to be believed.

But still she trembled.

“I don’t anticipate further complications,”

the doctor said as he collected his bag.

“But should anything develop, you may call for me again at any hour.”

“What sort of complications?”

Ian asked as he trailed the man to the door.

“Dizziness, confusion, nausea. Head wounds can be a tricky business.”

And she had hit the ground hard.

He’d heard the strike of her head even from the distance he’d been at.

He’d seen her teeter precariously on that last shove before the villain had dashed off into the night.

Had known there was no possible way he might have reached her in time.

And she had just lain there where she had fallen.

Anyone else might have thought the fall, the strike of her head had sent her reeling, scattered her senses…but he’d seen the limpness of her limbs even before the villain had released her.

They’d scattered already.

He’d lost years of his life in those endless seconds it had taken him to reach her where she had fallen, silent and utterly still upon the pavement.

His heart had yet to recover from the fear that had squeezed it in his chest, and she—she had just lain there.

Eyes gone dull, staring sightlessly up at the sky.

If not for that first tiny whimper, he’d have thought her dead already. And she might have been, had he chosen the wrong path home. Had he been just a little slower to catch up to her.

The doctor retrieved his hat and coat from Butler, who had stationed himself just outside the door.

“There’s no reason to think she won’t recover swiftly,”

the doctor said.

“But keep a close watch for the next hour or so, just to be certain. Good evening to you both.”

The door closed, and they were alone once more. The chaos of the last hour or so tore at his mind. Keep her calm. How was he meant to do that?

She looked—not calm, but listless and muted.

As if she’d been painted over in sepia.

A shade, he thought.

At most half present, and the rest of her…the rest of her had gone somewhere else. Somewhere he couldn’t follow. Somewhere he’d never even known existed for her.

He had the strangest sense that what remained of her here was a version of her he’d never met.

Felicity Nightingale, perhaps.

He knew Felicity Carlisle; his angry, recalcitrant wife.

He’d known Felicity Cabot; a starry-eyed, tender-hearted dreamer. But who had she been before that? Who had she been, exactly, before he had ever known her?

The fire crackled and still she trembled.

His arms ached to hold her again, but her vibrant green eyes were watchful still, following his sharp, restless movements as he paced the floor.

Guarded, defensive.

Her hands braced upon the bed on either side of her hips. Her shoulders pinched up about her ears. Wary.

He came to a halt just before her.

The firelight cast shadows, flickered over that vivid red impression upon her face.

And again that fury welled up within him.

The bastard had marked her; a slap so harsh that it had knocked her senseless.

The prowler. The letter. And now this. He said, in a searing hiss.

“Who did this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Felicity—”

“I tell you, I don’t know!”

Ian threw up his hands in a surfeit of agitation, still simmering with unrelieved rage.

Felicity flinched, recoiled—cringed. From him.

Every bit of fury evaporated in an instant. Ian sank to the floor as if his legs had been cut out beneath him, dropping to his knees before her.

“I would never strike you,”

he said, setting one hand upon her thigh, clasping gently through the thin linen of her nightgown. “Never.”

But he had frightened her with only an aggressive gesture of his hands, even if it had not been directed at her. It reeked of an ingrained reaction, a remnant of a time past when a gesture like that would have preceded a slap, a strike. Someone had made her cower like that, once.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

He gathered that she had meant the words to be strong, insistent, indignant. She’d managed only a quavering warble, and the squeak at the end had produced an upward inflection, making it sound much more like a question than a demand.

“Like what?”

Her mouth set in a mulish line.

“As though I’m some sort of wounded bird.”

“You are wounded. You struck your head when you fell.”

It was an effort to force the cup of his hand on her thigh to remain light. She’d been terrorized quite enough for one evening; the last thing she needed was to be frightened further, even unintentionally.

“This is important,”

he said, his voice thick with strain.

“Did you see his face? Could you identify him if you saw him again?”

Her nails scraped across the counterpane beneath her.

“No, I—it was dark. I couldn’t see his face.”

A long, hard swallow.

“I think he must have been the same man who followed me before. The same size at least. Big. Beastly. He had sour breath, like his teeth were rotten.”

“Did he say anything? Anything at all?”

“He said—he said—”

Her breath whistled through her teeth.

“He said five thousand pounds.”

Christ. The letter. If he had nurtured any faint hopes that this had been a random act of violence, unconnected to whatever private intrigue into which she had become embroiled, they dissipated like a puff of smoke. No idle threat this; whoever had attacked her meant to terrify her into compliance.

And it was bloody well working.

Of its own accord, his hand captured one of hers, prying it free of its tight grip upon the edge of the bed. Her fingers were so cold in his, small and stiff.

“No one is ever going to hurt you again,”

he said fervently.

“I swear it to you. But to keep you safe, I need something from you. I need you to work with me, not against me.”

A hiccough lodged in her throat.

“I already know I shouldn’t have left the theatre,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant, not exactly.”

His fingers squeezed hers.

“I need to know precisely what it is we’re dealing with,”

he said.

“I need you to tell me—about Felicity Nightingale.”

∞∞∞

It took a long moment for the words to seep through her ears and into her brain. But when they did, they did it with a glorious crash, banging around inside her and drawing up every muscle tight and tense.

“Where—where did you hear that?”

The words were a croak, forced through her aching throat.

“Where did you hear that name?”

With a sigh, Ian pushed himself onto his feet once more, letting fall her hand long enough to reach for the drawer set into the nightstand. He withdrew a folded piece of paper from it, and in the flickering firelight she could see the now-familiar handwriting upon it.

Fury zipped up her spine.

“You stole my letters?”

“Just this one. It was delivered here,”

he said.

“the day you returned to work. There was no return address, no postmark, so I knew it had been hand-delivered. And there had been—”

He hesitated.

“There had been a prowler spotted in the garden some days before. It just seemed rather too coincidental. So, yes, I stole it.”

“It was mine! My business!”

She snatched the letter from his hand, tearing it from his fingers as if the action might also yank free the knowledge he had stolen along with it.

“Anything that threatens you is my business as well.”

He took a breath, took a seat upon the bed beside her.

“Felicity, I don’t care where you’ve come from or what you’ve done. I only need to know what sort of problem we’re facing. Why someone is trying to extort five thousand pounds from you.”

She choked on a rueful laugh.

“It hardly matters. I haven’t got five thousand pounds.”

With her meager wages, she could have worked a hundred years and still not have amassed that amount.

“I do have it,”

he said. And probably substantially more besides, though she’d never cared to ask how deep his pockets truly were.

“But I need to know what the danger is to you.”

The note crinkled in her fingers as her hands clenched.

Both of them, with a helpless, nameless wrath that swept over her like a fever, crackling along her skin.

Her fingernails dented the letter in one hand, carved divots into the palm of the other.

With a ruthless twitch of her arm, she cast the note as far away as she could.

She was shaking again; a violent tremor that built upon itself, redoubled with every raspy wheeze that itched inside her throat.

Weeks of fear.

Years of anger that she had shoved so far down inside her, layer upon layer upon layer of it.

As if she could scrunch them all down and lock them away.

Not neatly; not carefully.

She had only wanted them gone.

Hidden.

Concealed down in that secret place of shame in which she had tucked away the last remnants of the girl she had once been.

The one who had first come to Brighton sixteen years ago, still clad in the wounds of that past she had escaped.

The one who had cowered, flinched from every sound, who spoken in a whisper for months.

Now he demanded to know who Felicity Nightingale was? No.

He hadn’t the least right to it.

He had surrendered that right years ago.

He hadn’t broken only her heart; he’d broken that last part of her she’d thought inviolable.

And now—now, every last one of those emotions she had hastily stuffed away came spilling back out in a horrid, wrinkled tumble.

She choked on them, drowned in them, and scrambled from her perch upon the bed in a desperate bid to escape the flood.

And still she was knee-deep, waist-deep, smothering upon them, every step across the floor a slog through this—this wretched miasma.

“Felicity. Please.”

There was strain in his voice, the effort to maintain a gentle demeanor.

“I hate you.”

The words shuddered from her lungs.

She hated what he’d done to her, what he’d made of her.

But more than that, she hated what she had let him take from her.

What she had surrendered herself, buried in that box beneath all the rest of her anger, her grief, her pain.

Ten years, and she’d gone nowhere.

Ten years, and she was still that same girl she had once been, struggling to shove the shredded tatters of her heart somewhere down deep where they could not hurt her.

“I hate you,”

she said again, and it hissed across her lips in the same shrill tone as a kettle boiling over. And that was what she was; a kettle boiling over. That simmer that had burned her heart for so many years allowed to roil up at last.

“That’s all right,”

he said, so quietly the words seemed to fall upon the rug at her feet to be stamped beneath them.

“Shut up.”

She couldn’t bear the softness of his voice. He used it like cotton batting, like he would wrap her in it to protect her from her own sharp edges.

“Aren’t you listening? I am telling you I hate you!”

Her voice shredded itself on a screech; she pressed her hands to her face as if the pressure of them might quiet the chaos of her mind. Beneath the touch of her hands, her injured cheek burned.

“I always listen when you speak. I am telling you that I understand. I love you enough for both of us.”

“Shut up!”

Her fingers itched to throw something, to break something—to satisfy the lust for violence that crawled beneath her skin.

Or perhaps it was just lust.

And she had hated that, too.

That despite his betrayal, despite the resentment that had been her constant companion for years…he could still make her want.

That there had been a few raw instances where she had woken in his arms when, for precious whole seconds at a time, she had forgotten everything that had come before.

That there was some part of her, still, that ached for the pleasure of his hot hands on her breasts, or the pressure of his cock cradled against her bottom, or the abrasive rasp of his stubble against her shoulder.

She hated that Louisa’s words in the retiring room this evening had terrified her out of her wits, sent her fleeing the safety of the theatre against her better judgment and straight into the path of a violent predator.

That in those moments when she had been so stiff with fright, with that same humiliating terror that had rendered her so helpless and immobile that she could only stare up at the night sky in petrified silence, still she had been so glad that he’d come after her.

That he’d tucked her into his arms and held her on the carriage ride home.

That he’d made her grateful for those gentle fingers that had stroked her hair, for the soothing nonsense he’d whispered as she had cried.

But she hated most that he sat there, now, upon the edge of the bed, looking at her so—so goddamned softly, as if she were some wild creature he thought to tame.

That he’d had the audacity to say that vile word in her presence.

Love.

A scornful sound scratched out of her mouth, so caustic and corrosive that it burned her tongue.

Her toes curled into the plush carpet beneath her feet.

Her chest heaved with strange, frenetic breaths as a shiver slid down her spine, as her nipples pebbled beneath the thin linen of her nightgown.

She didn’t want love from him.

But still she wanted.

The warmth she’d been denied; the pleasure she had denied herself.

She had controlled so little of her life, had been permitted so few choices of her own.

Even now, her life was governed by a necessary adherence to propriety, by her responsibilities to her students…by the shadowy figure haunting her in the darkness, threatening all she held dear.

She couldn’t control those things.

But she could control this.

Satisfy the violent, chaotic turmoil that churned in her head, in her stomach, in her loins.

Quiet the wild clash of her thoughts, garner a brief respite from them with an honestly-earned exhaustion.

Her fingers twitched at her sides.

“Take off your clothes,”

she snarled.

A muscle in his jaw jumped. His hands landed on his thighs, elbows bent outward as he drew in a long breath, let it out slowly as if steeling himself for something. “No,”

he said on a sigh.

“Felicity, you don’t want this. Not now. Not when you’re—”

He hesitated, his lips flattening into a grim line.

“When I’m what?”

The words were a feral growl; ominous, foreboding.

“Overwrought,”

he said at last.

“You’re overwrought. You’ve had a difficult evening. You’ve been frightened, injured. You’re in shock. You don’t want this, not really.”

A strange, strangled sound, half-despairing, half-enraged, tore itself from her throat.

She could feel it there between them, that barrier she’d long thought inviolable.

The one she’d been trapped behind all these years, one and twenty still, frozen—

No.

Not frozen any longer.

Now she burned, raged against the ice that had long encased her, seethed and strained and thrashed.

Until her hand punched straight through it, fisted itself in the wrinkled fabric of his cravat.

She didn’t know which of them she’d yanked across those years.

She knew only that it wasn’t the broken-hearted waif he’d left behind who stood toe-to-toe with him now, who wrapped that snowy fabric in the tense clutch of her hand and dragged his face to hers.

It was the woman scorned who had finally found reason to come roaring out of her with the strength of a lion.

It was the woman scorned who let every bit of spite she possessed saturate her voice as she snarled into his startled face.

“You don’t ever tell me what I want.”