Page 26 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

True to Butler’s claim, the shouting made itself evident even before the carriage had come to a complete stop before the house, and Felicity tumbled out onto the pavement, her heart in her throat as she raced toward the door.

Butler had lagged behind, clearly reluctant to jump once more into the fray he had all too recently escaped, and so Felicity cast open the front door herself and cringed from the avalanche of raised voices that assaulted her ears.

Any sound she had made upon entering was eclipsed by the din within the drawing room, and she steeled herself for further unpleasantness as she walked decisively toward it, her hands flexing at her sides.

Four people present, other than Ian—no, five.

It was just that one was very small; a literal babe in arms, her sensitive ears shielded from the racket by her mother, who pressed the baby’s head against her chest and shielded the exposed ear with one hand.

Her family.

And she recognized only one of them.

That was Charity, there, in a flaming scarlet gown, seething with barely-leashed fury.

Somehow she had backed Ian up against a wall, and kept him constrained with the jab of one pointed finger to his chest as she shouted into his face.

And the man standing just behind her—that was surely her new husband, the duke.

The woman with the baby had to be Mercy, her half-sister.

They’d never had occasion to meet in person, but they had exchanged so many letters that Felicity felt she knew her already.

The bespectacled man at her side must therefore be Mercy’s husband, Thomas, and the baby, little Flora.

Her family.

Here.

Even the ones who had never met her, who would have been perfectly within their rights to leave her to her own problems.

She was, after all, a woman well beyond the age of majority, answerable to no one save herself, and responsible for her own choices.

They had come.

Weeks too late, perhaps, but they had come.

And they were all shouting, and Ian was pinned to the wall by the pressure of the pointed finger that Charity had jabbed into his chest, and Felicity still didn’t know what Butler had expected her to do, how she was meant to defuse the scene playing out before her eyes that looked as though it had been creeping toward a potential murder for some time—

But she was just so glad to see them.

To know that she had not been forgotten or abandoned.

That those torturous thoughts that had plagued mind her had turned out to be unfounded.

That they had come, all of them, when she had called.

An odd, strangled sound eked out of her throat, and she hadn’t expected it to garner much attention, given that the general volume within the small room was perhaps a hair beneath a roar.

But Ian had noticed it.

His head jerked sharply toward her, his shoulders—which had been pitched rather stiffly up about his ears—sank to a relieved slope.

“Thank God,”

he said on a ragged breath.

“Felicity.”

Felicity wasn’t certain, exactly, what she had expected his reaction to be in this situation. Anger, she supposed, would have been a credible guess. Perhaps indignation, or offense, or even resentment. She had never once mentioned even Charity to him, when they had shared nearly everything else. She had neatly sidestepped every delicate inquiry made of her past, made only the vaguest of allusions to the story Charity had concocted for the purposes of enrolling her at Nellie’s school. Perhaps she could be forgiven for not having told him about Mercy in the past, since she had not even known of Mercy’s existence until only a few years ago. But she had no such excuse for Charity.

And yet he only looked relieved to see her.

“Felicity!”

Charity spun so abruptly that she missed entirely the way that Ian wilted from his stiff posture against the wall as she withdrew. She sailed across the room, neatly dodging furniture and people both to fling herself at Felicity, and then…and then for the first time in too many years, Felicity felt herself wrapped in Charity’s warm embrace, surrounded by the sweetly floral scent of her perfume.

“Oh, thank God,”

Charity said in her ear.

“I was so worried for you. I came the moment I received your letter.”

“Charity,”

Felicity said, and it came out like the plaintive wail of a child.

“I’ve missed you.”

And she hadn’t realized just how much until this exact moment. So many letters they’d exchanged across the years, precious, treasured words that had offered some measure of comfort from the loneliness of her life, and yet—a letter couldn’t offer a much-needed embrace. It could not contain a fond glance or hold a laugh or a smile. It couldn’t compare to the delicate fingers that smoothed over her back, the cheek pressed against her own. There was the thickness of tears in her throat and she dragged in a hoarse breath to stifle them, scrubbed at her eyes with the back of one hand.

“And you’ve married,”

she said, withdrawing just a few inches.

“I wish I—I wish I might have been invited.”

Even if her duties at the school would have precluded her from attending. Still it would have been nice to know she had entered her sister’s mind during the course of such a momentous event.

Charity’s lovely smooth brow wrinkled in confusion.

“Of course you were invited,”

she said.

“Whyever would you not be invited? I wrote to you at once.”

She clasped Felicity’s hands in hers, holding tight.

“I didn’t expect you would be able to attend,”

she confessed.

“But of course you were invited.”

“I—I never received any such invitation,”

Felicity said.

“I thought…I assumed you’d decided it was best to go on without me.”

“Never,”

Charity declared passionately.

“You’re my baby sister. Of course I wanted you there.”

From his position at the rear of the room, Ian muttered.

“Nightingale. Of course.”

And as attention fell upon him once more, he smoothed at the wrinkled fabric of his cravat and added.

“I invite you to try ascertaining any particular specifics when four people are shouting at you at once.”

With a haughty sniff, Charity turned her head away from him once more in a magnificently arrogant cut.

“I wasn’t in London to receive your letter when you sent it,”

she said.

“But I came as soon as I did.”

“I did receive your letter,”

Mercy blurted out.

“And I am so very sorry. Motherhood has made a whole host of things slip my mind just recently. I’m afraid it sat unopened upon my desk for far too long. But I came the very moment I found it again.”

She nodded her head toward Charity.

“Charity happened to spot our carriage at a coaching inn on the way.”

And again that wretched knot of tears swelled within her throat.

Despite her status as a relatively new mother, despite the fact that she had never once met Felicity in person, still Mercy had come.

From Kent, at this time of year, with her husband and daughter in tow.

Felicity’s fingers itched. Like a sleepwalker, she edged a step forward, her arms lifting.

“Could I—would it be all right with you if I—”

“Oh!”

Mercy gave a shred of a laugh, adjusting the baby in her arms to hand off to her husband.

“Oh, yes, of course.”

And she turned back toward Felicity, reaching for her in the same moment.

“It is so lovely to meet you at last,”

Mercy murmured in her ear, settling into the embrace.

Yes. Yes, it was. Perhaps it wasn’t the most perfect version of a family ever to have existed, but this one was hers.

Ian cleared his throat.

“If we are quite through with the shouting, might I interest anyone in tea?”

∞∞∞

Ian was not unaware of the fact that everyone in the room likely wanted to kill him.

Even the baby, he thought.

Probably she could not have managed it, but her impossibly large eyes stared at him with something akin to suspicion and antipathy.

It was rather a strong emotion with which to credit a child so young, but this one seemed eminently capable of it.

He ought to have realized it before.

That day that Felicity had become so flustered when he had passed on the gossip from London that a duke had married a notorious courtesan—it had been because she’d just learned of her sister’s marriage in the paper.

Had thought she’d been deliberately excluded from the event.

He hadn’t had reason, then, to pay much attention to the names listed in the paper, nor to give over much of his mind to London gossip.

And so it had been something of a shock to find a duke and duchess at his doorstep, caterwauling about Felicity.

She had never mentioned any living family.

In the past, she’d made very brief mention of an uncle who had secured a place for her at the school, but he’d been led to believe the man had died.

He’d thought they’d shared that in common; their lack of family.

And now, his home had been invaded by two sisters, two brothers-in-law—a baron and a damned duke—and finally an infant niece.

The family he’d never known that she had had.

And now his, too, he supposed, by the extension of marriage.

For all the good it would do him, since murder seemed just as likely an outcome as peace.

Probably more so, if those venomous looks the elder sister—Charity—kept slanting him over her teacup.

She hadn’t the panache to pull it off as Felicity did, her eyes plain brown instead of Felicity’s vibrant and generally lethal green.

It was clear that they had not seen one another in some time.

But from the shaken, emotional reaction their appearance had pulled from Felicity, it was also clear that they were quite fond of one another.

Which meant that he was going to have to do his damnedest to get along with them.

To be pleasant, however poorly they’d gotten off to begin with.

A resolution that was tested only moments later when the duke spoke sharply for the first time since tea had been delivered.

“Naturally,”

he said.

“we’ve come to retrieve Felicity.”

Retrieve her? Like a damned lost coat.

“Felicity is my wife. One does not retrieve another man’s wife.”

No matter how he might be related to her.

The duchess bristled, her shoulders tensing.

“She is my sister!”

A fact of which he was now very much aware.

“We made a bargain. I’ll hold to my end of it so long as Felicity holds to hers.”

The bespectacled fellow—the baron—lifted his brows.

“And the terms of this bargain?”

“None of your damned business,” Ian said.

“Are you insinuating that Felicity is not free to speak her mind with her own family?”

the duchess inquired in a poisonous hiss.

“Nothing of the sort. Felicity is free to share whatever she wishes. But I have no intention of making public what is private without her consent.”

He allowed himself another sip of tea and a measure of enjoyment over the nonplussed expression which so briefly slid across the woman’s face.

“Felicity?”

the other sister—Mercy, he thought—prompted.

“What can we do? What would you like us to do?”

“Whatever he says, you don’t have to stay,”

the baron added.

Felicity steeled herself.

“Ian owns Nellie’s school,”

she said.

“He bought the building from her. It’s her home; the only one she has known all these years.”

At least it was more charitable than accusing him once again of stealing it.

“At a fair price,”

he said.

“She was not cheated. She’ll live out the rest of her days in perfect comfort, and, notably, without the threat of a debtor’s prison hanging over her head.”

The duke made a scathing sound in his throat, and his eye—the one not covered by an eye patch—narrowed upon Ian.

“How much do you want for it?”

he asked as a muscle twitched in his jaw.

“It’s not for sale.”

“Every man has a price,”

the duke said.

“I must insist that you tell me yours.”

“It is not for sale at any price. There isn’t enough coin in the world that would equal the value of what I would lose along with it.”

Mercy rubbed the baby’s back with one hand and turned her face toward Felicity once more.

“We can find a new school building,”

she said, her voice tinged with desperation—and perhaps a bit of guilt, he thought. For taking so long to arrive. For leaving her sister to Ian’s mercy.

“You really can’t,”

Felicity said, and that grimace deepened as she ducked her head.

“Of course we can,”

Charity said.

“Between us, we have got quite a lot of money—”

“She means to say,”

Ian interrupted.

“that you will not find anyone willing to sell to you. You might be in the privileged position of carrying titles, but your homes are elsewhere. You’ll leave Brighton eventually, and when you do, anyone who dares sell to you will have to contend with me.”

Another slow sip of tea, as if to punctuate his words.

“No one with half a shred of sense wants that.”

“Then come home anyway,”

Charity said to Felicity, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.

“Just come with us. He can’t force you to stay.”

And that—that was true enough, he supposed. True enough, at least, in the context of this new revelation. He had, according to the law, certain legal rights over his wife. He did not, however, expect them to be of any particular relevance when weighed against the power that might be wielded on Felicity’s behalf by her brothers-in-law, both peers in their own right.

But then again, he hadn’t forced her to stay to begin with. She could have walked away the moment he’d placed that marriage contract into her hands. She’d forced herself to stay. He had only provided the motivation required to make the benefits worth the sacrifice.

As Felicity shifted uncomfortably, searching for the kindest possible words to refuse the offer of ready escape, when her sisters had plainly rushed to rescue her at the earliest possible moment, Ian caught sight of the baron eyeing him speculatively. There was still some hostility in that dark gaze half-concealed by the glare streaking across the lenses of his spectacles, but more than that, there was a vague, reluctant curiosity.

There had been so much shouting from the very moment they had arrived. He’d found himself in the unenviable position of being utterly unable to get so much as a word—much less a shout—in edgewise. But now, he supposed—now, at least one of them was wondering why he’d not much defended himself in the face of so much spite.

Felicity took a deep, shuddering breath as her gaze dropped to her lap.

“Brighton is my home,”

she said at last.

“The school is my home. It has been these last sixteen years. I can’t leave it.”

And there it was. What the rest of them had somehow forgotten. That while their lives had been playing out in parts unknown, so had Felicity’s here in Brighton. Wherever it was she had come from, here she had remained—and the whole of her life was here, too. Everything she had worked for, everything for which she had sacrificed. It was all right here. It wasn’t so simple as shucking off the old and slipping into the new, and no amount of money or power could make it so.

But that, he was certain, was going to be a conversation all of its own, and one in which he would not find himself particularly welcome. And with that, he set down his cup upon the table and rose to his feet. “Well,”

Ian said.

“I’d like to say that it’s been lovely, but as my ears are still ringing, I think I’ll forego the pleasantries.”

Before he could take his leave, Felicity popped to her feet, her cup rattling upon its saucer. “Not yet,”

she said, her breath hitching in her chest.

“It’s been so long. And they’ve come all this way.”

“I’m not ejecting them,”

Ian said.

“This is your home. They can stay as long as you like.”

Another wild hitch of her chest; further evidence of a discomfiture she struggled to mask. A few resolute blinks, probably to stem the sting of tears. She asked, “Really?”

“You don’t require my permission for your family to visit.”

He just wished he’d known of them.

“Neither do you require my supervision. I have business of my own to which to attend, which has gone wanting in light of today’s events. I meant only to leave you to visit in private.”

He resisted the urge to scratch the back of his head, where he could practically feel the baron’s gaze boring into his scalp.

No. Not just the baron. The duke as well. Hard, assessing gazes. Suspicious and no doubt doubly on guard against anything that might cause their wives further distress. Which was Ian, presently.

“We’ll stay as long as you like,”

Mercy said to Felicity.

And damned if it hadn’t rasped across Ian’s ears like a threat.