Page 28 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

I would like to speak with the gardener.”

Ian jerked his head up, wincing at the pull of tight muscles in his neck. There was the threat of a headache behind his eyes, and he blinked through the dim light toward the door of his office, where Felicity had somehow slipped in unnoticed. How late had it gotten? She ought to have been abed already. She was dressed for it, at least, in a red silk wrapper she’d likely borrowed from one of her sisters. The duchess, he thought.

“It’s late,”

he said, rubbing at the back of his neck as he set his pen down upon his desk.

“You should be abed.”

Contrarily, she sidled in further, pressing the door closed behind her and folding her arms over her chest.

“We had an agreement,”

she said, and he could not tell by the carefully-neutral tone of her voice which way her emotions skewed this evening.

“I still owe you an hour.”

“I’ll forgive it.”

It had come out a bit more gruffly than he had wished, but he’d been working for hours already, and enduring rather unsubtle jabs from the men—the peers—she called brothers-in-law whilst endeavoring to be pleasant and civil in return, and the whole damned evening had been fucking exhausting.

Probably he would forgive every hour she owed him while her sisters were in residence, though. If only because it was one more hour she could spend with them, and he thought—he thought she must need that. He’d seen that expression she had worn when she had arrived, heard that tiny little sound she’d made. Disbelief; delight. Gratitude. Love.

That last one had been particularly painful to witness. She’d once given it to him.

Another few steps toward the desk, her feet soundless on the floor. An awkward little roll of her shoulders.

“You do that rather a lot,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Make allowances. Fail to hold me accountable to the terms of our bargain.”

“Would you prefer I did not make such allowances?”

“I would prefer to know why,”

she said.

“I would prefer to know—”

She stopped herself, her lips pinching shut tightly. Her arms unfolded, and she stretched out one hand to touch the back of the chair set before his desk, as if she needed the stability of something solid beneath her fingers.

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“I did leave,”

he said, his brows drawing.

“But your damned brothers-in-law followed me. They took their leave perhaps an hour or so ago—”

“No, not today.”

She gave a little shake of her head, and a curl slipped free from behind her ear, bobbing over her shoulder, rolling across the scarlet silk that clung there.

“Years ago. Why didn’t you leave Brighton?”

“There was nothing I wanted in London.”

“There was a position,”

she said, with a sharp jab of her chin in his direction, resentment scrawled upon the taunt line of her jaw.

“The potential of bigger and better things for you.”

“I’ll rephrase. There was nothing that mattered in London.”

“Don’t say that.”

Her chin notched up, her green eyes narrowing.

“Don’t you dare say that now!”

“What else would you have me say?”

God, his head ached. Ian pressed his fingertips to his temples and rubbed. He’d told her she could leave. That he would forgive the hour she owed. Still she had stayed, taunted him with her scorn—and it had just been such a long damned day.

“What else would you have me say?”

he repeated.

“Do you know how long it took me to realize what a terrible mistake I had made after you left that last evening? Seven minutes.”

Seven minutes in which he had been first stunned by her defection, then mortified by his actions, and then at last terrified that he’d ruined the most important thing in his life.

“Seven minutes, and I’ve relived them every day since.”

“It wasn’t just one mistake.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was a succession of them, one after another, and foolishly, I could only see them in retrospect. I wanted so badly to give you everything I thought you deserved that I let myself forget about what you wanted. So, no, I didn’t go to London. I realized it wasn’t important. That my place was here.”

It had set him back a bit. London had offered more opportunities. But Felicity hadn’t been willing to see him, to speak with him, and he’d had nothing but time to work, first in banking, and then in investments. He’d amassed a fortune anyway, and he’d never needed London to do it. A pyrrhic victory at best.

“Rather bold of you to say this now.”

“It has to be now. You asked,”

he reminded her.

“You asked, and you never did before. You never cared before.”

He didn’t know why she cared now. But it needed to be said. And she needed to hear it.

“The very next day, I bought a ring. Very small, very plain. Only a few stones, and not of any particular quality or value. It was all I could afford at the time. I believe it sits now upon the nightstand.”

He saw the moment the implication struck, heard the little breath she drew in.

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“I can afford better now,”

he said.

“But that ring—it means something to me.”

It meant faith held when she’d long since dropped it. It meant years of anguish endured because he’d never been able to imagine a life without her. It meant he’d committed himself to loving her better, in the way that she’d needed him to.

Except he hadn’t expected it to take ten years to reach this point. And he was still making mistakes. Better wasn’t good enough; he needed to learn how to love her best.

“The garden,”

he said.

“It wasn’t meant to hurt you. I knew what you wanted. You’d told me, after all, and I had the sketch to show for it. I only wanted you to have it.”

When he’d defaulted upon so many other promises. When she no longer trusted him to keep them. It had been one thing, one small thing, intended to show her he’d learned to listen at last.

Her fingers had curved over the back of the chair, nails pressing into the varnished wood.

“Still, I would like to speak to the gardener,”

she reiterated.

“You are speaking to the gardener,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

Ian threw up his hands.

“I don’t employ a gardener,”

he said.

“There’s only me. I built the garden. Every bit of it, with my own hands. There was no one else I’d trust to create what you wanted. The flowers that are not perennials I replant every spring. I weed the beds. I trim the hedges. I train the goddamned wisteria to grow as you envisioned it.”

For a moment she was utterly silent, still and quiet as the grave. And then, finally, she slid down into the chair, an inch at a time. In the protracted hush, she settled her hands in her lap, fingers nervously plucking at the silk of her wrapper, then smoothing the fabric once more. At long last, after an eon or more in which he had watched a half-dozen thoughts traipsed across her mind and flee just as quickly, she said.

“I didn’t want you to build me a garden. I wanted to build one together.”

Oh. Hell, he’d got it all wrong. He was still getting it wrong, still making and remaking the same damned mistakes that had sent her running to begin with.

“I didn’t know,”

he said, although the truth was something more like he simply hadn’t understood.

“I’ll tear it up for you in the spring.”

But it occurred to him, as that silence stretched out once more between them, that she hadn’t had to tell him that. That she could have let him suffer for his own ignorance indefinitely. Perhaps it was more an olive leaf than an olive branch, but it was still something. Something she hadn’t owed to him, and which she’d offered anyway, that he might take from it a better understanding of her.

“I would have been happy with only a kitchen garden,”

she said, a telling thickness to her voice.

“A box for herbs on a window sill, even.”

His chest ached to hear it. Probably—probably she had told him as much a dozen times or more in the past. And he hadn’t ever truly listened, because he’d wanted so badly to make real all of those dreams she had once cherished. Did they mean anything at all to her, anymore.

“I do want you to be happy, Felicity.”

A strange little sigh slipped past her lips, and her lashes lowered over her eyes.

“Sometimes I think that some people just aren’t meant for happiness,” she said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because there hasn’t been a shred of it to exist in my life that I’ve managed to keep hold of.”

She tilted her head back, pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose.

“Did you tell my family about the letters I’ve been receiving?”

So there had been more.

“I’ve told them nothing,”

he said.

“What you wish for them to know is your business. I’ve never betrayed your secrets; I don’t intend to begin now.”

He hesitated.

“Felicity, we can’t pay off your extortionist. They’d just spend whatever we gave them and come round again with new threats for more money later. It would never end.”

“You’re certain of that?”

she asked quietly, her gaze dropping to her lap.

“When you pay off an extortionist,”

he said.

“you give the impression you’re guilty of whatever accusation is being slung at you—whether you are or are not. Our best bet is to instead uncover the villain’s identity.”

Absently his fingers curled once more around his pen, fidgeting with the object.

“Probably it would have occurred to me earlier, had I known you had siblings,”

he said.

“But today I had to wonder why you were targeted.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean to say the letter clearly meant to make some reference to your past. But you’ve been Felicity Cabot as long as I’ve known you. Whatever it meant to imply, it’s ancient gossip from when you were little more than a girl. From even before you were a student at Mrs. Lewis’ school. By all rights, it ought to be equally dangerous to your sisters. Have they mentioned any such letters?”

Felicity’s brow furrowed.

“No; not to my recollection.”

“Would they have done, if they had received them?”

“Yes, of course. Charity, Mercy—they would have warned me.”

“So it is only you,”

he said.

“You, despite the fact that your sisters also have the means to pay such a sum.”

They had, after all, offered to buy her a new school building outright.

“Out of all of you, you’re in the most precarious position. Newly married, working in a school where a good reputation is everything.”

Felicity hunched her shoulders.

“Charity has got a particular friend,”

she said, tentatively.

“A former patron, in fact, who was once a rather notorious criminal. I cannot imagine he would take it kindly were Charity to find herself the victim of extortion.”

“She is also a duchess,”

he said.

“And Mercy a baroness. One does not, as a general rule, threaten members of the peerage with extortion without careful consideration. So I must assume that you were chosen because of your own position. Not protected by a noble title and the headmistress of a school whose reputation could be sullied rather easily and to devastating effect.”

But she had considered that already; it was written into the wariness of her eyes, etched into the tense line of her jaw. The last bit of happiness to which she had laid claim, now about to be snatched straight out of her hands just like every other.

“Would you tell me?”

he asked.

“How it is you came to be Felicity Cabot?”

Not a demand. Not an order. Only a question, rendered without judgment, without the presumption of guilt.

“I was of the impression”—because she had told him once, and he now knew that she had lied—“that your uncle was your last remaining relative.”

A long, hard swallow as her lips contorted into a grimace.

“He wasn’t my uncle,”

she said.

“That is—we told everyone he was, Charity and I, because neither of us had yet reached our majority. But he wasn’t our uncle. He was our neighbor in London; a military surgeon. But he was a kind man, and a generous one. He patched me up altogether too often, after—after Father flew into one of his rages.”

Christ.

“And did he fly into rages often?”

A small nod.

“He hated us,”

she said.

“Charity especially. She was too strong-willed, too stubborn, and she resembled our mother far too closely for Father’s liking. But he could not make her bend to his will with violence, and so he made me bend instead. He could control Charity by striking out at me.”

He’d done more than that, Ian suspected. He’d made her break. His fingers curled around his pen, gripping until his knuckles had gone white, until the pen threatened to snap in the relentless pressure of his fist.

“That’s why—that night on the street, after the theatre—”

A shudder worked its way down her spine, and the green of her eyes grew brighter, misted with tears.

“I freeze,”

she said simply.

“I always freeze. I don’t know why. It just…happens. It has ever since I was a child.”

Ever since she was a child, when her own father had beaten her to the point that she had required patching up.

“I’ll kill him.”

The words crawled out of his throat with a sort of hateful vehemence that provoked a ragged little laugh from her.

“He’s already dead,”

she said in hoarse croak.

“He died in October. Charity gave him a macabre parody of a funeral. She got me away from him,”

she said.

“She got herself away, too, but I was just fifteen and she had no income that would allow her to care for me. The surgeon—Mr. Bell—kindly arranged for me to come here to Brighton beneath an assumed name, so that Father wouldn’t find me.”

By the reedy tone of her voice, Ian suspected that she had never stopped fearing he would somehow find her anyway.

“And Charity went to work beneath Mr. Bell in recompense for what he had done for us. For me, in particular.”

“So you stayed behind in Brighton. As Felicity Cabot.”

“I’ve been Felicity Cabot longer than I was ever Felicity Nightingale,”

she said.

“Charity saved my life. Being Felicity Cabot saved my life. The last time—the last time I saw Father, he nearly killed me. I think we both knew he would, eventually. Charity and I, I mean to say.”

“And Mercy, I assume.”

Her fingers linked in her lap, flexing uncomfortably.

“No, not Mercy,”

she said.

“We didn’t…know about Mercy, then. Mercy didn’t know about us.”

What.

“But she’s your sister.”

“Half-sister. Through our mother.”

She drew a sharp breath, unnaturally loud in the quiet of the office.

“Our mother left us,”

she said in a rush.

“when I was still very small. She married Mercy’s father, but it wasn’t…the marriage wasn’t a legal one, if you take my meaning. And she abandoned Mercy, too, eventually, just as she had abandoned us. Charity and I—we have no idea, no way of knowing, whether her marriage to our father was her first, whether it was even legal. We have no way of knowing how many other half-siblings we might have, whether our mother might have married again. And I think somehow—somehow, someone has found it out.”

Christ.

A scandal not of her own making, but one that had been brewing around her for decades.

One which might have begun before she had even been born.

And her sisters…they were more or less insulated from it by the positions they had married into, by the independence they had acquired and the wealth they had accrued.

Felicity was the only one to have been left so vulnerable.

A baroness and a duchess could shake off a scandal like that.

But Felicity ran a school, one that had been for some years in a precarious position.

Even if this scandal had not been of her making, still the taint of it would cling to her.

A bigamist for a mother, an illegitimate half-sister, another sister who had once been a renowned courtesan—and Felicity herself who had been only a lost, wounded girl who had lived half her life beneath an assumed name for her own protection.

The reasons for it wouldn’t matter half so much as the gossip surrounding it; there would be just as many ready to paint her a woman of suspect morality simply for the fact that she had gone into hiding.

For what had been done by others too closely connected to her. She had become a calculated target, no doubt chosen for the vulnerability her sisters lacked.

“None of this is your fault,”

he said. And in truth, it wasn’t even her responsibility. But that did not mean she wouldn’t be held accountable for it regardless.

“I know you are worried, but I promise you—I am going to find whoever is responsible.”

He wanted so badly to reach for her hand, the one that plucked nervously at the cuff of her sleeve.

“Probably there will be another letter. There were no instructions for delivery in the last. No time, no date, no location.”

“They always come to the school,”

she blurted out.

“Not with the regular mail; not postmarked. Someone has been putting them through the mail slot.”

“I have men watching the school at all hours, and have ever since that last note.”

If he had known it had been necessary, he’d have posted them earlier.

“I never noticed.”

“You weren’t meant to. They’re discreet and unobtrusive; they’d hardly be useful otherwise. They work in shifts and alternate days. Suffice it to say that they ought not to present as suspicious or dangerous to anyone with a vested interest in remaining unobserved.”

Ian hesitated.

“I intend to meet with my solicitor, if you would care to join me.”

“For what purpose?”

There was a fearful tightness about her eyes, a reticence at the thought. That she might be called to explain herself, he supposed, to someone less sympathetic.

“Whoever is attempting to extort you may well follow through on their threat,”

he said.

“If they cannot extort money from us, then there is the possibility that they will attempt to profit however they can. Most likely by selling what they know to any publication willing to purchase the right to print it.”

“Sell?”

Her voice shrilled high, and her brows winged upward with it.

“You don’t mean—”

“Felicity. It’s all right.”

His restraint snapped; he stretched his hand across the desk, offering it to her. And to his surprise, she untangled the knot she’d made of her own fingers to set one hand in his.

“It’s all right,”

he said again.

“It’s unlikely that any publication will be willing to print such a thing, and they are even less likely to pay for the privilege of it. I only need my solicitor to make it plain that I would be exceptionally displeased were anyone to do so.”

Her cold fingers gripped his like a lifeline.

“And you can do that?”

As easily as he could have ruined the Marchants had they proved obdurate.

“I never have before; I’ve not much cared what anyone has said of me. Which is why I must make it exceedingly clear that I do care what is said of you. I won’t have you slandered for ancient bits of gossip that aren’t remotely your responsibility. I’ll buy the damned publications if I must.”

Her free hand shook as she lifted it to her face, swiping at her eyes.

“I don’t—I don’t want to lose the school,”

she said in such a fragile little voice that it fairly splintered his heart. A bit of vulnerability given over to him. Just the tiniest fragment of trust.

“I know.”

It had been her home for so many years. More of a home than she’d ever had, in all likelihood.

“You won’t. I’ll see to it that you don’t.”

When she let her hand fall from her face, her lashes were left spiky with the last traces of tears she had managed to scrub away. She gave a fierce sniffle and set her shoulders.

“I don’t hate you,”

she admitted finally.

“I know that, too.”

But still it warmed him to hear her say it. Even if he had already known it, he suspected it had taken no small amount of courage to admit it to herself—much less to him.

“Felicity, it doesn’t matter what your name is or was. It doesn’t matter where you come from or who your parents were or what scandals they might have caused. I already know what matters. I know who you truly are.”

A small squeeze of her cold fingers, which he hoped she would find reassuring.

“Now go to bed,”

he said at last.

“I’ve still got some documents to look over, and I’ve the devil of a headache, besides.”

“Oh.”

With an odd little sound, she extracted her fingers from his.

“I’m sorry to have intruded upon you.”

“Don’t be. You’re welcome whenever you please. It’s just been a difficult day all around.”

As she rose from her chair, he bent his head over the paperwork he’d abandoned, attempting to sort out where, exactly, he’d left off before she’d come in.

“I expect I’ll be quite late—”

The scent of lavender wafted to his nose. She hadn’t headed for the door as he’d expected—she’d rounded the desk instead. He froze as her warm lips touched his cheek, and for a moment he fancied they’d lingered a fraction of a second longer than he had any right at all to expect of her.

“Good night,”

she said softly as she turned to leave.

Ian watched her go, lifting one hand to touch that spot high on his cheek where he could still feel the pressure of her lips, wishing he’d never made that bargain with her to begin with. Because now, when it felt most important, it was impossible to know for certain whether it had been obligation or some small sliver of affection.

∞∞∞

Felicity curled up beneath the counterpane and peered through the dim light provided by the flickering flames in the hearth that grew steadily weaker with each passing moment. The room would begin to chill soon, but she supposed it didn’t much matter.

Ian would feed the fire before he retired for the evening. He always did. Only so her toes wouldn’t grow too cold for comfort.

She had rather a lot of thinking to do. Rather a lot of odd, displaced emotions shaking about in her chest like too many birds stuffed into too small a cage, fighting to get out. Anger, she thought, was the largest of them. The one that wanted to punch and scream, to rail against the cruelness of the world, the injustice. To be surly and cross, to wallow in the unhappiness it wore like an extravagant evening gown; all glittering spite and sparkling malice.

She’d done that for ten years already and it had ceased to serve her. In fact, it had only kept her rooted to the past, immobile, incapable of moving forward. She had been entitled to that anger, had earned it. And Ian—Ian had let her have it, let her wallow in it. With every action, he had affirmed her right to it. Acknowledged it. Accepted it. Even at her most furious, her most hostile and aggressive and volatile, he’d never suggested through word or deed that she wasn’t perfectly justified in it.

He’d let her lash out at him, had collected every bit of her vitriol, every ounce of her hatred, and just…held it for her. Owned it. She hadn’t realized how cleansing it had become, how freeing to have it siphoned off a bit at a time. To have other hands hold it for her, so it did not sit so heavily within her chest. Ian’s hands, singeing themselves on the heat of those smoldering coals, so that they burned her heart a little less.

In the dying light of the fire, a rogue glint—from an object half-buried beneath a handkerchief she had discarded upon the nightstand, and dangerously close to the very edge—caught her eye. The ring she’d forgotten; the one Ian had given her on the occasion of their wedding. She’d hardly spared it a moment’s thought since, and yet…and yet she suspected Ian had thought of it a great deal. Perhaps not only over the last few weeks. Perhaps for the last several years.

In retrospect, it occurred to her that she’d scarcely even glanced at it when it had, however briefly, adorned her finger. The only true impression it had made upon her was to have been unexpectedly underwhelming, and that only because of the incongruity of the rather plain band when contrasted with the opulence apparent in all other facets of Ian’s life. She simply hadn’t thought it of any particular significance. But now—

Curiosity won out. Felicity shuffled across the empty expanse of the bed, slid one arm out from beneath the tangle she’d made of the covers, and reached through the darkness for the glint of the ring on the nightstand. Cold gold fell into the clasp of her fingers, and she held it up before her eyes.

Four gems. Four tiny gems set into the band in a single line, and they looked…odd. Mismatched, of differing colors. An unusual ring to say the least, but then if Ian were to be believed, they weren’t of any particularly high quality. Probably the value of the gold, even thin as it was, eclipsed the value of the gems. It was impossible to tell, in such dim lighting, what sort of gems they might be.

Ah, well. Perhaps Charity would know. She’d received enough gifts of jewels over the course of her career to have acquired a creditable acumen for identifying them. With a sigh, Felicity reached out to set the ring back upon the nightstand—careful, this time, to place it well away from the edge upon which it had teetered these last weeks.