Page 33 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Ian watched unobtrusively through the bed chamber door as the three women huddled together in the small sitting area near the hearth. They’d been at this rather long talk of theirs all evening, by turns crying and comforting one another—but Felicity was the one who had needed it most.

It was nearing ten, past the time when Felicity would ordinarily have been asleep, and even from this distance he could see the dark circles that wreathed her eyes, the exhaustion that sloped her shoulders. He was going to have to call a halt some point soon, if only to ensure that she did, in fact, sleep.

“You ought to have told us well before now.”

The words, tinged with displeasure, came from somewhere over his left shoulder. One of Felicity’s brothers-in-law—the bespectacled baron. And beside him, the duke. It wasn’t a surprise to find them here now; they’d all been in and out more or less constantly, catching snippets of conversation, ensuring that the ladies had eaten, had had their tea refreshed before it had got the chance to go cold.

Ian stepped away from the open door, retreating into the hall to keep his voice from carrying back into the room.

“I did advise that she ought to have a conversation with her sisters,”

he said.

“But what Felicity chooses to share is her business alone. It wasn’t my decision to make for her.”

“One wonders why, when you’ve made others of more consequence for her.”

The duke this time, his arms folded across his chest, his tone utterly scathing.

He wasn’t wrong. But Ian had come to the same conclusion himself already, and so it was just one more prick of guilt amongst the hundreds of slices of it that had practically flayed the flesh from his bones already.

“Suffice it to say that I’m well aware of my mistakes,”

he said.

“I can’t repair them while making more.”

“That’s a piss poor explanation,”

the duke groused.

“I don’t owe you an explanation.”

But he did owe Felicity one. Several, most likely. And he thought—he thought she might just be ready to listen.

“Collect your wives, if you please. Felicity is exhausted.”

The baron gave an exasperated sigh.

“First, we must discuss how we intend to handle this situation.”

“There is nothing more we can do at present other than what is already being done.”

An unfortunate fact, but a fact nonetheless.

“How much have you learned?”

“Bits and pieces here and there,”

the duke said.

“How much was demanded?”

“Five thousand. We’re not going to pay it.”

Ian risked a peek back through the door, saw Felicity huddled between her sisters, her head pillowed upon Mercy’s shoulder.

“Felicity’s been receiving threatening letters at the school for some time. The amount was made clear—likely to give adequate time to gather the funds—but the date and location were not specified. My suspicion is that they don’t wish us to have information we might use against them in advance. To keep us unprepared, make certain we are unable to plan ahead.”

“So they’ve got to leave another note,”

the baron said.

“If they expect to receive payment? Yes. But the school is being watched. So is the house. It doesn’t matter where they deliver the note; the moment they do, they’re done for.”

“What do you intend to do with her, then? Their—”

The duke hesitated just briefly.

“Their mother, I mean to say.”

“That’s up to Felicity and her sisters,”

Ian said.

“But if they cannot abide hanging, I’ll press for transportation. Whatever will make certain she is never a threat to any of them again.”

But it wasn’t his decision. He hadn’t been harmed by the woman—they had. They all had, one way or another, even if Felicity now bore the brunt of it.

“I can scarcely credit it,”

the baron mused to himself, with a rueful shake of his head.

“What sort of woman—what sort of mother—would ever think to extort her own children?”

“The sort of mother who abandoned them in the first place,”

Ian said. And now, he thought, he understood Felicity at last. Understood how deeply he’d hurt her all those years ago.

He’d left her, too. By inches, by hours. With his neglect, with his condescension. He’d left her long before she’d left him, and he hadn’t even had to leave to do it. He’d starved her of his attention, even of his presence, until he’d killed off the last of the trust she’d had in him.

Only in retrospect had he been able to truly see how many times he had brushed off her concerns, how many chances she had offered to him despite them. Was it too much to hope for only one more?

∞∞∞

“In bed with you. You’re dead on your feet.”

At Ian’s urging, Felicity teetered on unsteady legs toward the bed, half-collapsing across it as she tried to gather the strength to crawl toward her side. Just now, in the fatigue following hours and hours of explanations and confessions and so damned many tears, it seemed an insurmountable task. She didn’t even know how she was going to summon the will to change out of her day dress when there wasn’t the least energy left in her.

The thick of the silence that followed was broken only by the sound of the coal scuttle being lifted from its place, the dull clatter of coals replenishing those which had burned away in the hours she’d sat before the hearth with her sisters.

Such a small thing. Done just so she’d stay warm through the night, even if the cold had never bothered him the same way it had bothered her. She’d thought she’d exhausted herself of every last bit of emotion, but her heart wrung itself once more in a vicious squeeze, and a few last tears slipped free, sliding down her cheeks to blot upon the soft velvet counterpane beneath her.

A soft rustle of fabric as something white and light and airy landed upon the bed beside her. Ian’s fingers plucked at the laces of her dress.

“Hold still,”

he said, though she was hardly inclined to struggle at the moment.

“We’ve got to get you changed for bed.”

We. As if she were capable of any effort toward the task. As if it were a problem they tackled together, rather than one he accomplished despite her, fighting her limp, pliant limbs to pull the sleeves from her arms and to slide the dress off over her legs. The laces of her stays loosened, and for the first time that evening she felt she could draw a full breath at last. She turned her head to stare at the frill of linen that he’d dropped beside her. She said.

“That’s not my nightgown.”

“No. It’s new.”

The stays fell away from her back, remaining trapped beneath her.

“I didn’t think you’d mind.”

The chill of the air hit her legs as he stripped off her petticoat, and she shivered in only the thin fabric of her chemise.

“I need you to sit up for a moment,”

he said as he gingerly rolled her to her back, pulled at her shoulders to help her sit upright.

“Only for a moment. I promise.”

“I never had a fitting,”

Felicity said, her voice slightly muffled by the fabric of her chemise as he pulled it off over her head.

“How could you have known what to order?”

“I had the measurements taken from one of your old dresses,”

he said.

“They fit you well enough; it seemed a reasonable method to employ. Lift your arms.”

Somehow she managed to drag her arms over her head, allowing him to slip on the new nightgown. “Why?”

she asked.

“Because you were embarrassed at the theatre,”

he said.

“You shouldn’t have been. But you were, and I didn’t want you to be embarrassed again.”

He twitched the nightgown down over her hips, and the feather-soft fabric bunched over her thighs.

“You don’t like the theatre,”

she accused.

“Not particularly. But you do. When you go—if you go—I don’t want you feeling as though you don’t belong.”

Her eyes stung anew.

A sniffle dredged itself up from her lungs on the heels of a shuddering breath.

Her shoulders fell into a slump that would have given Nellie conniptions, her head bowing as Ian dropped to his knees before her to relieve her of her shoes and stockings.

She didn’t belong, and even the thought felt like—like a grand ceding to some great universal truth which had gnawed at her heart for years.

Decades, even.

She had never belonged.

Not anywhere; not really.

The house into which she had been born had been more battlefield than home, more prison than refuge.

Nellie’s school had been the closest she’d ever come to a true home, and she had tried so damned hard to make herself fit into it.

To claw out a place for herself.

But the only constant had been Nellie herself.

Everyone else—everyone else had left.

Staff coming and going like the turn of the seasons; students cycling through their years in residence until they had left to begin their own lives, diverted by marriages and children.

And she had always been left behind, desperately clutching at the only stable thing she had ever known; the school to which she had devoted so much of her life.

And even that was so much less hers now than once it had been.

So gently, so carefully, Ian lifted her legs from their lax dangle over the side of the bed, tucked her beneath the soft velvet counterpane.

She ended up somewhere in the middle of the bed, too battered, too weary even to shuffle far enough to place her head upon her own pillow.

Ian slid in beside her, maintaining—as he always did—a discreet distance between them.

For a moment she felt the warmth of his hand hovering just above her shoulder, reluctant to touch her without permission.

Reluctant, in this moment, even to ask it of her.

So she asked instead.

“Will you hold me?”

There was a palpable relief in the sigh he gave.

“Always. Whenever you need. Whenever you like.”

Gingerly he slid one arm beneath her head, draped the other over her waist.

The heat of his chest was at her back, warming her through the soft fabric of her nightgown.

For a moment, he felt like a shield against the bitter wind of the world that had buffeted her about too often, leaving her forever reeling from one loss to the next.

How long had she desired something solid, something stable? Something warm that belonged to her alone.

She said, in a fragile little voice.

“You were meant to be the one who stayed.”

“I know.”

A quiet acknowledgment. Just simple acceptance of that fact which she’d let languish in that silence that had stretched between them for years.

“I learned it too late.”

“You were supposed to choose me.”

Only speaking the words cracked open some part of her heart she’d locked away ages ago.

His palm flattened over her stomach.

“I thought I was,”

he said softly.

“I thought I was choosing the best possible future for us—for you—even if it meant waiting to marry until I had made a place for myself. I’m ashamed to say I did not realize that in the doing of it, I had sacrificed a place for us.”

His chin notched itself atop her head.

“We had such dreams, you and I. I wanted you to have all of them.”

A raw little sniffle.

“You changed,”

she said.

“You became someone I no longer recognized. So determined to become a success.”

His fingertips toyed with a loose curl that had fallen across the pillows, rubbing it between them.

“I wanted to be someone you could be proud of. Felicity, you were already so far above me; educated and decorous and well-spoken. And I—I had nothing to recommend me. Not a name of any renown, not a proper education, not even a particularly lucrative profession. I thought I needed to prove myself. To show you that I would endeavor to be deserving.”

“I never asked you to prove yourself to me.”

“No, you didn’t. You asked for so little. And I wanted you to have everything I thought you deserved. It never occurred to me to ask what you wanted until it was far too late to change those mistakes I’d made.”

The pressure of his arm over her waist increased, and he shifted minutely, his lips brushing the top of her head.

“I am sorry for them. For making you believe that I valued position and prestige above you. For making you feel that I was leaving you behind. I’ve wanted to tell you for years. But you would never let me.”

Because she’d lost all faith in him.

And now, in retrospect, she found herself considering that perhaps she had never had terribly much of it to begin with.

It hadn’t been his fault; her lack of faith.

Whatever predisposition toward it she had once had had begun to crumble long before they’d met.

The moment she’d felt herself cast aside once again, she’d washed her hands of him, unwilling to risk her heart again.

There had been nothing he could have said that she would have cared to hear.

She knew what building trust looked like, because Nellie had done it a bit at a time over a process of years.

But she had never learned what rebuilding trust looked like, because no one had ever bothered.

And yet—and yet she thought she might know it now.

It looked like fresh coal laid in the hearth before he retired only to keep her toes warm at night.

It looked like a library filled with a decade’s worth of books he’d never intended to read himself.

It looked like a garden painstakingly refashioned every spring in the faint hope that she would one day see it.

It looked like remembering her favorite beef pasties and inviting her family to stay despite the fact that they’d descended upon him like a pack of wolves.

It looked like keeping her secrets even when he thought it ill-advised.

It looked like consideration for its own sake, without expectation of gratitude.

She thought most of all it looked something like the ring that sat once more upon the nightstand, which had been precious to him and still surrendered to her to do with as she pleased.

“I’m afraid,”

he admitted in a low voice, and she heard the vulnerability in it. Like it was weapon he had forged himself and placed directly into her hands.

“There has never been a moment I didn’t love you. I’m so afraid that there is nothing I can do to make you believe that.”

The whisk of a sigh from somewhere above her head, a wistful little sound that held the same conflict and uncertainty she carried in her heart.

“I still have hope for it. There are moments when I think…”

His voice faded away, and a long moment passed in silence. At last he said.

“You’ve never liked roasted chestnuts. Would it be too much to hope that they were intended for me?”

“Does it matter? I didn’t manage to purchase them.”

Mama’s appearance had sent her reeling. She’d forgotten her purpose entirely, had clambered back into the carriage without having gotten what she’d gone for, and her only thought—

Her only thought had been getting home again. To Ian. Not to her sisters; not to her family. But to Ian. She’d gone to his office directly, knowing he would be there. Knowing he would comfort her.

“It matters very much to me.”

There was a tiny quaver in his voice, the faintest ring of hope. He hadn’t assumed; they could just as easily have been intended for Charity or Mercy. But he’d hoped.

She said, a touch defensively.

“I never gave you a Christmas gift.”

“I never expected one of you.”

There was a note of pleasure in his voice. Small, subtle. But undeniably there.

“Thank you,” he said.

Something so insignificant as roasted chestnuts, and he was grateful for it.

“Don’t thank me,”

she muttered, feeling rather small and petty.

“I didn’t buy them.”

“The thought is as good as the deed.”

She’d long thought that only a phrase used by those who wished to mask their disappointment. But he’d sounded as if he’d meant it. It was enough that she’d thought to do it. More than he’d expected of her, which struck her as rather sad. He was happy enough with a thought—just a thought. The thinnest shred of evidence that he had crossed her mind at some point in the day.

“I’ll wait for you,”

he said softly.

“I’ve waited ten years already.”

He adjusted his arm, winding it around her beneath her own, his warm hand cupping hers.

“Go to sleep,”

he urged.

“It’s late.”

“I don’t know if I can,”

she whispered. Exhaustion weighed heavily upon her, but anxiety roiled beneath it. Even between blinks, Mama’s self-satisfied smirk flashed before her closed eyes.

“I’m so frightened.”

“Felicity—”

“She never cared for any of us at all,”

she said.

“She named me, and she didn’t know me. I was just…the most convenient daughter to use. The easiest to ruin.”

And she would do it if she could. Because she could.

“I won’t let that happen.”

He sounded so certain, and she desperately wanted to believe it.

“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”

Gentle fingers stroked her hair.

“Just sleep,”

he said.

“Sleep, and let me do the worrying for both of us.”

How lovely that sounded; as if her worries were merely an object she might set into his hands to carry for her when they had proved too cumbersome to bear herself. How many times had he reached out to her in this manner, extending a hand in offer which she had slapped away? Probably he had come to expect a rebuff—and still it had never stopped him from offering.

“All right,”

she said, and felt herself relax a fraction. A fragment of trust extended; the first freshly-constructed moorings of a bridge that had burnt years ago.

“All right,”

she said again, turning her cheek into the pillow.

And she did sleep. Safely, dreamlessly, straight through until dawn.