Page 5 of The Lyon’s Dilemma (The Lyon’s Den Connected World #86)

This was Adaline’s opportunity, but she was not keen to take it. An exclusive viewing of Lord Stillwater’s bed chamber might entail a price she was not prepared to pay.

She was going to have to burgle his room while he was not in it.

Adaline was probably in bed. Of course she was. It was after midnight, but Felix needed to talk to her privately, without anyone noting—and misinterpreting—his interest.

He couldn’t get past her anger. He was the one with the right to be angry, wasn’t he? She had betrayed him, and with the Duke of Richport, of all people. Richport, who was all the things Felix was not—confident, handsome, and wild to a fault.

But she had seemed genuinely hurt he had left without speaking to her, and that he had refused her visit in London and her letters.

He could not have been wrong about what he saw.

It was dark, but her face was clear enough.

And besides, he had spoken to her, when she came to his bedchamber not an hour later, and she had admitted to everything.

“It was just a bit of fun, Kempbury,” she told him. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. What sort of a marriage did you want, anyway?”

She had not sounded at all like herself, but that was the real her, of course.

His stepmother had been the same—all sweetness and light when she wanted him for some reason, and then laughing at him for being taken in.

Again . By the time he was fifteen he had learned not to play her nasty games. Or any woman’s.

But still, Adaline had managed to fool him. Felix felt ill at the thought of it even ten years later.

Unless her behavior that day was some weird aberration.

Perhaps she had lapses. Felix had heard of such a thing—a kind of madness in which the person would act in ways quite contrary to their usual behavior, and then have no memory of it after.

Yet, apart from that once, he had never seen any sign of madness in Adeline.

Again, he wondered if she was the person who should be raising his daughter.

Now, he knocked quietly on her door, and after a few moments, knocked again. When she opened it a bare inch, all he could see of her was one eye showing dark in the light of his candle and the barrel of a small pistol.

“Oh,” she said. “It is you.”

His suspicion surged. “Who were you expecting?” Someone unwanted, by the look of the pistol.

“Lord Stillwater, probably. He was making some very improper suggestions earlier, and I thought he might want to follow up on them. Baron Thrick won’t make another attempt, since I promised to put a bullet in the equipment he suggested I might wish to sample.” She sounded more tired than indignant.

Felix’s reaction was far beyond indignation.

His urge to incapacitate both men was as strong as it was unexpected.

His reason reminded him that the woman standing in front of him was a wanton and a tease, but his instincts were in charge, and those instincts roared that those men had dared to insult his lady.

“I suppose you want to know about Melody,” she said, and opened the door wide. “You had better come in. I don’t want anyone to see you standing there.”

Melody. Yes . “We need to talk.” He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

“Would you care for a brandy?” Adaline asked. “It is to Mrs. Stillwater’s credit that she asks her guests what they prefer, instead of assuming we ladies would prefer ratafia or some other oversweet horror.”

And why not . Felix did not need to be a barbarian about this.

He waited while she poured the drinks, one for each of them, and lit a branch of candles from the one she had taken to the door.

She brought him his drink and then carried her own and the candelabra to the fireplace.

Another man would make polite conversation.

Felix never bothered. He never knew what to say. Even with Adaline, and especially now.

The silence held until they were seated opposite one another on the fireside chairs with their drinks, the candelabra casting a pool of light from the mantelshelf over the fire.

Adaline was the one to speak first. “Kempbury, the woman you saw with Richport was my half-sister, Emmeline. It was not the first time she had pretended to be me so I was blamed for things I did not do, but it was the worst and the last. I have not seen her in years. Indeed, I believe she and my step-mother left for Jamaica shortly after I married Richard Beverley.”

Kempbury had not been certain what she would say, but that wasn’t it. “Your half-sister,” he repeated. “Emmeline.”

“Yes. I didn’t tell you much about her, did I? We have never been friends.”

“She looks so much like you?”

“Very like. Her hair is dark, but she had a wig of hair my color that she used when she pretended to be me. When I found out what other people were saying I had done, I knew it must have been her. I confronted her, of course, but she merely laughed. She was triumphant. Joyous, even.”

Felix didn’t know what to think. Such a convenient explanation, but he had known that Adaline had been raised with her half-sister, and that both that sister and step-mother hated her.

And in support of her contention, he had his own observation that the Adaline who confronted him that night was not the Adaline he thought he knew.

Careful, Kempbury. Women cannot be trusted. His own step-mother had taught him that.

“I tried to tell you,” Adaline said. “If you had met Emmeline and seen how much like me she is, you would have known even then. Her eyes are a different color, and her chin is more pointed. I think, too, that I am a shade taller. But instead, Emmeline won again.” She sounded tired. Even defeated.

The thought consuming his mind was that if she was telling the truth—and he had a terrible, sinking feeling she was— she had not betrayed him.

Instead, he had betrayed her.

“Then I discovered I was with child,” Adaline said.

“I had been looking for proof that Emmeline was the culprit, and I uncovered some other things that had nothing to do with Emmeline’s horrid trick.

Except that one of them was a secret Richard Beverley preferred to keep concealed.

Before the wedding, I wrote to you to tell you about Melody.

When the letter came back unopened…” She shrugged. “I needed to give my daughter a name.”

Felix frowned. “You blackmailed your way into marriage? I understand you must have been desperate, but—”

“Don’t be offensive! If Richard had not known I discovered his secret, I would never have told a soul.

As it was, it was he who suggested the marriage, as a solution to his problem, as well as mine.

I suppose, since he has been dead these seven years, it cannot hurt to tell you, in confidence, that he and his valet were…

very close friends in a way that might have seen them both hanged. ”

“Oh,” said Felix, fighting not to seemed shocked. “I see.”

“It was Richard who told me to write to you the second time, because he said he would not stand in my way if you wanted to marry me instead. But you sent the letter back again. Unopened.”

Felix winced at the grief she managed to express in that last word.

Woman cannot be trusted , old habits said, but his heart insisted that Adaline was telling him the truth.

And after all, hadn’t he recently discovered, as Dorcas and Ben had drawn him into their social group, that his stepmother was by no means typical?

He would trust Dorcas with anything. And her friends Laurel and Seraphina were both cut from the same cloth—ladies of integrity for whom love, not pride, was the driving force of their lives.

Yes, and Mrs. Dove Lyons had a reputation for making marriages that were happy for both parties, and she had sent him to meet Adaline.

“When I thought you were false—when you came to me and laughed at me for thinking you would be faithful—it nearly killed me,” he said.

“Emmeline came to you? Laughed at you? Oh, Felix. I am so sorry.” She leaned forward, bringing her lovely, somber visage closer into the pool of candlelight.

Her brown eyes were full of compassion, and she had not aged at all.

Queenly , he thought, as he had so often during their courtship. Beautiful, to him.

The sorrow in her voice was for him, and almost, it overcame the fears that told him not to believe her.

Speaking for her was the difference in character between the woman he had spent such precious hours with and the woman who had cruelly laughed at his desire for fidelity.

In lamplight, he had not noticed her eye color.

Was her chin pointier that Adaline’s? He hadn’t seen that difference either.

But what if Adaline were telling the truth!

Incredible though the story was, it explained things he had never understood.

“I have spent the past ten years only half-alive. If this is all some vast game, Adaline, I beg of you, tell me now. Have mercy on me, and let me go. For I swear, I will not survive losing you again.” He barely recognized his own voice, strained as it was through all his fears and the pride that wanted him to keep silent.