Page 6 of The Lyon’s Dilemma (The Lyon’s Den Connected World #86)

F elix had broken her heart again, but this time it broke for him. She should have realized how deeply Emmeline’s deception would have hurt him. She knew how his step-mother had played on his emotions.

Indeed, after they had spent all one long afternoon talking about their childhoods, she had concluded that hers was better experience, since her step-mother’s behavior was completely predictable—all sweet kindness while in the presence of her father and all cold cruelty in his absence.

Felix had never known what to expect. His step-mother had eventually had him exiled, but prior to that, she blew hot and cold, treating him as her own and a favorite at that, and then switching in a moment to screaming abuse or icy punishment.

“Felix,” Adaline said now, leaning forward to touch his hands.

“I am speaking the truth. I loved you. I would never have been unfaithful to you, even if you had not meant more to me than life itself. I am so sorry you were hurt because Emmeline chose to use you as a weapon against me.” Adaline frowned.

“How stupid you must have thought me to go to all that trouble to catch a duke and then to ruin it at the last minute for a tom cat on the prowl like Richport.”

From the arrested look on Felix’s face, that had not occurred to him.

“You would not have done it,” he said, sounding impressed by the revelation.

“If your goal was to catch a duke, you had one. And I was a much better prospect than Richport. Everyone knows he will not marry again, and would never be faithful if he did marry. I didn’t think of that.

I don’t think I thought at all, Adaline.

And I have lost us ten years because I let your sister fool me. ”

He turned his hands so he could clasp hers. “Is it too late for us? Tell me you are willing to try again, Adaline. For Melody’s sake, if not for mine?”

Fear rose in her, so potent that it choked her for a moment, then the yearning and anxiety in his eyes freed her tongue. “I am afraid, Felix.”

“I let you down,” he said. “I should have listened to you.”

Knowing now how Emmeline had mocked him, Adaline understood why he had turned her away. “You thought you had already listened to me, and that I had laughed in your face.”

“My brain was trying to tell me it wasn’t you. Something was off. Her expressions, the words she chose. What she said. I thought you had been putting on an act while we were courting.”

“If only I had told you how Emmeline used to pretend to be me. You might have questioned what you saw, if you’d known about her tricks.”

“We cannot change the past, my darling,” Felix said. “Can we start again? Can we build a future?”

“Not for Melody’s sake. Or, at least, not only for her sake. For mine, Felix, for my heart has been yours and only yours since the day we met.”

“It is the same with me,” Felix agreed. “For all three of us then, we will marry? You will be mine at last?”

“We will marry. I have always been yours, Felix, and now the world will know it.”

“But not, I think, your sister,” Felix cautioned. “Not, at least, until I have my ring on your finger.”

“She is in Jamaica,” Adaline said. “Or, at least, that was where they intended to head. My father owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. My half-sister’s mother insisted they had been left to her.” She grimaced. “I wanted no part of them, in any case. The workers are slaves.”

“We agreed on that, I remember,” Felix said.

“But too many people in the United Kingdom make huge incomes from the sugar trade. We finally managed to ban the abominable trade in slaves throughout the British empire, but slave labor? When it is far away across the Atlantic and the people who want sweet tea and sweet treats do not have to see the price those poor people pay? We shall ban it in the end, Adaline, but it will take years, perhaps decades.”

“I fear you are right. In any case, I did not challenge Mrs. Fairbanks’ claim.

” As a bastard daughter, she was unlikely to have won against her father’s widow.

It would have been a waste of the little money she had, and despite her relative poverty, she had never regretted it.

Mind you, Adaline, if you and Melody had really been destitute, it might have been a different story.

“I remember,” Felix said again. “When your stepmother turned you out, you took your inheritance from your father and used it to give yourself a season. Which was how you met me. You were concerned about not having enough if you did not find a husband, Adaline. I hope this Richard Beverley left you comfortably situated.”

Not at all. “Richard’s entailed estate went to his second cousin, and his personal effects were left to his valet,” Adaline replied. “I support us from my business. I am a private investigator, Felix.” She sounded proud, she realized. Well, that was fair. She was proud of what she had achieved.

“A private investigator? You mean, like a Bow Street Runner?”

“Not exactly. I help people find things out, I suppose you would say.” Adaline told Felix about trying to find out what Emmeline had done, and how, after Richard died, she managed to piece together several clues to find out who had been stealing trinkets at the local manor, thereby exonerating the governess.

“Women will often tell other women things they would never mention to a man,” she said.

“I have been able to make quite a nice living for us, thanks to my business. In fact, I am on a case at the moment.”

His eyes widened and he looked around the room as if looking for what she sought. “Here? At this house party?”

“Yes, my client obtained my invitation, though I have no idea how. I shall have to tell her that I do not need my fee.” Whoever Mrs. Dove Lyon had lined up to match her with, she was marrying Felix.

“If you’ve earned the money, you should take it,” Felix said.

“Oh, it is not money. I suppose I am not breaking my client’s confidence if I tell you.

I had decided it was time to marry again, to give Melody a father and myself the chance to have more children.

I went to a matchmaker and offered her my savings.

She said that she would make a match for me if I would retrieve something for her. ”

“What do you mean?” Felix asked. Retrieve what?

She told him. “That is why I am here—to fetch the scroll and tooth for Mrs. Dove Lyon so she will make a match for me.” She paused. “No matter who he may be, I want you to know—I will only marry you. You are the man for me, and always have been.”

He sighed, and she supposed felt the same “Mrs. Dove Lyon,” Felix said, somewhat grimly. “So that was it. Adaline, I went to her, too, looking for a wife. I have been lonely for so long —it seems my whole life, except for those few weeks of our courtship.”

“ You went to Mrs. Dove Lyon?” Adaline asked.

She had heard that men were often tricked into marrying one of Mrs. Dove Lyon’s brides, all of whom, like her, had some count against them. Scandal, lack of birth, something. She had not heard of a man willingly employing the matchmaker’s services, though she could see how it would appeal.

Felix told her about his half-brother’s widow and the way Dorcas had eloped with Vespasian straight from the schoolroom, and had followed the drum with him. Augustus, Felix’s other half-brother, had persecuted her, and lied about her to his mother and to Felix.

She had become a protégée of Mrs. Dove Lyon, and had married the Earl of Somerford in a love match, brokered by the matchmaker.

“I wouldn’t take Augustus’s word for the color of the sky or which direction the sun rises,” Felix said. “Why on earth did I believe him when he told me that Dorcas was a liar and a wanton?”

“Because she is a woman, and women have let you down,” Adaline said. Including her, though she had not meant to. She should have tried harder to see Felix, instead of retreating into her own pain.

Felix smiled at her. “Dorcas has restored my faith in women, Adaline. She is a wonderful mother to my nephew, and deeply in love with Somerford. She is kind, clever, determined, and good. Because of her, I went to Mrs. Dove Lyon, who sent me to this house party to meet my intended bride. You are the only person present who could be the lady Mrs. Dove Lyon planned to match me with. And because of her, I was willing, finally, to listen to what you had to say.”

“Then I am grateful to Lady Somerford,” Adaline said. And jealous. The warmth in Felix’s voice when he spoke of the lady made her wonder if he would have preferred a wife like Dorcas. Would Adaline be his bride only because Dorcas was already happily married?

If so, it was no more than she deserved, and she would not allow it to upset her. She would just have to love Felix enough for them both, and trust that one day her love would spark his own.

“I am, too,” Felix said. “I used to wonder what it was like to have a sister, though some time I will confess to you how badly I initially treated the one Vespasian gave me when he married. Now we are reconciled, I couldn’t be more delighted.

She is the sister I never had, and her husband is a better brother to me than either of mine were. ”

A sister! That was better. A sister hadn’t been a joy in her own life, mind you. “I would like a sister who was kind, clever and good,” she said.

Felix chuckled. “I shall share mine,” he said. He turned serious again. “But enough talking about other people. May I kiss you now, my dearest love?”

One kiss led to another and eventually to bed, for apparently their bodies remembered the night they had shared. It was as wonderful as Felix remembered.

One event marred the night. They were asleep in one another’s arms when they were woken by knocking, at first barely audible and gradually louder. Felix leapt out of bed ready to fight, but Adaline begged him to have some regard for her reputation.