Page 26 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“You’re not late,” he said. “You’ve been ill. You won’t be expected.” He dragged one hand through his disheveled hair, wincing at the pull of knots in his fingers. “I won’t stop you,” he said on a frustrated sigh, “but I think you’re rushing your recovery.”
“I don’t recall asking your opinion,” Felicity said as she slipped on her shoes. “Or your permission.” And there—she had only to grab her coat, and she would be ready.
“You’ll have breakfast first,” he said doggedly, blocking the door as she turned toward it. “You’ve picked at your meals these last few days.”
How could she have been expected to do otherwise, when everything she tried to eat scratched at her sore throat on its way down? She’d lived mostly on tea. “I wasn’t aware you’d noticed.”
“I notice most everything which concerns you,” he said. “Andyou will take the carriage. The weather is still dismal.”
“I hadn’t intended to do otherwise.” It wasn’t as though he’d be requiring it, after all, when one considered that his very presence here still suggested he was unlikely to spend the day up and about. “You’re in my way,” she said, with a little flick of her fingertips meant to suggest he should absent himself from his position in the doorway.
With a grumble of annoyance, Ian backed up just enough for her to slip past. But he caught her wrist in his warm fingers as she did—not tightly, but still firm enough to hold. “I was in earnest,” he said. “What I told you earlier.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Ian’s dark eyes stared straight into her own, holding her captive with more than just the light pressure of his hand around her wrist. “You were the last woman in my bed,” he said. “There was never—” He swallowed audibly, and his fingers tightened just a fraction. “There was never anyone after you.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Felicity jerked at her wrist, infuriated anew. “What could possibly possess you to imagine I would believe it? That I wouldcare?”
“Don’t you?”
“No!” The denial erupted too swiftly, too impassioned to be anything but a lie, and Felicity felt her cheeks burn with the shame of it. In a fit ofpique, she jammed her heel down upon his bare toes. Ian released her wrist with a muffled grunt of pain, and Felicity scrambled past him, all but racing for the door.
But the half-smothered chuckle of satisfaction he gave as he bent to rub his injured toes followed her out into the hall. She might not have given him the reaction he’d expected—but she feared she had given him one he’dwantedinstead.
∞∞∞
Ian shivered in his banyan as he stood out on the stonework path in the center of the garden, a small scrap of paper pinched between two fingers. The lone remnant of the garden sketch Felicity had burned, it corresponded to the flower bed just on his right, where a row of hydrangeas stretched out against the wall of the house. In spring, they would produce lovely and vibrant blue blossoms, though now they were just brown stalks topped with puffy bulbs and dusted with a sprinkling of snow and ice. They taunted him now; a desolate reminder of his myriad failures.
Felicity hadn’t liked the garden. No; she’dhatedthe garden. Stolen, she’d said, as if he’d contrived to take it from her, when in fact he had meant to give it to her. Everything she’d ever dreamed of. Everything they’d dreamed of together.
The promises he’d once made to her were worthless to her now. The tattered scrap of paper in his fingers was proof positive that he’d done more than delayed them past the point of breaking—he’d dashed her dreams along with them. How could she be expected to climb the mountain of resentments that lay between them when he’d littered the path with the shards of every dream she had once held so dear?
As a chilly breeze slid through the garden, Ian tucked the scrap of paper into his pocket for safekeeping, at least until he placed it back into his nightstand drawer. Even if Felicity no longer wanted it, it remained precious to him.
“If you’re seeking a belated Christmas gift, might I suggest jewelry, Mr. Carlisle? I’ve yet to meet a woman who wasn’t fond of a pretty bauble.”
Ian jerked in surprise as he turned toward the door from which Butler had appeared. “Ah,” he said, reaching out to take the steaming cup of ciderthe man offered to him and taking a deep drink from it. “I’m afraid it would do me no good. She doesn’t even wear her wedding ring.” Though it could not, in any traditional sense, be called pretty. It had spent the last few weeks languishing upon the nightstand, entirely forgotten. At least by its owner. “She wouldn’t welcome anything quite so personal. What am I meant to give to a woman who wants nothing from me?”
Butler blanched. “Well, I—”
“That was purely rhetorical, Butler.” Ian managed a bleak smile. “If an answer to that question existed, I imagine I could treble my fortune selling it. Besides, Christmas has passed.” Much the same as any other day had. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
Ian heaved a sigh and drained the last of the cider, which went a little way toward warding off the chill that seeped through the thin fabric of his banyan. Just a few days earlier, when he’d been in the throes of fever, this cold would have been delightful. “Did my wife eat breakfast before she left?” he asked as he handed the empty mug back to Butler.
“It was nearer to luncheon, Mr. Carlisle, but she did eat. And she took the carriage as well.”
Well, there was that, at least. Just a few weeks ago she might have refused to do either purely on principle, only to be contrary.
Butler cleared his throat and pulled open the side of his coat, withdrawing a stack of letters from within. “Regrettably,” he began, “I had already sent out a footman to collect the mail from the school when Mrs. Carlisle decided to go herself. Shall I send it back?”
“No,” Ian said, and held out his hand to collect it. “She’s got a stack of it in our bed chamber anyway. Might as well put it with all the rest.”
Probably there was nothing particularly pressing; not when the bills were paid by his solicitor, anyway. Correspondence, largely, he guessed, as he began to thumb through the stack of letters. A few names he recognized—letters that had been sent over the holiday break from students or their parents.
About midway through the stack, there was a letter addressed to Felicity from the elder Mr. Marchant; the father of Dorothea’s would-be suitor. Given the tone of the letter he’d sent to the man, and the not-quite-veiled threats heavily laden within, Ian expected the response would be particularly interesting. It would have to wait for Felicity’s return, of course, but if she was not acceptably mollified—well, then, it would be his pleasure to rakebothof the Marchants over the coals.
And there, at the very bottom, one last letter without a return address.Without even a postmark. Only Felicity’s given name scrawled across the front in thick, black lines. Spidery tendrils of ink feathered out from the underscoring etched beneath it.
