Page 37 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“Felicity—”
“I tell you,I don’t know!”
Ian threw up his hands in a surfeit of agitation, still simmering with unrelieved rage.
Felicity flinched, recoiled—cringed. Fromhim.
Every bit of fury evaporated in an instant. Ian sank to the floor as if his legs had been cut out beneath him, dropping to his knees before her. “I would never strike you,” he said, setting one hand upon her thigh, clasping gently through the thin linen of her nightgown. “Never.” But he had frightened her with only an aggressive gesture of his hands, even if it had not been directed at her. It reeked of an ingrained reaction, a remnant of a time past when a gesture like that would have preceded a slap, a strike. Someone had made her cower like that, once.
“Don’t look at me like that.” He gathered that she had meant the words to be strong, insistent, indignant. She’d managed only a quavering warble, and the squeak at the end had produced an upward inflection, making it sound much more like a question than a demand.
“Like what?”
Her mouth set in a mulish line. “As though I’m some sort of wounded bird.”
“Youarewounded. You struck your head when you fell.” It was an effort to force the cup of his hand on her thigh to remain light. She’d been terrorized quite enough for one evening; the last thing she needed was to be frightened further, even unintentionally. “This is important,” he said, his voice thick with strain. “Did you see his face? Could you identify him if you saw him again?”
Her nails scraped across the counterpane beneath her. “No, I—it was dark. I couldn’t see his face.” A long, hard swallow. “I think he must have been the same man who followed me before. The same size at least. Big. Beastly. He had sour breath, like his teeth were rotten.”
“Did he say anything? Anything at all?”
“He said—he said—” Her breath whistled through her teeth. “He saidfive thousand pounds.”
Christ. The letter. If he had nurtured any faint hopes that this had been a random act of violence, unconnected to whatever private intrigue into whichshe had become embroiled, they dissipated like a puff of smoke. No idle threat this; whoever had attacked her meant to terrify her into compliance.
And it was bloody well working.
Of its own accord, his hand captured one of hers, prying it free of its tight grip upon the edge of the bed. Her fingers were so cold in his, small and stiff. “No one is ever going to hurt you again,” he said fervently. “I swear it to you. But to keep you safe, I need something from you. I need you to work with me, not against me.”
A hiccough lodged in her throat. “I already know I shouldn’t have left the theatre,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant, not exactly.” His fingers squeezed hers. “I need to know precisely what it is we’re dealing with,” he said. “I need you to tell me—about Felicity Nightingale.”
∞∞∞
It took a long moment for the words to seep through her ears and into her brain. But when they did, they did it with a glorious crash, banging around inside her and drawing up every muscle tight and tense.
“Where—where did you hear that?” The words were a croak, forced through her aching throat. “Where did you hear that name?”
With a sigh, Ian pushed himself onto his feet once more, letting fall her hand long enough to reach for the drawer set into the nightstand. He withdrew a folded piece of paper from it, and in the flickering firelight she could see the now-familiar handwriting upon it.
Fury zipped up her spine. “You stole my letters?”
“Just this one. It was delivered here,” he said, “the day you returned to work. There was no return address, no postmark, so I knew it had been hand-delivered. And there had been—” He hesitated. “There had been a prowler spotted in the garden some days before. It just seemed rather too coincidental. So, yes, I stole it.”
“It was mine!Mybusiness!” She snatched the letter from his hand, tearing it from his fingers as if the action might also yank free the knowledge he had stolen along with it.
“Anything that threatens you is my business as well.” He took a breath, took a seat upon the bed beside her. “Felicity, I don’t care where you’ve comefrom or what you’ve done. I only need to know what sort of problem we’re facing. Why someone is trying to extort five thousand pounds from you.”
She choked on a rueful laugh. “It hardly matters. I haven’t got five thousand pounds.” With her meager wages, she could have worked a hundred years and still not have amassed that amount.
“Idohave it,” he said. And probably substantially more besides, though she’d never cared to ask how deep his pockets truly were. “But I need to know what the danger is to you.”
The note crinkled in her fingers as her hands clenched. Both of them, with a helpless, nameless wrath that swept over her like a fever, crackling along her skin. Her fingernails dented the letter in one hand, carved divots into the palm of the other. With a ruthless twitch of her arm, she cast the note as far away as she could. She was shaking again; a violent tremor that built upon itself, redoubled with every raspy wheeze that itched inside her throat.
Weeks of fear. Yearsof anger that she had shoved so far down inside her, layer upon layer upon layer of it. As if she could scrunch them all down and lock them away. Not neatly; not carefully. She had only wanted themgone. Hidden. Concealed down in that secret place of shame in which she had tucked away the last remnants of the girl she had once been. The one who had first come to Brighton sixteen years ago, still clad in the wounds of that past she had escaped. The one who had cowered, flinched from every sound, who spoken in a whisper for months.
Now he demanded to know who Felicity Nightingale was? No. He hadn’t the least right to it. He had surrenderedthat right years ago. He hadn’t broken only her heart; he’d broken that last part of her she’d thought inviolable.
