Page 61 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“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—everyoneelse 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 muchlesshers 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 shufflefar 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 chooseme.” 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—foryou—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 forus.” 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 solittle. 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 whatrebuildingtrust 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 stillsurrendered 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 toIan. 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.”
