Page 70 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t considered it.”
“You’ve considered everything else.”
Because she wasimportant, and nothing that would come after her held any promise for him. He didn’t know what he would do because he simply didn’t care. The days would just be a long march stretching out until his inevitable death, each one singularly inconsequential. “Perhaps I’ll travel,” he said. “You’ll forgive me, I’m certain, if I tell you that you will haunt me if I stay.” Whether or not she meant to. He might never be able to exorcise her from his mind, but it would certainly be an easier task when there was no chance of them encountering one another.
“But your home is here.” An odd, stray hoarse note quivered in her voice as she turned to face the windows.
“No. It’s just a house.” He had tried to turn it into a home, but it hadn’t taken. It could never be one without her. When she left, it would be robbed of the potential he had once seen in it, its beauty and grandeur diminished.
Her dark hair was a wretched tangle down her back, and she bent her head like a lily as she busked her arms, chasing away the chill that must’ve set in as she’d moved away from the warmth of the fire. “You would simply…walk away from all of this? Everything you dreamed of?” she asked.
“This was never my dream. You were my dream. I’ve never wanted anyone but you.” He lifted one hand, scrubbed at his jaw. “You were the only one who ever believed in me,” he said. “You saw me when I was no one, when I was poor and dirty and ignorant, with no hope of bettering myself.” Nor even the desire to do so. He’d known his place, stayed within it.Shehad given him the first taste of hope for better. Perhaps his first taste of hope at all.
But some dreams weren’t meant to be realized. He had hoarded every bit of wealth and power of which he was capable, and still he couldn’t buy his, nor force it to fruition. And if he couldn’t have his own, then at least he could give hers back to her.
He said, “I would give everything to go back. But I can only go forward,and this—this is all I have to give you. The staff is at your disposal, whenever you choose to begin packing. I’ll use an unoccupied room until you’ve found your way home.” Because the school had been that for her for so many years.
The French doors leading to the balcony flew open, and a chilly gust of wind blew inside. Ian lifted his gaze from the fire to see Felicity striding out onto the balcony in nothing but her nightgown.
“Christ.” He vaulted up from his chair, snatching up her coat where it lay abandoned upon the neighboring chair. “You’ll catch your death,” he chided as he strode for the balcony.
“Probably,” she said, and snuggled into the folds of the coat he draped over her shoulders, her bare toes curling from the cold of the stone floor. “But I can smell the salt in the air. Isn’t it lovely?”
This far from the sea, yes. Up close it often smelled like overripe fish. Sour and stale. “Come back inside,” he urged as she sidled closer to the banister, peering over it down into the garden below.
“Hush,” she said. “I’m imagining.”
Imagining? “You can do that inside, where it’s not bloody freezing.” He watched as a shiver chased down her spine, flexed his hands at his sides impotently. What had brought her out here now, when she had never cared in the least for the garden before?
Her shoulders hunched, drawing up toward her ears. “It’s almost perfect,” she said, and gave a little jerk of her chin toward a portion of the garden. “The delphiniums there. What color are they when they bloom?”
“Blue,” he said inanely, jamming his hands into his pockets. “The ones…the ones on the other side, near the kitchen—they bloom pink.”
“Lovely,” she said again on a little sigh. “I never had a garden for the pleasure of it alone. Only a kitchen garden, one fashioned to be useful.” She slanted him a sidelong glance. “I would have been satisfied with only that,” she said. “Perhaps I’d have kept flowers in pots instead. They do brighten up a room.”
“In summer, when they bloom, the house is lousy with them,” he said wearily. “There’s so many blossoms that the staff could cut a new bouquet every day and never run out of them.” There was a time he’d considered sending them to her. But he’d learned by then that she hadn’t wanted even his letters. “The wisteria is somehow worse. When it drops its petals, the wind sends them scurrying about, and the whole garden is blanketed in purple. Like snow.”
A soft little approving sound deep in her throat. “I like the hydrangeaswhere they are,” she said. “Are they also blue?”
He gave a nod.
“Ah, well,” she said on a gusty sigh, which sounded vaguely disappointed to his ears. “They’ll give the garden some depth when they bloom again, at least. But the columbines beside them…they will have to go.”
He managed a wry smile. “I don’t see why. I placed them exactly according to your design.” Though he hadn’t the means to prove it any longer, since all that remained of that long-ago sketch she had done was a single shred bearing a hydrangea blossom.
“My mistake,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it when I did the sketch, but now that I can see it, there’s entirely too much blue and purple in the garden.”
Was there? He’d thought it quite pretty. Feminine, tranquil. Exactly the sort of garden a lady of leisure would have. The ultimate expression of the life he’d hoped to give her. One of luxury and ease, with a private bower of her own, cultivated to her tastes.
“Daffodils,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Daffodils,” she repeated. “In the spring, when the ground is soft enough to plant them. I want daffodils. Right there where the columbines are. Yellow is such a pleasant, cheerful color, don’t you think?”
∞∞∞
Felicity watched, from the corner of her eye, as the words settled over him like a cape. He didn’t know what to make of them, what he was meant to do with them. What he was meant to think. At last, tentatively, he eased up on her side at the banister, taking the brunt of the biting wind.
