Page 23 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“Yes.”
“And your muscles, too? Are you sweating from places you’d not thought it possible to sweat from?” Her voice had attained a rather pinched, nasal quality, and her nose had gone quite pink.
“Yes and yes.” She’d not opened a single letter. She only glanced at the return addresses printed upon the front, her lips pinching further with each letter. She was expecting something specific, then, he assumed.
“Does your throat feel tight and sore?”
“God, yes. Every bit of me aches.”
“Good. I can think of no one more deserving of it at present.” She lifted her nose in haughty superiority, and then promptly ruined every bit of hauteur to which she had so briefly laid claim by sneezing, loudly and wetly, into the cup of her palm. She cast him a horrified glance, hand still clasped over her nose, which Ian assumed must now contain a great deal of mucus.
Even the weak chuckle he managed rasped in his lungs. “There’s ahandkerchief in my coat pocket,” he said.
“You could pretend to be a gentleman and fetch it for me,” she said, her voice thick and distorted.
“I really could not,” Ian groaned. “Have mercy; I might be dying.”
“One can only hope.” With her free hand she stuffed the letters that had dropped into her lap when she had sneezed beneath her pillow and crawled out of bed, tottering toward the chair upon which his jacket hung. She muttered beneath her breath as she rifled through his pockets. A soft sound of relief, which he assumed meant she must have found the handkerchief, and she blew her nose once, twice—and then sighed, though the breath she drew in through her nose still sounded rather congested to his ears.
At last she climbed back into bed, tucking herself back beneath the counterpane, though she was gracious enough to wrap herself in no more than the half of it that rightfully belonged to her. Ian flopped one hand across the bed, pushing the bulk of it in her direction. “Take it,” he said. “I’m boiling anyway.”
“But you just added coal to the fire,” she said as she cocooned herself within it.
“You get cold at night.”
“So you intend to just…what? Suffer?” That little crease between her brows was bound to become permanent sooner or later, if she kept squinting at him in baffled suspicion.
“That’s about the size of it.”
A pause, long and speculative, her green eyes piercing through the tangle of her dark hair that had fallen about her face. He could practically hear the gears in her mind turning, considering, assessing. At long last she made a caustic sound in her throat, heaved herself over to give him her back—though with the thick of the blanket layered around her, he could hardly tell the difference—and grunted again, “Good.”
Ian managed a chuckle that turned into a cough. He hadn’t expected her sympathy, but if she could manage such rancor even while sick as a dog, then she was likely not in dire need of medical attention. Yet, anyway.
The pressing desire for sleep blurred the edges of his vision and sank its hooks into the corners of his mind, beckoning him down into blissful unconsciousness. Somehow he resisted the lovely lure of it, listening instead to Felicity’s breaths ease into the rhythmic cadence of sleep, the beginnings of a sonorous snore gurgling in the back of her throat.
“I missed you,” he said softly, and his fingers drifted across the bedtoward her—halfway and no further. “Ten years. That’s three thousand six hundred and fifty days, more or less. I missed you every one of them.”
∞∞∞
Felicity sighed as she climbed out of the bathtub and wrapped herself in a length of fluffy white toweling. She’d stayed in the bath nearly an hour, until her fingertips had pruned up and the water had gone tepid, but the heat of it had been lovely while it had lasted. The chills had persisted these last few days; a more or less constant condition that had led to the bed chamber growing rather stuffy, as Ian had kept the coals ablaze at all hours in deference to her relentless trembling.
But it had been less unpleasant than she might have thought. Ian’s staff largely kept their distance to prevent the illness from running rampant through the household. According to Nellie, the school had been spared the contagion, though Felicity had been asked to stay clear until she was thoroughly recovered. So the last three days had been spent in seclusion, mostly sleeping, interspersed with the occasional bath, cups of willow bark tea, and meals delivered straight to the bed chamber.
She pulled a fresh nightgown over her head and scrubbed at her damp hair with the towel as she pulled open the door of the bathing room at last, shivering anew as the comparatively cooler air from the bed chamber poured in, swirling through the cloud of steam that had accumulated.
Ian had shucked off half his banyan robe and reclined against the pillows in bed, his bare chest and shoulders glistening with a mist of sweat, a flush of fever highlighting his cheeks, and his nose red and a bit irritated-looking. He had a newspaper open, the pages rustling slightly in the faint tremor of his hands—a testament to his lingering weakness.
“What do you want for Christmas?” he asked through a sniffle as she snatched her hairbrush off the vanity and padded toward the fire.
“I beg your pardon?” Felicity settled on the floor before the fire, toasting her toes in the heat. Dragging her hair over her shoulder to dry it, she began to pull the brush through the damp strands carefully, wincing at the pull of tangles through the bristles.
“It’s the twenty-third,” he said. Another rustle, as of pages turning. “You didn’t like the garden.”
Her fingers tightened around the handle of the brush to the point of pain. “Had you expected me to be pleased with it?”
“I thought it a faithful recreation.” His voice had grown rather nasally again, and he bit out a foul word beneath his breath as he sneezed into a handkerchief.
“A recreation of something that was meant to be mine.” It still stung; like the prick of a needle jabbed into her heart. “But you took it from me. You took something precious to me and you made it your own.” Hidden behind his house for God alone knew how long.Hergarden.
