Page 5 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“Felicity.” He looked up at last, and there was a glacial frost to his dark eyes, hard and uncompromising. “You will sleep in my bed, each and every night. It’s not negotiable. I suggest you make your peace with it, and enjoy this last night as much as you are able.” His gaze flicked to the clock. “It’s nearly one already. You’ve precious few hours left before ten.”
“Why ten?” Her fingers curled around the folio in her hands, digging crescents into the buffed leather surface. “I had thought after nightfall—”
“Weddings are conducted in the morning, between the hours of eight and noon. I have some business to attend to prior to ten.”
Felicity recoiled on instinct. “Weddings!”
“Yes, of course there will be a wedding,” he sighed in exasperation. “If I had been interested in ruining your reputation, I might have done that years ago.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked, as her heart tripped through its paces in her chest. A few whispers into the right ears of what they had once been to one another, and she would have been made suddenly scandalous. “Why didn’t you, then?”
“Because I doubt it would have yielded me the outcome I desired.” A cant of his head. “What, you would rather have been my mistress?”
Yes. Yes, she would. Being his temporary mistress would be infinitely more desirable than being his wife. A position which would be hers until one of them died. Preferably him.
“I can’t—” Her breath backed up into her throat, her voice emerging on what little she could manage to wheeze out. “I can’t.”
“That is my price. And you’ve already agreed.”
And all it would cost her was her freedom. Her hand. Her name. If shecame here tomorrow at ten, she would shortly find herself a different person altogether. Not Felicity Cabot, nor even Felicity Nightingale, but instead Felicity Carlisle. Her tattered self-control fractured beneath the pressure of it all. “I thought…a temporary arrangement. For the—the duration of the Christmas holiday.”
“I know what you thought.” The words emerged surlier than she would have expected, as if he had taken offense to the suggestion. “I have no interest in bedding an unwilling woman.”
“But you will marry one.”
“Yes.” He seemed to think this a sufficient response. He grabbed for the pen she had abandoned, dibbed the nib in the inkwell, scratched through a line on the page before him, and scribbled a correction beneath it. “You won’t always be unwilling,” he said.
“I will be.” How could he possibly think otherwise? He’d said it himself—she would never have come to him had she had any other option. “I won’t sleep with you. Not ever.”
“I’m not yet four and thirty. You’re—what, one and thirty? I expect we’ll have many years of marriage ahead of us. Plenty of time for minds to change. Andeveris a long damned time. When I do bed you, you will be willing. But until then, you will sleep in my bed.” He lifted his head once more. “Beginning tomorrow.”
Her heart thudded in her chest. “It’s just twelve hundred pounds. That’s nothing to you.”
“But it’s everything to you, isn’t it? It’s your life, your livelihood—your friend’s future. Twelve hundred pounds to keep your friend out of prison and to save your school. I could have asked so much more of you than only this.”
Onlythis. Only the rest of her life. Her mouth opened, searching desperately for the words that would move him to pity.
He bent his head back to his documents, unimpressed. Perhaps even irritated. “Go home,” he said curtly. “There are precious few hours left before dawn.”
She spun to face the door, her heart burning with fury. It was not a new feeling; merely a fresh log cast upon a fire that had blazed for a decade.
“Felicity,” he called before she reached it, and she turned in the faint hope that he might have reconsidered. Instead his dark eyes raked her grey coat, the black skirt of her dress revealed beneath. A mocking smile curled his lip. “Wear something pretty tomorrow,” he said.
∞∞∞
Ian rubbed at his temples. She’d slammed the door behind her. Of course she had slammed the door. But God, that last brazen gesture of her incandescent rage had resounded throughout the room and set his ears to ringing.
His hands were shaking.Trembling. He flexed his fingers in a futile effort to erase that wretched quiver, but it continued on, unabated. Damn. He’d have to do something about that, somehow. Find some way to hide it, to mask it. Because if she even remotely suspected he could be affected to this degree by something so simple as her presence, that pendulum would swing, sending every bit of his power straight into her hands.
Ten years since he’d last seen her from something other than at a distance. Ten years since she had last turned toward him instead of away. And it was entirely his fault.
How many times had she tried to tell him what a hash he was making of things between them? How many times had she pleaded for just a little of his time, his attention? With every excuse he’d given, every promise he’d broken, he’d lost another piece of her heart, until there had been nothing left of it she cared to risk to his clumsy hands. He hadn’t even realized it until that last terrible night, when he’d watched the last of her love die in her eyes. Watched the tattered shreds of it turn to fury as he’d broken the most important promise he’d given her.
For a while after their rift, he’d held on to some sort of nebulous hope that her ire would fade with time. That she would, eventually, unbend enough to hear his apologies. To allow him to make things right between them.
She never had. Every letter had been sent back unopened. Every gift returned. Felicity Cabot could hold a grudge until the end of time without surrendering a single ounce of her fury.
But they had loved each other once, before he’d turned hers to hate.You are going to make something of yourself, Ian Carlisle, she had told him years ago. Over and over, until, eventually, he had begun to believe it. And he had made something of himself. He’d made a fortune, a reputation, a name.
