Page 48 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“Youarespeaking to the gardener,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
Ian threw up his hands. “I don’t employ a gardener,” he said. “There’s only me. I built the garden. Every bit of it, with my own hands. There was no one else I’d trust to create what you wanted. The flowers that are not perennials I replant every spring. I weed the beds. I trim the hedges. I train the goddamned wisteria to grow as you envisioned it.”
For a moment she was utterly silent, still and quiet as the grave. And then, finally, she slid down into the chair, an inch at a time. In the protracted hush, she settled her hands in her lap, fingers nervously plucking at the silk of her wrapper, then smoothing the fabric once more. At long last, after an eon or more in which he had watched a half-dozen thoughts traipsed across her mind and flee just as quickly, she said, “I didn’t want you to build me a garden. I wanted to build one together.”
Oh. Hell, he’d got it all wrong. He was still getting it wrong, still making and remaking the same damned mistakes that had sent her running to begin with. “I didn’t know,” he said, although the truth was something more like he simply hadn’tunderstood. “I’ll tear it up for you in the spring.”
But it occurred to him, as that silence stretched out once more between them, that she hadn’t had to tell him that. That she could have let him suffer for his own ignorance indefinitely. Perhaps it was more an olive leaf than an olivebranch, but it was still something. Something she hadn’t owed to him, and which she’d offered anyway, that he might take from it a better understanding of her.
“I would have been happy with only a kitchen garden,” she said, a telling thickness to her voice. “A box for herbs on a window sill, even.”
His chest ached to hear it. Probably—probably she had told him as much a dozen times or more in the past. And he hadn’t ever truly listened, because he’d wanted so badly to make real all of those dreams she had once cherished. Did they mean anything at all to her, anymore? “I do want you to be happy, Felicity.”
A strange little sigh slipped past her lips, and her lashes lowered over her eyes. “Sometimes I think that some people just aren’t meant for happiness,” she said.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because there hasn’t been a shred of it to exist in my life that I’ve managed to keep hold of.” She tilted her head back, pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose. “Did you tell my family about the letters I’ve been receiving?”
So there had been more. “I’ve told them nothing,” he said. “What you wish for them to know is your business. I’ve never betrayed your secrets; I don’t intend to begin now.” He hesitated. “Felicity, we can’t pay off your extortionist. They’d just spend whatever we gave them and come round again with new threats for more money later. It would never end.”
“You’re certain of that?” she asked quietly, her gaze dropping to her lap.
“When you pay off an extortionist,” he said, “you give the impression you’re guilty of whatever accusation is being slung at you—whether you are or are not. Our best bet is to instead uncover the villain’s identity.” Absently his fingers curled once more around his pen, fidgeting with the object. “Probably it would have occurred to me earlier, had I known you had siblings,” he said. “But today I had to wonder whyyouwere targeted.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean to say the letter clearly meant to make some reference to your past. But you’ve been Felicity Cabot as long as I’ve known you. Whatever it meant to imply, it’s ancient gossip from when you were little more than a girl. From even before you were a student at Mrs. Lewis’ school. By all rights, itoughtto be equally dangerous to your sisters. Have they mentioned any such letters?”
Felicity’s brow furrowed. “No; not to my recollection.”
“Would they have done, if they had received them?”
“Yes, of course. Charity, Mercy—they would have warned me.”
“So it is only you,” he said. “You, despite the fact that your sisters also have the means to pay such a sum.” They had, after all, offered tobuyher a new school building outright. “Out of all of you, you’re in the most precarious position. Newly married, working in a school where a good reputation is everything.”
Felicity hunched her shoulders. “Charity has got a particular friend,” she said, tentatively. “A former patron, in fact, who was once a rather notorious criminal. I cannot imagine he would take it kindly were Charity to find herself the victim of extortion.”
“She is also a duchess,” he said. “And Mercy a baroness. One does not, as a general rule, threaten members of the peerage with extortion without careful consideration. So I must assume that you were chosen because of your own position. Not protected by a noble title and the headmistress of a school whose reputation could be sullied rather easily and to devastating effect.”
But she had considered that already; it was written into the wariness of her eyes, etched into the tense line of her jaw. The last bit of happiness to which she had laid claim, now about to be snatched straight out of her hands just like every other.
“Would you tell me?” he asked. “How it is you came to be Felicity Cabot?” Not a demand. Not an order. Only a question, rendered without judgment, without the presumption of guilt. “I was of the impression”—because she had told him once, and he now knew that she had lied—“that your uncle was your last remaining relative.”
A long, hard swallow as her lips contorted into a grimace. “He wasn’t my uncle,” she said. “That is—we told everyone he was, Charity and I, because neither of us had yet reached our majority. But he wasn’t our uncle. He was our neighbor in London; a military surgeon. But he was a kind man, and a generous one. He patched me up altogether too often, after—after Father flewinto one of his rages.”
Christ. “And did he fly into rages often?”
A small nod. “He hated us,” she said. “Charity especially. She was too strong-willed, too stubborn, and she resembled our mother far too closely for Father’s liking. But he could not make her bend to his will with violence, and so he made me bend instead. He could control Charity by striking out at me.”
He’d done more than that, Ian suspected. He’d made her break. His fingers curled around his pen, gripping until his knuckles had gone white, until the pen threatened to snap in the relentless pressure of his fist.
“That’s why—that night on the street, after the theatre—” A shudder worked its way down her spine, and the green of her eyes grew brighter, misted with tears. “I freeze,” she said simply. “I always freeze. I don’t know why. It just…happens. It has ever since I was a child.”
Ever since she was a child, when her own father had beaten her to the point that she had requiredpatching up. “I’ll kill him.” The words crawled out of his throat with a sort of hateful vehemence that provoked a ragged little laugh from her.
