Page 7 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“I thought I told you to wear something pretty,” he said, watching the arches of her brows slant down into a scowl.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she retorted, with a pugnacious lift of her chin. Her voice had been clear and even, but there were dark smudges beneath her eyes attesting to a long night of little sleep.
“I think you’ll find that between the two of us, I’m not the beggar,” Ian said. He set his pen down and straightened in his seat. Lifting one hand to gesture to the man who stood, riveted by the scene playing out before him, he said, “Felicity, may I introduce Mr. Grantham? He manages the bank which holds Mrs. Lewis’ mortgage.”
Her stiff shoulders, which had been wrenched back proudly when she had sailed in, relaxed a fraction. Probably she had not entirely expected him to honor his word. Probably she had spent a not-insignificant fraction of her night fretting over it. “Is it done, then?” she asked. “Because I won’t marry you until it is.”
“It would have been.” Had she not stormed in as though she owned the place already and sent his paperwork flying off the desk. “Only a few moresignatures. Banking is a tedious business.” By the sound Mr. Grantham made beneath his breath, Ian guessed he was on his own in his opinion. His gaze drifted to the folio, which bore a few marks he knew had not been present evening last when he’d given it to her. A few scratches, a few gouges. One corner looked slightly singed, as if she had gotten perilously close to tossing it in the fire as she’d suggested she might. “Have you read it, then?”
“Most of it,” she said. “The text was quite small, and I’m allotted only two candles in the evenings. I spent most of the night straining my eyes in reading by the light of the fire. It’s given me the devil of a headache.”
“Has it?” There was a queer sensation at the back of his neck, a prickle of awareness. She had always been clever—cleverer than he, in a good number of ways. She had laid a trap somewhere within those words, and she was only waiting to spring it upon him. Though she did not betray it with so much as the tiniest sliver of a smirk, he could sense the balance of power shifting between them, as if she had wrapped the rope of it in her fist and given it a firm tug.
“It made it most difficult,” she said, “to make revisions.”
“Revisions,” he echoed inanely. “Whatrevisions? I don’t recall agreeing—”
“But you will,” she said, and a malevolent undertone had crept into her voice. The suggestion that he might have tossed her into the depths of the ocean with no avenue for escape—but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t drag him down beneath the waves with her. “Youwill. I’ll admit I spent an hour, perhaps two, simply reading and fuming. And then a very simple fact occurred to me. I allowed myself to become so irate with your arrogance, with the devious foresight in which you concocted this—this farceof a proposal, that I very nearly missed the most important part of it.”
Ian’s fingers tightened around his pen. “Which is?”
“It’s fifty-four pages,” she said. “Fifty-four. A trifle excessive, no? A trifle obsessive, even, to put so much effort, so much timeinto such a thing. It must be terribly important to you.”
Goddammit. “Grantham,” he said. “Out.”
The man took off like a shot, heading for the door with an alacrity that suggested he had as little interest in being caught in the crossfire between them as Ian had in allowing the man such an intimate glimpse into his personal life.
The door closed. Silence descended. And Ian considered his position anew. Felicity stood before him, her hands braced flat upon the surface of hisdesk, the folio laying upon it between them like a gauntlet of challenge. He’d elected not to rise when she had entered, to convey the same manner of power he’d held in his hands evening last. That no one could make him bow, make him scrape or plead.
But she could. She always could.
And now she loomed, deliberately imposing even for her middling height. She had taken his power, seized it in her fist, and yanked it straight from his hands.Fifty-four pages. It certainly hadn’t started out that way, but he’d seen the slow collapse of her school coming for months now. In the bitterness of the half-life he’d lived without her, he’d had so much time to consider, to make revisions of his own, to concoct an ever-increasing list of demands. He’d assumed she would accede to every one of them when her situation became dire enough. And he’d been correct, of course.
Every bit of his frustration, all ten years of aggravation and hopelessness he’d suffered had come out in those pages. She hadn’t given him so much as the time of day in better than a decade—so he’d demanded it. Claimed every day, every hour, every minute of her time. And in the doing of it, he’d revealed his own desperation.
He hadn’t even glanced at it, this manifesto he’d laid into her hands, since his solicitor, Mr. Graves, had delivered the finished product to him. He’d had no idea how far past reasonable the simple agreement he’d begun with had ballooned into a testament to his own obsession.
Fifty-four pages built into a weapon he himself had given her. And sheknewit.
“You would have been better served,” Ian said slowly, “if you had waited until I’d finished with Mr. Grantham. I’ve three pages left to sign. Our deal falls apart if I don’t.”
A muscle twitched beneath her right eye. “I’ve already burned the page I signed,” she said. “And I’ve no intention of signing my name to it again now that I know what is in this.” Her jaw tightened; Ian fancied he could hear the grind of her teeth. “I have no intention of surrendering my career, or acting as your hostess for dinner parties, or managing your household, or requesting yourpermissionfor a damned thing.”
All right, so a few of his requirements had been a bit of a stretch from the beginning. But she had hated him for years already; what was a little more of it added to the pile?
He’d never really wanted her under his thumb. But he had wanted her in his life. He’d surrendered more than a few principles and moral standards towhich he had always held himself in order to effect it.
Each of those obnoxious conditions he had placed in that contract had become liabilities. She would walk and damn the consequences; he could see it there in the vibrant, toxic green of her eyes. His thumb rifled over the corners of the three remaining pages.
It wasn’t much. Just three signatures. But it was all he had. He said, “Marriage is non-negotiable.”
She lifted one hand from the surface of his desk to place it upon the leather folio, pressing down so hard her fingers whitened. “I won’t agree to this.”
“Not in whole,” he said. He had bungled any hope of that. “But those last three signatures—how much are they worth to you?”
Those bitter, vengeful eyes narrowed in rank suspicion. “What are you suggesting?”
“A concession each,” he said. “Three things from you in total, of my choosing.”
