some much-needed rest, yes?” Raphael yawned, though whether in earnest or for effect, it was difficult to say.
Felicity stood and kissed her sister goodnight, reveling in their closeness, as if one half of her had been returned. “I missed you. I’m glad you’re back.”
“I made it back just in time, I see,” Mercy said, clinging to her. “I’ll go to hell before I see you married for anything but affection. I don’t care what Father wrote in that damned will. He was wrong. It was like a parting shot.”
At that, Felicity tensed. “Does my fortune go to Bainbridge upon my death?”
“No,” Mercy answered.
“Then, who?”
Her sister’s mouth fell open. “The solicitor said there was a list of names, but he cannot reveal them to you or to the other recipients until such time as is deemed necessary.”
“Say someone found out…” Felicity postulated. “Shouldn’t everyone on that list be considered a suspect?”
“Then it is the solicitor we go to first thing,” Raphael said, his eyes glittering with a dark anticipation. “We’ll make him talk.”
Chapter 14
Knowing sleep was impossible, Felicity stood outside Gabriel’s door for several breaths.
She could feel him in there. A man like that carried some sort of atmosphere with him, like the current in the air before a storm broke.
A warning, most probably, to creatures of prey.
The effects of his nearness were familiar to her now. Little vibrations of the fine hairs on her body or a prickle of awareness washing down her spine.
Except the thought of him devouring her made her tremble with emotions other than fear.
I am not kind.
He’d said that to her in the very beginning. He’d always cautioned her about who he was. And yet, it was in his very sin against her that he proved his own claim false.
His lie was meant to be kind.
Lifting her fist, she meant to knock at his door. But froze.
Asking for what she wanted, what she needed, had rarely ever gone well, and Raphael’s revelations about his brother had both clarified and complicated things.
She’d been shattered by discovery of his past. By the barbarity he’d had to endure. And she did comprehend that his hands knew no other trade than violence and crime.
He’d never had a woman. Never been a lover.
Never been loved.
He was a weapon, and she was nothing of the sort.
Everything said and left unsaid between them surged from her breath and broke on the barrier of the door. What would this conversation look like? When they were both so overwrought and frustrated by everything from desire to circumstance. Would he be kind, now that the lie was uncovered?
Would he stay?
She lowered her hand back to her side, calling herself nine shades of coward.
Not tonight. If things went terribly between them, she’d not have the fortitude to withstand his rejection or abandonment.
With a frustrated sigh, she slunk away to the stairs, heading down toward her father’s study across from her parlor in the front hall.
There, in the extraordinarily masculine space, she used her lamplight to search through what little paperwork had been left in his enormous desk, deemed personal by the solicitors and accountants. If they’d not found anything of note in the more official documents, perhaps she could find a clue in the personal effects she hadn’t yet gotten around to sorting out.
After more than an hour of reading records with financial or legal language she barely comprehended, she slid off her spectacles and rubbed at her tired eyes. All she had left were the household accounts. Opening that book, she squinted down at the tedious figures beneath her, written in her father’s decisive script.
Here was his life in integers. In money, the thing he’d valued over his own family.
With a wistful sort of resentment, she ran her fingers over the long sheet. Past payments for stable feed and servants’ salaries going back years. She found where he installed the broiler that now heated their running hot water, and her eyes bulged at the expense. She found her sisters’ allowances, and where they stopped when they’d each taken husbands without his consent.
But what was this? Quarterly payments by banknote to an M.W. Goode at Fairhaven House, in a staggering amount.
If Felicity had yearned for anything in her life, it’d been extended family.
Her parents were both only children, so far as she knew, and neither of them had come from prolific stock. Had her father been helping some distant relative? Someone far more removed than even Bainbridge?
Encouraged, she frantically went through several files, coming up with nothing.