with breath now, which was all that mattered. He had saved her life so many times.
Now she must return the favor.
She attuned her breaths to his, focusing her mind on the intruder in front of her. If she could provide him what he wanted, perhaps he’d leave them unharmed.
“She’s not my Emmaline,” Felicity said evenly. “Why did she bring you here, and what will it take for you to leave?”
At that, his comically thin eyebrows crawled up to where his hairline might have once been in his younger days. “Oh, but she is your Emmaline. She is my Emmaline. We all belong to each other, my dear. Because we’re family.” Pulling back the hem of his coat, he showed her a pistol, but his remark had already landed like a bullet to her middle.
“A-are you M.W. Goode?” Felicity asked, dreading an answer that would make this man her blood relative in any fashion.
He brightened, his boots clicking together as he tapped an idea out of the air. “Oh yes, introductions.” He gave her a comically chivalrous bow. “I am Sir Reginald Winterton III, and my elder sister, Mary, was your father’s legal wife and Baroness.”
Felicity’s heart slammed against its cage as she gaped at him. “You’re lying.”
“I wish I were,” he scoffed. “But decades ago, before your mother came along, Clarence and my sister, Mary, eloped to Gretna Green and were wed. I’ve brought along the license to prove it. But poor Mary’s dowry was not what your father wanted for them, and so they hatched a plan. He’d wed a wealthy invalid heiress— your mother— and stash his true love and wife— my sister, Mary— in the country until the woman gave up the ghost, leaving her fortune to him.”
He meandered to one of the bookcases above which a framed portrait of the Baron and Baroness Cresthaven loomed over the room.
Looming had once been her father’s favorite pastime.
“Unfortunately, the life of a Baroness agreed with your mother, and she regained her good health. Your father formed an attachment, resulting in you four girls.”
Felicity shook her head, staring into the ice blue eyes of her father’s rendering, eyes he’d passed on to her… and to Emmaline? “My father was… a bigamist?”
Sir Reginald’s lip curled into an ugly snarl. “He thrust upon Mary the life of a mistress, turning his true bride into nothing better than a whore, and his true-born children into bastards.”
Felicity turned to Emmaline, the woman who’d lived in her house since before her parents had died. Tears streaked down the woman’s colorless cheeks, though her expression remained as smooth and bleak as the grave.
“Our father turned our own half-sister into our governess?” she asked, horrified. “He installed you in our home and bade you keep such a secret?”
Clarence Goode had been a cold and ruthless man. A miser, a zealot, and, she was ashamed to say, a bigot, but she’d never expected him to be so cruel to his own children.
Indifferent, yes. But this…
“Uncle Reginald had been blackmailing him since Mother died of cancer,” Emmaline said with little inflection.
“Your father was a cheapskate!” Reginald crowed, thumping his cane against the floor.
Felicity was beginning to hate that cane, and from the way Emmaline warily avoided it, she suspected the poor woman had greater reason to do so.
“So long as his precious Mary was alive, he kept us in the manner which befitted our stations.” Reginald’s acrimony escaped on every syllable, along with a good bit of spittle. “But once she’d gone, his upkeep dwindled. He began trying to arrange marriages for the children to get them settled, and bestowed upon them dowries and educations rather than liquid money.” He stalked closer to her. “How were we supposed to live in the meantime, I ask you?”
Felicity blinked up at him, stalled on one particular thing he’d said.
“Children?” She glanced at Emmaline. “There are more of you?”
Emmaline’s eyes hardened to chips of ice. “A younger brother, Emmett, and a younger sister, Rosaline, whom Uncle Reginald keeps as his ward. Indeed, she does not come of age until she is twenty-one. But after I visited her that day I was poisoned, I found her in terrible straits. I do not know if she will survive another year.”
“Don’t you whisper a breath of those ugly rumors, Emma,” he sneered. “Or you won’t like what I’m forced to do to defend myself.”
A darkness in his voice threaded a peculiar revulsion through Felicity’s blood. It took all her sparse courage to face him. “I