Gold hair. Blue gaze. Soft smile. Scents. Blooms. Spice. Herbs. Slick musk. Smooth flesh.
He felt like a prisoner set free. Or perhaps better, like a warrior invited home.
Home.
That word had never meant anything to him until now.
Welcoming the mindless lust threatening to take over his emotive thoughts, Gabriel found the slick sounds their bodies made incredibly erotic, and he had to focus on keeping himself sane.
Lifting onto his hands to check on her, he nearly lost his rhythm at the sight. If she’d been breathtaking before, looking at her now was like trying to gaze at the sun.
He marveled as she seemed to lose control of her limbs, writhing beneath him, twitching and trembling, clutching at him with artless demands. Her hand smoothed down his back, lower, to shyly explore the curve of his ass, pressing him forward, deeper.
Without thought, he repositioned a bit, his cock finding some deep-seated place inside her that peeled her eyes wide.
“There,” she gasped. “Don’t stop.”
He would never. Instead, he accelerated his pace, deepened his strokes, driving himself home. Inside of her, he could feel the muscles quicken, tighten and release in unbearably sweet spasms as she opened her mouth in a soundless scream.
His own cock thickened, and he held on for as long as he possibly could before, with a deep groan of regret and iron will, he retracted from her, his seed spilling onto the ground beneath her open legs as his entire body undulated with inexhaustible, all-encompassing bliss.
Though the temptation to remain joined with her haunted him in the moments after the storm had passed, Gabriel noted the absolution of exhaustion in the sprawl of her limbs.
Her eyes were languorous upon his as she fought some sort of oblivion with a soft smile and a sigh that turned into a jaw-cracking yawn.
Finding that a torpor also called to him, Gabriel lifted her and took her to bed, pulling the remaining covers over her body.
“Stay?” she murmured, her eyes already closed as if she knew as well as he did that he couldn’t deny her.
All he wanted was to sleep with her, but something about it almost felt too much.
Too intimate.
More permanent and unretractable even, than what they’d just done.
Lifting the covers, he slid into the bed beside her, gathering her close as she turned to curl into his body.
In seconds, her breath had steadied, and her lashes had begun to flutter with dreams.
Gabriel’s heart wouldn’t allow him to sleep for a long time. It beat a tattoo against his chest, four syllables at a time. Her name.
Felicity.
Happiness. Joy. Completion.
Never had a name been so perfect.
Chapter 15
Felicity would have loved nothing more than to spend the rest of the day in bed with Gabriel, discovering what his broad body looked like when the drapes were thrown open to the daylight.
Against the snow-white cloud of her bed, he was surely a wicked, colorful mélange of ink and flesh and muscle and sex.
But, alas, Mercy had pounded on her door just after dawn— demanding to know why it was locked— and then harassed her into meeting them downstairs for breakfast.
They’d an attempted-murderer to catch, after all.
Felicity might have rolled out of bed, if Gabriel hadn’t caught her first, pulling her bottom back against his hips.
She gasped as his erection throbbed against the cleft, then moaned as his lips found her ear and nibbled it.
Responding instantly, she rolled her hips, delighted when his cock slid between her thighs from behind.
Filthy French words spilled from his sleep-husked voice as his hand glided around to cup her breasts before angling down her belly to delve into her slit.
Lifting her leg for him to gain access, Felicity covered her mouth and bit down on her palm as he simultaneously slid into her from behind and worked damp circles around the hood of her sex with his clever fingers.
Her climax was less a climb to the stars as it was an explosion of them, and she had to bite the pad of her palm in order to not scream the house down now that it was awake.
As her clenching spasms began to abate, he quickened his strokes, the hand in her hair curling into a fist as he pulled out of her body and thrust between her thighs lubricated by the slick jets of his release.
He barely took the time to regain any breath before he left for the basin and returned with a damp cloth.
It was this thoughtfulness that made her care for him so. How strange, for a man so adverse to being vulnerable, who hid himself from everyone, to walk naked in her room with the prowling confidence of a rutting stag.
She liked it.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said once she’d been administered to.
“What’s that?” Sitting up, she nuzzled into his neck.
“Your sister is the worst.”
She giggled at his mock-aggrieved expression, playfully pushing him out of her bed with a shove of her foot.
“Better you go and dress in your own chamber, before Mrs. Pickering finds you in here and forces you to make an honest woman of me.”
She’d said it in jest, but their gazes crashed together for an uneasy moment. Her words landing on the floor in a heap of disorganized chaos between them.
They’d never spoken of the future.
Swallowing, Felicity was the first to give into her cowardice. “I-I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“Of course.”
They didn’t look at each other as he gathered his clothing and left.
Felicity was hoping the awkwardness between them would dispel by breakfast, but it hung above them like a sword through the meal. And then in the carriage after, when they went to the offices of George C. White, Esquire, to question her father’s solicitor.
Finding the offices suspiciously vacant, they followed a strange and complicated trail through the city, finally determining that Mr. White had left the country for an indeterminate amount of time.
It was well into the afternoon by then, and they all decided to return to Cresthaven for luncheon to plot their next move.
“Actually,” Mercy said as the carriage pulled into the courtyard. “I have a friend through the Eddard Sharpe Society of Homicidal Mystery Analysis who might know how to find this Marco Villanueve. He’s always talking about his contacts in the smuggling world.” She reached out and squeezed Felicity’s knee through her voluminous sage skirts. “What say Rafe and I go pay him a visit while you rest, dear. You look absolutely knackered.”
“A lovely idea,” Felicity agreed, offering her sister a wan and grateful smile.
“Yes,” Raphael agreed, his dark eyebrow lifted at his sullen brother. “That would give you time to talk about whatever is going on between the two of you, I think. I’ve been wanting to squirm out of my skin all afternoon.”
Mercy stepped on his toe and he merely grinned. “Ever the subtle rogue, my husband,” she muttered, though her eyes were fond as she gazed over at him.
Emitting a sigh from deep in his chest, Gabriel heaved out of the carriage and held his hand out for Felicity.
A hand that had pleasured her out of her mind just this morning.
Taking it, she stepped down and led the way into the house as the driver turned the carriage in the tight courtyard and clopped back into the mild London afternoon.
“Will you come with me to the parlor?” she asked.
He nodded, his stony expression never changing.
Are you having regrets? She wanted to ask him. Are you feeling guilty because you are still going to leave?
What would it take for him to stay?
Because if there was a price, she’d be willing to pay it.
Even if it meant losing everything to gain his heart.
“Gabriel, I—”
Without preamble, he seized her roughly and shoved her behind him, his finger held to his mouth in a signal for si
lence.
The knife he kept against his back appeared in his hand as he cocked his ear toward her father’s study.
Felicity could hear nothing above her racing heart, but she trusted his senses and was happy to allow him to stalk to the door like an advancing buccaneer, ready to slice their intruder to shreds.
Shoving the door open, he lowered the knife immediately, though his grave frown remained firmly in place.
“Mrs. Winterton,” he said in a bemused voice. “I think you need to explain yourself.”
Gasping, Felicity shimmied past him through the doorframe to see her friend and companion frozen over her father’s desk, papers clutched in her hand.
She’d never looked so terrible. Her gold dress hung from a frame that’d become alarmingly thin in the matter of only several days. Her eyes, so lively and blue, had sunken into pallid skin that seemed to all but sag from tired bones. Hair usually the lambent color of copper escaped a hasty knot in limp, dull strands. The papers in her hands shook, and she let them fall to the desk to wring her fingers together.
Moving as if her joints hurt, Emmaline Winterton turned to Felicity with lashes gathered in spikes as tears leaked out the corner of her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she all but croaked. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. You have to believe that—”
“Oh, do shut up, you dull bitch.”
The moment the masculine voice slithered from around the other side of the door, Felicity could feel Gabriel surge behind her, moving to place himself in between her and the interloper.
Something stopped him.
Looking behind her, Felicity despaired to find that a thin metal garrote had been slipped around his neck by a cutthroat, and two other burly brutes had ahold of each straining arm.
His knife clattered to the floor. A furious roar became a choked groan as the weapon cut into his windpipe, strangling his breath.
“No.” Felicity reached toward him, only to have her elbow seized by a clawlike hand that jerked her off her feet and tossed her against the desk.
She whimpered as her hip caught the edge, but wrenched her hand away when Emmaline reached for her.
Facing her enemy, she was astonished to find him a perfect stranger.
Though his suit was at least a year or more out of fashion, it might have been expensive once. It stretched over a paunch that’d increased significantly since the initial tailoring of his vest and jacket. Grey hair was pulled back into a queue over a face that might have belonged to a raven in another life, it was so beakish and gaunt.
“You let these men into my house?” she accused Mrs. Winterton, gagging on her first bitter taste of true betrayal.
“Oh, don’t be too hard on our Emmaline.” The man tapped on the desk with a heavy cane, causing Emmaline to flinch. “I didn’t give her much of a choice.”
She glanced from Emmaline to her assailant to Gabriel, as her terror spiked.
Gabriel’s face had gone red, but at least his chest was heaving 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 ask you again to tell me what it is you want. Is it money? You shall have it, but only if you release my personal guard.”
His dark eyes twinkled a bit, and he seemed to relax, though he made no motion to release Gabriel.
Felicity couldn’t say she blamed him, from the pure murder etched onto her lover’s harsh features, any idiot in Blighty would be aware he was not safe.
Reginald retrieved a large envelope of papers from a case. “I have the marriage certificate, the proof of the children’s progeny, and
correspondence and documents that demonstrate what your father has done. I sent Emma here to find and retrieve the deed to Fairhaven, but she has failed to do so. Then old Clarence went and died, leaving his entire fortune to you. You? The youngest and least deserving of his bastards. That, I could not abide.”
“He tried to force me to ruin you.” Emmaline spoke a bit stronger now, as if she, too, had summoned courage against her tormenter. “To find what you had and take everything. But I loved you all so much. I stayed because I felt safe here. Because I couldn’t bring myself to hurt you, Felicity, most of all.” She dropped her head into her hands. “And poor Rosaline and Emmett have suffered for my selfishness. When I learned of their misery, I began to acquiesce to his despicable demands. It was me who left that threatening note in your parlor, but it was written by his hand. I had no notion that he’d go so far as to try and poison you.”
“That was only after my attempt to kidnap you and make you disappear failed,” Reginald muttered with a put-upon sigh. “Better it look like an accident, like you ingested one of your own plants.”
A low growl emitted from Gabriel’s direction, but Felicity forced herself not to look. If she saw him in pain, her strength would abandon her.
“You want me dead,” she realized. “So, the fortune will go to the true-born heir.”
Emmett. She turned the name over in her mind. She’d a brother. Her father had sired an heir after all, but with the wrong woman.
It must have galled him every day.
“I only want what’s best for my nieces and nephew, so that my wards have legal claim to their rightful inheritance, and I, as their guardian, will guide them as I see fit.”
“Is Emmett in his minority?” she asked.
“No.” Reginald wrinkled his nose in distaste as a shudder coursed through him. “He is quite seven-and-twenty. I had him institutionalized, poor boy, for his unnatural urges, until Emmaline began to cooperate.”
“Institutionalized?”
“He’s… unnatural.” Reginald bared his teeth. “An invert.”
Felicity held a hand to her lips. She’d heard of inverts; they were men who preferred the romantic company of other men… She couldn’t imagine shutting them up in a hellish asylum. “My God. He’s not still there, is he?”
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