“No time?” she asked in surprise.
“No need for costumes,” he answered. “He wants to meetyou, not your disguise.”
She swallowed visibly. “Don’t you think it’s a teeny bit selfish to have the best mother, the best father, and also be the best person I have ever met?”
He blinked. “For letting you wear trousers?”
“For letting me be me,” she whispered.
Before he could answer, Mother swung open the door with enthusiasm. “Could you smell biscuits baking all the way from the street?”
“I thought you didn’t bake,” Felicity stammered.
“True.” Mother hauled her into the apartment. “There are no biscuits. Which means you two are here to seeme.”
“And Father,” Giles added.
Mother paused for such a slight moment, no one would have noticed it but him.
“And Father,” she agreed. “He’s in the sitting room. Come.”
Father was always in the sitting room. Staring out the window at the people passing below was one of the few pastimes he had left. He rarely allowed himself to be wheeled anywhere else while he was awake.
“Good God,” Felicity said in shock when she entered the room. “You didn’t tell me your father was even more handsome than you.”
“You’re the first one he’s brought over,” Father said in his low, shaky voice. He clucked his tongue. “Can you stay for a minute?”
“I can stay for hours.” Ignoring the wingback chairs, she dragged a footstool next to Father’s wheeled chair so she could sit next to him at the window. “Giles really hasn’t brought friends up to meet you before?”
“Oh,friends,” Father scoffed. “Sure, plenty of them. Giles has more friends than a dog has fleas. But he’s never before brought a…” Father lowered his voice. “Forgive me. Was it Lord Felix or Lady Felicity?”
She burst out laughing and glared over her shoulder at Giles. “You are the very worst.”
“You said I was the best!” he protested.
“I changed my mind,” she said. “Female prerogative.”
“Then it’s Lady Felicity,” his father said with a smile. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
“Believe me,” she answered. “The pleasure is mine.”
Over his father’s trembling shoulder, Felicity’s gaze met Giles’s. He understood the questions in her eyes.
She didn’t wonder why her father was in a wheeled chair. The rhythmic muscle contractions and palsied hands, the soft, slurred speech, the bit of drool on his stiff jaw—Father’s ill health was unmistakable.
Nor was she wondering why all of Giles’s friends were familiar sights in this parlor. Giles was proud of his mother and father, and with good reason. His parents were clever and droll, and caring and friendly. Who wouldn’t wish to take tea with them?
The question in Felicity’s eyes was why he had brought her to meet them.
“She wants embarrassing stories,” Giles’s mother prompted her husband.
Giles closed his eyes. “Mother—"
“We have so many stories,” came his father’s quavery voice. “There was the time you drank too much sherry when the rector was over for supper, and you started to sing that bawdy ditty—”
“Not embarrassing stories aboutme,” Mother interrupted quickly. “Embarrassing stories about our son.”
“I like all stories.” Felicity leaned back against the windowsill as though she had first row seats at the theater. “I can be here all night.”
“I wish you would.” Mother held a hand to her mouth to block her lips from Giles’s view. “There really are biscuits, but Giles can’t be trusted not to eat them all. Once we get him to go back to his quarters—”
“I’m standing right here,” he said dryly. “And I know where you hide the biscuits.”
Mother crossed her arms and let out an exaggerated sigh. “Foiled.”
Too late, Giles realized the trap he’d set for himself. When he’d brought Felicity here, he’d been worried about her reaction, not his parents’. Of course it was love at first sight. Now that his parents had met her, they would want him to keep her.Gileswanted to keep her.
And Lady Felicity wasn’t the keeping kind.
