“He was drawn away,” she whispered. “By duty. By his father. I never saw him as less or wanted more than he was. And he still walked away from me.”
Celia reached out and took her hand. Her expression was filled with understanding and care. “I know how much that hurts. But he may have felt he had no choice. John nearly walked away from me, you know.”
Felicity caught her breath. Celia and John were so perfectly matched and so utterly happy that it was hard to remember sometimes that their start had been so rough and painful.
“Why did he?” she asked. “The danger?”
Celia shrugged. “I’m sure that didn’t help. But I think it was more that he couldn’t believe that a man like him deserved a woman like me.”
“And didn’t it hurt you that he made that decision for you? Didn’t it anger you that he’d walk away?”
“No, it hurt and angered me that he didn’t believe in himself,” Celia said. “I refused to let him throw away what I knew we could…what wedo…have together.”
Felicity blinked, wishing the hot tears that filled her eyes were easier to pretend away. But Celia saw them, there was no fighting that truth. She saw them and she leaned in, refusing to let Felicity escape.
“Felicity, doyouwant what you could have?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” she burst out on a short, gasping breath. “It is so hard to have faith in that unknown future.”
“That fact that it’s unknown is why they call it faith,” Celia said as she wiped a tear from Felicity’s cheek.
She opened her mouth to respond but before she could, the door to the parlor opened and John and Asher entered, Stenfax, Elise, Gray and Rosalinde right on their heels.
And Asher was bleeding.
The moment Asher and Dane entered the room, Celia gasped and rushed to her husband. She wrapped her arms around his neck before she placed a deeply passionate kiss on his lips that made everyone in the room turn their heads to give the couple a bit of privacy.
Asher couldn’t help it. His gaze turned directly to Felicity.
He expected her to be watching the pair along with the rest, but she didn’t even seem to notice their display. Instead she stared at him, a hand to her lips and her eyes wide.
“You’re bleeding,” she finally gasped as she moved over to him, lifting up on her tiptoes to brush her fingertips over the cut below his eye.
“It’s nothing,” he reassured her, but she ignored him, still smoothing her hands over his face as she searched out any other injury.
He realized that she wasn’t asking about their duty, she wasn’t asking about the book. In that moment, his well-being was more important to her than saving her own life. His heart swelled with impossible love for her. Impossible desires for a future that didn’t exist, couldn’t exist.
“Felicity,” he said, catching her hands. “We need to tell you what happened.”
Those words seemed to draw her from her worried focus and she looked at the others with a blush before she moved aside.
Dane drew back from Celia and she, too, blushed before she stepped away and took his hand. Asher wished he could do the same for Felicity, but didn’t.
“Tell us,” Stenfax said, his voice shaking.
“We found Beckford,” Dane said. “And the book.”
Felicity weaved slightly and Asher reached out to catch her arm, to steady her. She leaned into him, her warmth curling through him, and then she straightened and said, “So—so is it over?”
“I hope so,” Asher said softly. “But before he was taken way, Beckford told us he had sold some of the secrets in the book already.”
“Mine?” she asked, holding his gaze steadily, her voice somehow calm when her eyes screamed in terror.
“We don’t know,” Dane said. “But we know the code is book code and we know the book it comes from. I assume you have a Bible on the premises?” he asked Stenfax.
“I’ll show you where,” Elise said, motioning for Dane to follow.
Before he did, Dane looked back at Felicity. “I will do the best I can.”
