She was answered with silence.
“If I am to be mistress,” Felicity said. “I need to know how to go on.”
There was a small sigh. Felicity refused to face the girl, allowing her anonymity for the truth. “His lordship is much favored, Miss. And it hasn't gone unnoticed how good you were to Mrs. Windom.”
Felicity nodded. “A good place to start, then. Thank you, Sukie. I appreciate the candor.”
Sukie left the way she came. Felicity still couldn't work up the motivation to stand. She was caught dead center in the eye of a hurricane and didn't know how to navigate.
How could she? She was in an impossible place. A fantasy that made no sense. She had actually been whisked away from a second-rate boarding school at the invitation of a duke to meet his son with marriage in mind.
Marriage. To the son of a duke. Her, an orphan with a surname she had made up whole cloth.
And him....
She drew in an unforgivably trembly breath. Just thinking about him set those sparks loose again, spilling through her like fireworks and setting her limbs alight. Which didn't help her in the least. How could she keep a straight head while dealing with him when her body...when her body...?
She shook her head. It didn't even bear thinking about. If she couldn't control the rush of anticipation every time she thought of him, she would never be able to make a sensible decision.
That was troubling enough. In fact, it would have made an excellent plot for a Minerva Press novel. But then other women had been introduced to the plot. Frightened girls, really. Underfed, skittish, work-roughened girls on their way out of the country. Girls who were kept secret to all except for two men. Girls who had been hurt.
She had to believe that Lord Flint didn't know. He had truly looked as shocked as she felt. Sukie hadn't hesitated to defend him against any charges he might interfere with the help.
Felicitywantedto believe he was innocent of hurting the women who had moved through his house. She wanted to like him, she realized. He was unlike any of the aristocratic men she had known in her life, with the exception of Pip's brother Alex, who had helped rescue all the girls of Last Chance Academy back in the day.
Lord Flint could be completely overbearing. He could seem impervious to pressure, and rock stubborn against opposition. At the same time, he had apologized—-apologized—for having pressured her. She tried very hard to think of any other time in her life she had received an apology from anyone, much less the son of a duke, and simply could not.
Felicity sighed. She was in a dangerous place. She had known Lord Flint no more than a few hours, had known his intentions even fewer than that. And yet, she wanted them to be true. She wanted them to be honest. She wanted to think he liked her, too, and was sincere that he meant to make something out of his father's impossible demand.
And yet...
And yet, Felicity was too old to believe in fairy tales. If fairy tales were true, her parents would have come for her. They would have explained to her that they'd been lost at sea so long that by the time they looked she was beyond their reach. If fairy tales were real, she would have been a lost princess, not a teacher of ten-year-old girls who wanted no part of her, living in an unheated cubicle the size of Lord Flint's dining room table and using her half day off to bring her tatting into a local shop to sell for extra money.
If fairy tales were real, she wouldn't be alone. And Miss Murphy wouldn't have those bruises. And Aunt Winnie wouldn't live in hourly fear that she would lose the only world in which she still mattered.
Felicity knew she should leave. Sneak into her room, gather her meager belongings and tiptoe out the back door. Leave her sheet music if necessary. She should walk to Gloucester, all the way back to school if it came to it, if it meant being safely away from a situation that was looking more and more sketchy by the minute.
She should be strong enough to know better.
She feared very much that she wasn't.
There was nothing else for it. Taking hold of the banister, she pulled herself to her feet. It was time to move on. Pausing only long enough to brush any wrinkles from her feed sack of a dress, she sighed and continued on down the stairs.
Chapter 7
He knewshe was approaching even before he heard the soft pad of her feet outside the library door. He knew before she knocked, before he bade her come in. It was the oddest thing. He'd asked her to join him, of course. He'd been waiting to hear if she had gained any more information from Miss Murphy.
But that wasn't why his head lifted seconds before the floorboard creaked at the far end of the corridor. Something shifted in him, something unsettling and new. Something he thought it would be wiser not to identify. Something that set his heart skidding and his cock waking.
Still, he put down the quill he'd been using to scratch a quick letter to his father and waited until he heard the sound of her knock.
“Come in.”
Good lord, his palms were sweating. How could that be? He'd only met her that morning. There had been a spark of awareness when he'd taken her hand, of course, a delicious fire in her lips when he’d kissed her. But he'd felt that fire before and never actually anticipated seeing the woman again. Never looked forward to the surprise of learning just what she'd say next.
He definitely had to stop this now. Whatever his father expected of him, he suspected a real attraction wasn't part of it.
“Oh, you're busy,” she said, stopping in the doorway.
