Chapter 11
For a long momentFelicity didn't react. Then she laughed, a sharp, high sound. “Don't be absurd.”
She wasn't certain what she thought he'd do. What she hoped, maybe. Laugh, tell her it was all a joke. Nothing else would make any sense.
“Do I look as if I mean to be absurd?” he demanded. “The only reason you don't have a ball in your lungs is because you turned to talk to me.”
Setting his glass down, he reached out to her. Felicity flinched, but all he did was take a fold of her sleeve between finger and thumb. She looked down.
The glass slipped out of her hand andthunkedon the floor. She thought she might have stopped breathing. There was a ragged little hole in the material, right where she'd felt the plucking. Exactly at the level of her heart.
“That's ridiculous,” was all she could think to say, her voice thin and wavery.
He let go of her and reclaimed his drink. “Tell me about Teesdale,” he repeated.
She had dropped her brandy, she realized distractedly. Another stain on the carpet. She had to clean it up. She had to wipe off her dress. She bent over to retrieve the empty glass and tried to get to her feet.
“Sit down.”
She sat. She stared at the empty glass in her hand, oddly intent on the prism the sun shattered through it onto the floor. Beautiful colors dancing across the softly hued carpet and to the sleek hardwood floor beyond, the dark masculine room all but disappearing into the shadows. A beautiful room. A room in which she was certain she had no place. A room that had been tidy and neat and gleaming before she arrived. She would have to ask Mrs. Windom to thank the maids. Apologize for getting brandy on the good rug. Tell her about the blood...
“Felicity.”
She looked up, startled to realize she had wandered off. She took a long, shuddery breath, trying valiantly to pull her spinning thoughts back into line.
Shot. Yes. A bullet meant for her.
She shook her head. “I don't understand...”
“Neither do I,” he said, setting his own glass on the desk and reaching forward to retrieve hers from her nerveless fingers. Probably afraid she'd drop it again, she thought bemusedly, maybe break it this time. “Please. Tell me what you know of Teesdale.”
She looked up to see that his eyes had softened. She thought he might have been exerting a significant amount of restraint over his emotions. She couldn't understand why.
She couldn't understand any of this.
“I...only know him through the Lassiters. He visited during school holidays. He was a friend of Eddie....young Mr. Lassiter.”
She shrugged, wondering why her brain suddenly felt so foggy.
“Did you interact with him?”
“Not really. I was up in the nursery with the younger children.”
Except for that one time. The time in the hallway. The time Eddie surprised her. Or had she surprised him? She had stepped out of her room to find them there in the servant's wing. He had been standing there talking to Bucky, bent close. Intent on some papers Bucky held.
Eddie had startled. He'd smiled. He'd stepped up to ask her to go riding, standing far too close. And Bucky...what had Bucky done? She remembered him interrupting only after she’d been forced to drive her knee into the part of Eddie that had obviously been doing his thinking. Offering a rueful smile at Eddie’s howls of outrage and sending her on an errand to get her clear of Eddie’s wrath. She remembered being ushered out of the house the next day.
“Why do you call him by his nickname?”
She shrugged, still distracted. “Everyone did. One just...did.”
“Why, after all this time, would he come looking for you?” Flint asked, fully dragging her attention back. “And how would he know where you are?”
Oddly enough, Felicity's temper began to rise. “I have no idea. I told you. I rarely saw him when I worked for the Lassiters and haven't since leaving. And how are you so positive it was me? What about the line of women parading through your servants’ quarters? The ones no one knows anything about?”
This time he looked straight at her. “No one asked for them by name.”
Finally panic began to bubble up in her chest.
