Felicity was holding on to control by her fingertips. She couldn’t leap into his arms. She couldn’t admit that meeting him in person only solidified what she had suspected since she was eight years old. That this was the man she would love her whole life. He would be the ideal by which she measured all other men. If he left her, he would leave her with no heart at all.
But she couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Not before she was certain of him. Not before they both knew what was going on in this house.
Even so, she fought tears. She pulled back and stepped out of his hold, as if that would help. It didn’t. It only made her feel so cold all she wanted to do was nestle right back where she belonged. Where shewantedto belong.
“You really do need to get your wound looked at,” she said, not sounding appreciably better.
He frowned. “Felicity...”
Now she was the one shaking her head. She had almost died when she’d realized he’d been shot. She needed to step farther away from that. She needed to pull some sense out of the swirling chaos. She had to give her heart a chance to settle. Right now, it felt as if it would stumble right out of her chest.
“I can’t go this fast,” she protested, and lifted her gaze to see the sudden pain in his. “Please.”
“I want to marry you, Felicity.”
She smiled and knew how sad she looked. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m afraid I simply cannot go from inconvenient embarrassment to Lady Flint Bracken in less than a week. That only happens in fairy stories. And I have been nowhere near fairies my entire life.”
“Will you at least think about it?” he asked so gently it hurt. “I mean, really think about it.”
“It is all I’ve been doing.”
I love you. I will love you until my dying breath. But I know better than to think I am the woman you need. Not when you walk ducal halls and I pace the corridors of second-rate schools.Not when I have no name to bring to you.
But how could she leave? He still needed her to help unravel the mysteries here. At least she could stay that long.
Instinctively she reached up to take hold of her little locket, as if to resettle herself in the world. It wasn’t there.
Her locket.
“It’s funny,” she said with a stiff little laugh as she walked over to the bell-pull. “I just remembered something. I did bring something away from the Lassiters’ with me. I didn’t think of it because I didn’t take what wasn’t mine.”
She pulled the bell for Mrs. Windom.
Flint stayed perfectly still. “What is it? How did you come by it?”
“My pupil Mary. When I left so quickly, she ran down the drive after me and gave me a trinket she said she got at a local fair. A locket.”
She shook her head, the image of Mary’s tear-streaked face before her.“They shouldn’t have,” the little girl had kept saying, her hand clasped in Felicity’s. “I don’t want you to forget.”
There was no way Felicity could ever forget. Mary had been the first person who had needed her.
“Do you have it?” Flint asked.
Startled, Felicity looked up. “In my room. It broke when you pulled me from under the bed, remember?”
For half a minute she thought he might have smiled back at her. “Please. Go get it. I have to be sure. Quick. And Felicity.”
She turned.
“We will finish this conversation. That is a promise.”
She could do no more than nod and open the door.
On her way out, she asked the arriving footman to have Mrs. Windom see to Flint's wound. Then she went to retrieve the locket she prayed would mean nothing to anyone but her. After all, if it did, she might lose it.
It hadn’t begun life as a locket, she admitted, as she opened the small jewelry case her friends Fiona and Mairead Ferguson had given her on their graduation. She imagined it had begun life as a watch fob, a gold-colored metal oval bearing a surprisingly well-etched lion rampant. Felicity had spent precious funds to attach it to a good chain.
Little Mary said she’d seen the trinket in a booth. Felicity smiled as she palmed the cool metal. It wasn’t much, Mary had said, but it had reminded her of her dear Miss Chambers, fierce and protective. Felicity thought she would go to her grave without a finer compliment.
