Page 70 of Tempting Fate
A warning, most probably, to creatures of prey.
The effects of his nearness were familiar to her now. Little vibrations of the fine hairs on her body or a prickle of awareness washing down her spine.
Except the thought of him devouring her made her tremble with emotions other than fear.
I am not kind.
He’d said that to her in the very beginning. He’d always cautioned her about who he was. And yet, it was in his very sin against her that he proved his own claim false.
His lie was meant to be kind.
Lifting her fist, she meant to knock at his door. But froze.
Asking for what she wanted, what she needed, had rarely ever gone well, and Raphael’s revelations about his brother had both clarified and complicated things.
She’d been shattered by discovery of his past. By the barbarity he’d had to endure. And she did comprehend that his hands knew no other trade than violence and crime.
He’d never had a woman. Never been a lover.
Never been loved.
He was a weapon, and she was nothing of the sort.
Everything said and left unsaid between them surged from her breath and broke on the barrier of the door. What would this conversation look like? When they were both so overwrought and frustrated by everything from desire to circumstance. Would he be kind, now that the lie was uncovered?
Would he stay?
She lowered her hand back to her side, calling herself nine shades of coward.
Not tonight. If things went terribly between them, she’d not have the fortitude to withstand his rejection or abandonment.
With a frustrated sigh, she slunk away to the stairs, heading down toward her father’s study across from her parlor in the front hall.
There, in the extraordinarily masculine space, she used her lamplight to search through what little paperwork had been left in his enormous desk, deemed personal by the solicitors and accountants. If they’d not found anything of note in the more official documents, perhaps she could find a clue in the personal effects she hadn’t yet gotten around to sorting out.
After more than an hour of reading records with financial or legal language she barely comprehended, she slid off her spectacles and rubbed at her tired eyes. All she had left were the household accounts. Opening that book, she squinted down at the tedious figures beneath her, written in her father’s decisive script.
Here was his life in integers. In money, the thing he’d valued over his own family.
With a wistful sort of resentment, she ran her fingers over the long sheet. Past payments for stable feed and servants’ salaries going back years. She found where he installed the broiler that now heated their running hot water, and her eyes bulged at the expense. She found her sisters’ allowances, and where they stopped when they’d each taken husbands without his consent.
But what was this? Quarterly payments by banknote to an M.W. Goode at Fairhaven House, in a staggering amount.
If Felicity had yearned for anything in her life, it’d been extended family.
Her parents were both only children, so far as she knew, and neither of them had come from prolific stock. Had her father been helping some distant relative? Someone far more removed than even Bainbridge?
Encouraged, she frantically went through several files, coming up with nothing. On a whim, she searched through all the drawers, shelves, and even his cigar box, finding them infuriatingly empty.
Blowing out a faint curse on a frustrated breath, his bookshelf caught her eye.
Of course. The family Bible. Her father had been a zealous man, perhaps M.W. Goode would be mentioned in the records of family births and deaths.
She lifted it down, turning through centuries of names with no little amount of awe, finding no one with those particular initials.
But an edge caught her attention, the outline of thick paper snared beneath the thin pages of gold-leafed scripture.
Extracting it, she unfolded what happened to be a deed to an estate.
