Tempting Fate by Kerrigan Byrne (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

“Mercy…” Raphael caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “Please.”

“No, no!” She snatched her hand back and shook a furious fist at both of them as they stood before her diminutive frame like enormous, scolded boys. “Felicity knows nothing of men but what she reads in those damned books, aside from our overbearing father, who made her feel like her very existence was a mistake. He belittled and berated her because of her clumsiness as a child. And when it was discovered she was good as blind, we all sheltered her because she couldn’t see when danger was coming at her. She’d never see you coming for her until you owned her gentle heart. You were her first kiss, I hope you realize. The first man she let into this house alone. And you deceived her. A woman’s heart doesn’t forget that.”

“I know.” Gabriel stood and let her truth batter against him. It was what he deserved, what he’d wished Felicity had said and done.

“I’m going to go check on her,” she announced.

Her husband reached for her hand and gave her a gentle tug before she could storm away. “Let me, mon chaton?”

“Why would I? You’re a man. Don’t think that this isn’t somehow also your fault.” She waggled a finger at him.

“It’s all of our faults…” Gabriel muttered, seizing their attention. “Felicity is right, you know. We never should have lied to her. I thought to protect her, but I realize that was a high-handed, devious, self-serving thing to do.”

“Mercy,” Raphael said with a bit more fervency this time. “My brother never had designs on your sister, he had feelings for her. Always. Since the night we all met.”

Mercy’s mouth clamped shut. Fell open. Then shut again. She blinked at him as if she needed a moment to reassess her view of the entire situation.

Raphael’s knuckles grazed his wife’s jaw. “Please, darling. Go get comfortable and cleaned up from your travels and allow me to talk to your sister. Trust me. I know a thing or two about calming a distraught Goode girl.”

She snorted, but relented. “If you upset her further or make her cry, I’ll hang you both by your bootstraps and decapitate anyone who dares try to cut you down.”

Raphael watched as Mercy marched to the ornate courtyard entrance, her skirt swishing in angry little motions behind her. “I adore her vicious threats. She’d have made an excellent crime lord, don’t you think?”

Gabriel let out a low whistle of agreement. “She’d have been the most ruthless the underworld has yet seen.”

“Do not worry, mon frere.” Raphael put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and the weight comforted him mightily. “We will put this to rights.”

“I should go to her,” Gabriel said. “It’s my apology she deserves first and foremost. She should take anger out on me.”

“Gabriel.” His brother turned to him, searched his face as if he still couldn’t believe it. “I have some things to say to her that need to be said. The woman said she did not want to see you, and… at least for tonight, I think you should respect that.”

Gabriel nodded. “You’re right.”

“Get a drink, yes? You look like you need one.” Raphael sauntered into the house with his signature loose-limbed confidence, leaving him alone.

An abysmal shame and agony welled up from so deep within, Gabriel whirled and put his fist through one of the panes of the greenhouse, shattering it beneath the blow.

Feeling only nominally better, he inspected the damage to his fist, which was astonishingly minimal. Only a few small cuts and barely a drop of blood. He stretched the skin with a curl of his fingers, testing it, ripping it further. Needing some sort of pain to ground him back into his body.

This was why he didn’t belong with Felicity Goode. Because she wanted a gentle palm in which to place her tender heart.

And he only knew how to make a fist.

Chapter 13

Felicity paced the room, shaking with every elemental emotion. First with the hot lance of anger, then with the whirlwind of shame for that anger. Thereafter, the scorched earth was flooded by hurt and then buried beneath humiliation.

Was there ever a woman who didn’t have to claw her way through a graveyard of shame?

She hadn’t even done anything, and yet here it was.

It was merely that… the look in his gunmetal eyes had been enough to melt her.

Because she glimpsed the shame there, too.

It was humiliation at the base of her ire. Her family thought her nothing more than a child, one to be coddled and cosseted. Lied to.

For her own protection.

Because she didn’t have the emotional fortitude to handle hard and frightening truths.

They weren’t wrong. That was the worst of it. Terror overwhelmed her sometimes, dread and doubt overtook her sense of practicality until she was certain the world would stop spinning at any moment.

It was why she escaped into her romantic fantasies. Because she had to remind herself that there were happy endings, even in those moments when her mind told her such a thing was impossible.

Because she knew that they occurred; she’d watched it happen to her sisters with no small amount of envy.

And she thought…

Well, it didn’t bear consideration. It was always impossible. The massive, menacing stranger who protected her had teased those fantasies out of her imagination, and there were moments when she’d hoped that… that they might find a way.

And because she was so naïve, so inexperienced and sheltered, it’d never occurred to her that he was a man who’d deceived his way into her home.

Into her heart.

The decisive knock on her door came as no surprise.

“Come in, Mercy,” she sighed.

Her door creaked open, and Raphael’s dark head peeked around the edge. “It isn’t Mercy, but would you allow me to speak with you for a moment?”

Felicity took a moment to study him. Though there wasn’t more than two years’ difference in age between Gabriel and