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

Taking it, she stepped down and led the way into the house as the driver turned the carriage in the tight courtyard and clopped back into the mild London afternoon.

“Will you come with me to the parlor?” she asked.

He nodded, his stony expression never changing.

Are you having regrets? She wanted to ask him. Are you feeling guilty because you are still going to leave?

What would it take for him to stay?

Because if there was a price, she’d be willing to pay it.

Even if it meant losing everything to gain his heart.

“Gabriel, I—”

Without preamble, he seized her roughly and shoved her behind him, his finger held to his mouth in a signal for silence.

The knife he kept against his back appeared in his hand as he cocked his ear toward her father’s study.

Felicity could hear nothing above her racing heart, but she trusted his senses and was happy to allow him to stalk to the door like an advancing buccaneer, ready to slice their intruder to shreds.

Shoving the door open, he lowered the knife immediately, though his grave frown remained firmly in place.

“Mrs. Winterton,” he said in a bemused voice. “I think you need to explain yourself.”

Gasping, Felicity shimmied past him through the doorframe to see her friend and companion frozen over her father’s desk, papers clutched in her hand.

She’d never looked so terrible. Her gold dress hung from a frame that’d become alarmingly thin in the matter of only several days. Her eyes, so lively and blue, had sunken into pallid skin that seemed to all but sag from tired bones. Hair usually the lambent color of copper escaped a hasty knot in limp, dull strands. The papers in her hands shook, and she let them fall to the desk to wring her fingers together.

Moving as if her joints hurt, Emmaline Winterton turned to Felicity with lashes gathered in spikes as tears leaked out the corner of her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she all but croaked. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. You have to believe that—”

“Oh, do shut up, you dull bitch.”

The moment the masculine voice slithered from around the other side of the door, Felicity could feel Gabriel surge behind her, moving to place himself in between her and the interloper.

Something stopped him.

Looking behind her, Felicity despaired to find that a thin metal garrote had been slipped around his neck by a cutthroat, and two other burly brutes had ahold of each straining arm.

His knife clattered to the floor. A furious roar became a choked groan as the weapon cut into his windpipe, strangling his breath.

“No.” Felicity reached toward him, only to have her elbow seized by a clawlike hand that jerked her off her feet and tossed her against the desk.

She whimpered as her hip caught the edge, but wrenched her hand away when Emmaline reached for her.

Facing her enemy, she was astonished to find him a perfect stranger.

Though his suit was at least a year or more out of fashion, it might have been expensive once. It stretched over a paunch that’d increased significantly since the initial tailoring of his vest and jacket. Grey hair was pulled back into a queue over a face that might have belonged to a raven in another life, it was so beakish and gaunt.

“You let these men into my house?” she accused Mrs. Winterton, gagging on her first bitter taste of true betrayal.

“Oh, don’t be too hard on our Emmaline.” The man tapped on the desk with a heavy cane, causing Emmaline to flinch. “I didn’t give her much of a choice.”

She glanced from Emmaline to her assailant to Gabriel, as her terror spiked.

Gabriel’s face had gone red, but at least his chest was heaving with breath now, which was all that mattered. He had saved her life so many times.

Now she must return the favor.

She attuned her breaths to his, focusing her mind on the intruder in front of her. If she could provide him what he wanted, perhaps he’d leave them unharmed.

“She’s not my Emmaline,” Felicity said evenly. “Why did she bring you here, and what will it take for you to leave?”

At that, his comically thin eyebrows crawled up to where his hairline might have once been in his younger days. “Oh, but she is your Emmaline. She is my Emmaline. We all belong to each other, my dear. Because we’re family.” Pulling back the hem of his coat, he showed her a pistol, but his remark had already landed like a bullet to her middle.

“A-are you M.W. Goode?” Felicity asked, dreading an answer that would make this man her blood relative in any fashion.

He brightened, his boots clicking together as he tapped an idea out of the air. “Oh yes, introductions.” He gave her a comically chivalrous bow. “I am Sir Reginald Winterton III, and my elder sister, Mary, was your father’s legal wife and Baroness.”

Felicity’s heart slammed against its cage as she gaped at him. “You’re lying.”

“I wish I were,” he scoffed. “But decades ago, before your mother came along, Clarence and my sister, Mary, eloped to Gretna Green and were wed. I’ve brought along the license to prove it. But poor Mary’s dowry was not what your father wanted for them, and so they hatched a plan. He’d wed a wealthy invalid heiress— your mother— and stash his true love and wife— my sister, Mary— in the country until the woman gave up the ghost, leaving her fortune to him.”

He meandered to one of the bookcases above which a framed portrait of the Baron and Baroness Cresthaven loomed over the room.

Looming had once been her father’s favorite pastime.

“Unfortunately, the life of a Baroness agreed with your mother, and she regained her good health. Your father formed an attachment, resulting in you four girls.”

Felicity shook her head, staring into the ice blue eyes of her father’s rendering, eyes he’d passed on to her… and to Emmaline? “My father was… a bigamist?”

Sir Reginald’s lip curled into an ugly snarl.