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

“He thrust upon Mary the life of a mistress, turning his true bride into nothing better than a whore, and his true-born children into bastards.”

Felicity turned to Emmaline, the woman who’d lived in her house since before her parents had died. Tears streaked down the woman’s colorless cheeks, though her expression remained as smooth and bleak as the grave.

“Our father turned our own half-sister into our governess?” she asked, horrified. “He installed you in our home and bade you keep such a secret?”

Clarence Goode had been a cold and ruthless man. A miser, a zealot, and, she was ashamed to say, a bigot, but she’d never expected him to be so cruel to his own children.

Indifferent, yes. But this…

“Uncle Reginald had been blackmailing him since Mother died of cancer,” Emmaline said with little inflection.

“Your father was a cheapskate!” Reginald crowed, thumping his cane against the floor.

Felicity was beginning to hate that cane, and from the way Emmaline warily avoided it, she suspected the poor woman had greater reason to do so.

“So long as his precious Mary was alive, he kept us in the manner which befitted our stations.” Reginald’s acrimony escaped on every syllable, along with a good bit of spittle. “But once she’d gone, his upkeep dwindled. He began trying to arrange marriages for the children to get them settled, and bestowed upon them dowries and educations rather than liquid money.” He stalked closer to her. “How were we supposed to live in the meantime, I ask you?”

Felicity blinked up at him, stalled on one particular thing he’d said.

“Children?” She glanced at Emmaline. “There are more of you?”

Emmaline’s eyes hardened to chips of ice. “A younger brother, Emmett, and a younger sister, Rosaline, whom Uncle Reginald keeps as his ward. Indeed, she does not come of age until she is twenty-one. But after I visited her that day I was poisoned, I found her in terrible straits. I do not know if she will survive another year.”

“Don’t you whisper a breath of those ugly rumors, Emma,” he sneered. “Or you won’t like what I’m forced to do to defend myself.”

A darkness in his voice threaded a peculiar revulsion through Felicity’s blood. It took all her sparse courage to face him. “I ask you again to tell me what it is you want. Is it money? You shall have it, but only if you release my personal guard.”

His dark eyes twinkled a bit, and he seemed to relax, though he made no motion to release Gabriel.

Felicity couldn’t say she blamed him, from the pure murder etched onto her lover’s harsh features, any idiot in Blighty would be aware he was not safe.

Reginald retrieved a large envelope of papers from a case. “I have the marriage certificate, the proof of the children’s progeny, and correspondence and documents that demonstrate what your father has done. I sent Emma here to find and retrieve the deed to Fairhaven, but she has failed to do so. Then old Clarence went and died, leaving his entire fortune to you. You? The youngest and least deserving of his bastards. That, I could not abide.”

“He tried to force me to ruin you.” Emmaline spoke a bit stronger now, as if she, too, had summoned courage against her tormenter. “To find what you had and take everything. But I loved you all so much. I stayed because I felt safe here. Because I couldn’t bring myself to hurt you, Felicity, most of all.” She dropped her head into her hands. “And poor Rosaline and Emmett have suffered for my selfishness. When I learned of their misery, I began to acquiesce to his despicable demands. It was me who left that threatening note in your parlor, but it was written by his hand. I had no notion that he’d go so far as to try and poison you.”

“That was only after my attempt to kidnap you and make you disappear failed,” Reginald muttered with a put-upon sigh. “Better it look like an accident, like you ingested one of your own plants.”

A low growl emitted from Gabriel’s direction, but Felicity forced herself not to look. If she saw him in pain, her strength would abandon her.

“You want me dead,” she realized. “So, the fortune will go to the true-born heir.”

Emmett. She turned the name over in her mind. She’d a brother. Her father had sired an heir after all, but with the wrong woman.

It must have galled him every day.

“I only want what’s best for my nieces and nephew, so that my wards have legal claim to their rightful inheritance, and I, as their guardian, will guide them as I see fit.”

“Is Emmett in his minority?” she asked.

“No.” Reginald wrinkled his nose in distaste as a shudder coursed through him. “He is quite seven-and-twenty. I had him institutionalized, poor boy, for his unnatural urges, until Emmaline began to cooperate.”

“Institutionalized?”

“He’s… unnatural.” Reginald bared his teeth. “An invert.”

Felicity held a hand to her lips. She’d heard of inverts; they were men who preferred the romantic company of other men… She couldn’t imagine shutting them up in a hellish asylum. “My God. He’s not still there, is he?”

“He’s recovering… for now. It was all quite terrible for him.” Reginal sidled closer to her. “It’s nearly impossible to afford his upkeep now, without his inheritance. He might have to go back.”

Swamped with grief for siblings she’d never met, Felicity rushed to the bookshelf and retrieved the Bible, flipping through the gold-leaf pages to retract the deed. “I can give you Fairhaven. For that matter, I can give you Cresthaven if you want it. You can name your sum, if only…” She searched her mind for a solution. “If you’ll relinquish the guardianship of my siblings to me.”

He laughed as his pistol appeared, wiping a tear of mirth from the corner of his eye. “Why would I settle for a sum, when I can have the entire thing?”

Panic threatened to overwhelm her as her limbs went numb. “I-If that gun goes off in this neighborhood,