Adored in Autumn (Seasons #4)(4)

As she did so, her eldest brother, Lucien, the Earl of Stenfax, stepped into the parlor. He looked around and there was a small smile on his face as his gaze finally settled on Elise. Felicity turned her gaze away from the intensity of the stare they exchanged. She was very happy for him, of course. Just as she was happy for Gray and Rosalinde, and for her friend Celia and John. Each and every one of them had found deep and passionate love with their spouses in the span of the last year. She wanted nothing less for them.

But it didn't change the fact that their intense happiness made her own empty loneliness all the more stark.

"Good afternoon," Stenfax said.

Elise lit up as much as he did as she pushed away from the mantel and moved toward him. She placed a kiss on his cheek before she said, "Would you like tea, love?"

"Nothing, thank you. Where is Mama?"

"Upstairs," Gray said. "She complained of a slight headache."

Stenfax nodded and held up the letter in his hand. "Probably better, as I do have some news."

Felicity swallowed hard, her entire body stiffening as she slowly straightened up from her place leaning over the table with John and Celia. She couldn't stop staring at the letter, fearing it was a harbinger of her doom. Praying it wasn't.

She somehow found her voice as she took a step toward Stenfax. "News about me?" 

"Yes. Dane, I know you said that you are not as accomplished in tracing money trails as you are in other aspects of investigation."

Felicity set her jaw. He was not exactly changing the subject, but his attention toward John dragged out the inevitable.

John inclined his head. "Indeed, it was never my specialty."

"Well, I have reached out to someone who has a great deal of experience in financial dealings and he was once very close to our family, so he can be trusted."

Felicity stared at him, her lips parting in surprise. There were very few people in this world who met the description her brother had just given. In fact, there was only one. And it was the one man she had been trying to forget for years.

She took yet another step toward him. "Lucien, you didn't," she whispered.

His face wrinkled with confusion at the horror she couldn't keep out of her voice. "Didn't reach out to Asher? Indeed, I did."

Felicity caught her breath at the sound of his name. Asher Seyton. A childhood friend to them all, when he was allowed to join them in their games by his father, who was their father's valet. An obsession for her that had developed into something more.

A man who had broken her heart so completely that she had run into the arms of the very next man who paid her any attention. The man she'd been forced to kill in her bedchamber.

Emotion she normally controlled welled up in her at that thought and she let out one soft sob before she rushed from the room, desperate for them not to see how much that name, how much this news, meant to her.

She hurried up the stairs and to her room, where she closed the door behind herself and then sank into a chair before her fire. She covered her face with her hands, but that didn't stop her mind from turning, generating images that haunted her.

Images of the times she had run through the fields with Elise, her brothers and Asher, playing tag or hunting for frogs or pretending to be warriors on battlefields of old.

Those images gave way to later ones, when she'd followed Asher around, watching his every move as he helped his father, uncertain why her stomach flipped and her body tingled when he smiled at her.

And then there was the night of her coming out ball. Six long years ago, when she'd slipped away from the festivities, overwhelmed by her mother's pressure to marry a high title with money to help overcome the financial situation their father had left the family in after his death. On the terrace, she'd found Asher, watching it all from a place hidden in the darkness.

She still remembered how he'd drawn her into the shadows, how his scent had filled her senses and his warmth had made her body heavy and hot. Had she kissed him or had he kissed her? It was so blurry now, just a heated exchange of mouths and tongues and passion that had been repressed for what felt like a lifetime.

She'd known then that she loved him. His position hadn't mattered to her, his lack of funds hadn't mattered. All that had mattered was that she was his. She always had been and she always would be.

Only the next day he had disappeared, without so much as a word to her of goodbye. Her heart had been shattered. It had never properly healed.

There was a soft knock at her door and then it opened to reveal the kind face of Gray's wife Rosalinde. "May I come in?"

Felicity nodded and motioned to the chair beside hers. She couldn't find words at present, but Rosalinde didn't seem to mind. She just reached out and took Felicity's hand, squeezing it gently.