Adored In Autumn

by Jess Michaels

  Adored in Autumn

  (Seasons Book 4)

  By

  USA Today Bestseller

  Jess Michaels

  Adored In Autumn

  Seasons Book 4

  Copyright © Jesse Petersen, 2016

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  www.AuthorJessMichaels.com

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  Email: Jess@AuthorJessMichaels.com

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  Dedication

  For Harley, who sat with me through nearly every book I ever wrote. I will miss your elbow kisses and the way you blocked the screen to demand love.

  Now go play with Quinny in Kitty Heaven.

  And for Michael for being the best part of everything.

  Prologue

  Spring 1808

  Felicity, Viscountess Barbridge, jerked her head up from her correspondence as the hard, harsh voice of her husband echoed in the hallways. She began to tremble as she carefully put away her quill and ink and pushed the papers aside. She knew that tone of voice. She had learned it well in the two nightmarish years she had been the viscount’s wife.

  She also knew what normally happened when he had a few drinks in him and had his ire up. She had the bruises to prove it.

  The door to her chamber flew open, slamming on the other side of the wall, where there was already a hole from that action having been performed so many times before.

  “Erasmus,” Felicity said, trying to keep her tone calm and even as he entered the room. “I didn’t realize you’d be home so early.”

  She had often wished this man was ugly. That his outward appearance matched the violence and brutality within him. But he wasn’t. Erasmus was tall, broad shouldered, with dark blonde hair and intelligent green eyes. He was handsome, though she had long ago ceased to think him so.

  But it still seemed unfair that such a monster was encased in such a pretty package.

  “You didn’t want me home?” he barked as he swung the door shut behind him and moved on her a few steps. “Why? Are you fucking someone behind my back, Felicity?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not,” she whispered.

  He caught her arm and tugged hard, almost dislocating her shoulder as his fingers pushed hard into her skin, bruising it. “I’d kill you where you stand if you were, you know that.”

  She swallowed. “You’ve made it clear many times.”

  He chuckled as he shoved her away, sending her backward a few steps as she tried to regain her footing. Her heart was pounding now, so loud she could hardly hear anything else but the blood whooshing through her veins.

  “I could do it any time I’d like, you know,” he said, and he tilted his head as he stared at her, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. “It would be so easy.”

  Felicity stepped back. “Erasmus—”

  “Take off your clothes,” he murmured, shrugging out of his jacket. “Now.”

  “I’m having my courses and—”

  “Don’t fucking lie!” he shouted as he moved toward her, a hand raised. “Take them off.”

  Felicity jolted in terror. It had been a foolish, horrible mistake to marry this man, one driven by a broken heart. And she had suffered for it over and over both by his fists and by the demands like the ones he made now. With him this drunk, he would certainly hurt her as he had before.

  “Why don’t you sleep?” she suggested, edging away from him. “And we’ll do this tomorrow when you can enjoy it more.”

  The back of his hand came hard across her cheek, and she cried out as she fell against the bed. He began to push at her skirts, exposing her as he tore at the fabric.

  “No!” she cried out, fighting his hands. “Stop!”

  He ignored her, unfastening his trousers as he pulled out his half-flaccid cock. “By God, you will do your duty, woman.”

  Years of fear, of pain, flashed through Felicity, and a great rage and terror rose up in her. Without thinking, without planning, she kicked at him and hit him in the stomach. He grunted out a sound of pain, and then it felt like everything in the room came to a screeching halt.

  He stared at her, face wild with pure, unadulterated rage, and she stared back, realizing that by fighting back, she had sealed her fate. He moved forward in a flash and his hands closed around her neck. He began to choke her, squeezing the air from her lungs as his cock got harder.

  He was going to kill her at last. She saw that in his angry, evil eyes. She was going to die, he was going to violate her one last time and then discard her. There was a part of her that whispered to her to simply surrender to it. To let the blackness that was starting at the end of her sightline fill her up and overtake her. To end the torture, to end the pain and just let there be blissful nothingness.

  She let her eyes close, she let her body go limp, but as the darkness gathered, she heard a voice in her head. A voice she hadn’t heard in three years. A voice she had tried to pretend she’d never heard.

  She heard that voice, that deep, kind, masculine voice whisper, “Fight, Felicity. Fight.”

  Her eyes flew open at his order and she reached up to claw at Erasmus’s hands once more. She scratched his skin and his grip loosened slightly. Enough for her to reach out and grab the vase on the table next to her bed. She swung it, connecting with his skull, and he made a harsh cry, but he didn’t roll off of her enough that she could move. Desperation gripped her and she swung her arm out wildly. When she did so, her fingers touched the handle of the pistol Erasmus always kept in his waistband.

  She pulled the gun free and swung it toward him. “Stop!” she croaked through her ragged and sore airway. “I’ll…shoot you.”

  Blood trickled down from his hairline where she’d struck him with the now broken vase. He pushed off her and she gasped a breath, praying he would walk away. Sober up. But his eyes were lit up with rage that would not be contained and he laughed as he looked at her and the gun in her hand.

  He lunged at her once more and his hands folded around her throat.

  What happened next didn’t feel real. It was as if she left her body and watched it from a distance. Watched her dying self press the gun between them. Watched the trigger depress beneath her index finger, the weight of it making her work for her life. She heard the sharp, harsh echo of the discharge and then Erasmus’s face twisted in shock and disbelief and pain.

  He looked down at her, his eyes wide as his fingers relaxed from her throat. She gasped for air as he wheezed out a long, heavy breath. “Bitch, you shot me.”

  Then he slipped away, off of her body, down the side of the bed where he’d been leaning and into a heap on the floor. The gun smoked in her hand, filling her nostrils with an acrid scent. The harshness of it made some reality creep in and she slowly edged her body to the end of the bed. She stared down at him, down at where the blood began to pool out from under him. Down at where her husband lay, lifeless.

  And then she began to scream.

  The door to her chamber flew open and her maid, Cora, burst inside. The young woman looked first at Felicity’s face, and then at the lifeless body before her, and all the color drained from her cheeks. She shut the door and rushed over to Felicity.

  “Oh, my lady,” she said, reaching out to grasp Felicity’s hand and force the gun she sti
ll held out of her clenched fingers. “I thought I’d find you the one who was dead.”

  “H-he was going to kill me,” Felicity choked out. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to do this.”

  “Hush, now. It’s all right.” Cora set her jaw and bent down, examining Erasmus carefully. “He’s dead.”

  Felicity dipped her head back with a moan. “Oh no. No. No. I murdered him. I murdered him.”

  Cora slowly lifted her eyes, then looked back down at the lifeless body. She straightened up and went to the door, where she rang the bell. Keeping the door almost entirely shut, she whispered something to the servant who had come to the sound of her call, then shut the door again.

  Cora faced her, her shoulders back and her chin lifted. “I’ve been with you since you were naught but a young girl, my lady. And I have watched this man treat you so cruelly. I have feared for your life and your future at his brutal hands. And I say that you didn’t murder him.”

  Felicity blinked, clearing her eyes of tears so she could look at her maid. “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “I’ve just asked that Simpson join us, as well as Carter and Moss.”

  “Our butler and footmen?” Felicity said, numb and uncertain she understood.

  Cora nodded. “They’re trustworthy and big enough to help.”

  “Help do what?” Felicity asked.

  “Move him out into the estate grounds with a gun and a horse,” Cora said, her voice shaking. “You see, I heard Lord Barbridge tell you that he was wanting to have a hunt. He saw a sly little fox when he came back to the estate tonight and he thought the animal needed catching. You asked him not to go in his state, but he insisted. And tomorrow, he’ll be found, sadly dead, less than a mile from home.”

  Felicity pushed from the bed, edging away from Erasmus’s dead body. “You think we can make it look like an…accident?”

  Cora smiled. “Indeed, we can.”

  Felicity lifted her hand to her face, knowing it was bruised, feeling the stripes of a dead man’s brutal fingers against her throat. “But if they see me…”

  “They won’t,” Cora said. “For when the guard comes to investigate, you will be prostrate with grief, unable to see anyone in your hysterical state.”

  Felicity swallowed past the soreness in her throat as a faint hope pushed aside the terror of the earlier night and the horror at what she had done to protect herself. “It is common knowledge that he drinks. And he sometimes does foolish things.”

  “Many in this house will testify to that,” Cora said, folding her arms. “The servants who know the truth will swear an oath of silence and you…well, you will finally be able to return to your family. No one will ever have to know.”

  “What about the blood?” Felicity whispered, forcing herself to look at the pool of it beneath Erasmus’s body. It was dark, almost black, as it collected beneath him.

  Cora flinched. “I’ll take care of that once the body is moved.”

  Felicity stared at her maid, a friend to her for so many years. Then she lifted her chin. “No, Cora. We will take care of it. If we are going to cover this up to save me, then we’ll do it together.”

  Cora moved toward her, catching her shaking hands. “Are you certain you can manage it, my lady?”

  Felicity took a long breath. “After what I’ve endured these past two years, I can manage anything.”

  Cora smiled gently at her, then turned as there was a knock on the door. Felicity stepped away as her maid let the other servants in and quietly explained the situation. But as they offered their support and pity to Felicity, she could hardly process it.

  She was free. Free of this horrible marriage, free of the prison Erasmus had kept her in. And if they could manage to cover up the truth, she would remain free the rest of her days.

  She could only pray that no one would ever find out what she’d done.

  Chapter One

  Autumn 1811

  Felicity tried to keep her expression calm and her breathing even as she leaned forward and looked at a set of papers her friend Celia’s husband, John Dane, was showing her. The words swam before her eyes, lines of names and dates that meant nothing to her.

  Except her own doom.

  It had been three years that she’d kept her secret about the night her husband died. Three years where not even her family had known the truth. She and Cora didn’t speak of it even to each other, never saying the words out loud of what she’d done or how her loyal servants had responded to save her from the consequences.

  But now all of that had been crushed.

  She glanced up from her place to find her brother’s wife, Elise, staring at her. Felicity smiled at Celia and John and moved to stand with her at the fire.

  “What can I do for you?” Elise whispered.

  Felicity squeezed her eyes shut. “You have done enough. My God, Elise, when I think that you were blackmailed into a marriage because of what I did…”

  Elise grabbed her hand. “Dearest, that was not your fault. You defended yourself and I’m glad you did. That my late husband discovered that information and blackmailed me into a marriage with it is not your fault.”

  Felicity forced herself to look at her friend, but as earnest as Elise appeared, Felicity couldn’t fully accept what she said. Elise said the past wasn’t her fault, but Felicity was the one who had pulled the trigger. Because of that her brother Lucien had suffered, losing the love of his life for many years. Elise had suffered in her own unhappy marriage.

  The consequences for Felicity’s actions had damaged her family greatly. And they went on and on, it seemed. She glanced at John and Celia again, then her gaze moved to her other brother, Gray, and his wife Rosalinde, who stood at the window, talking about obviously serious subjects. If the truth came out, their family would be destroyed by scandal. Gray’s business might suffer. They would all be shunned from good Society.

  Elise sighed. “I hoped, of course, that when my husband died, the secret and all its ramifications died with him.”

  “A hope in vain, it seems,” Felicity mused. “He kept a book with all his secrets. What kind of man does that?”

  “A man like the late Duke of Kirkford, it seems,” Elise said, her tone bitter. “A small, bastard of a man who liked to hurt people for sport.”

  “And now his cousin has that book. It may be in code, but John says all codes can be broken, and he would know, wouldn’t he? Having been a spy.”

  Elise touched her arm again. “Look at me.”

  Felicity forced herself to do so and found her friend’s expression to be gentle and kind. More than she deserved.

  “We are going to do everything in our power to stop this man from harming you. Gray and John and Stenfax…they love you and they’ll protect you, as will Rosalinde and Celia and I. We are family and you are not alone.”

  Felicity smiled at her, for she adored Elise for saying such lovely things. But in her heart, she knew her friend was wrong. Felicity was alone. She had been alone for years, she’d made sure of it. She kept herself separate, her interactions on the surface. She never let anyone truly close to her.

  It was better that way. She’d learned that if nothing else in her twenty-four years on this earth.

  She squeezed Elise’s arm and slipped back to her place with John and Celia, leaning over the papers he was examining in the hopes that she could discover something within them that would help them find that book of secrets that could destroy her life and the lives of all those she loved.

  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.
<
br />   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.