The lieutenant nodded. “But history was decidedly against Apollo. Nymphs were beautiful and desirable, but demigods did not pursue them with long-term intentions. They were generally viewed as expendable and inherently unimportant. A nymph, after all, is not a goddess.”
He watched the two men, uncertain of the exact purpose of this discussion, knowing only that it had to do with Daphne.
“So Daphne of myth ran from Apollo, not because she despised him but because she anticipated his eventual defection,” Lieutenant Lancaster said. “She felt certain he would hurt her, would wound her heart with his false declarations of love. She begged the river god to save her from what she feared most. In general, people view the river god’s solution as unnecessarily cruel.”
“He turned her into a tree,” James said. “That does seem rather drastic.”
“He gave her precisely what she wanted,” the lieutenant countered. “Daphne pleaded to be saved from pain and heartache. But suffering is part of being human. She could only truly escape it by feeling nothing at all.” Lieutenant Lancaster’s voice took on a pointed quality as undeniable as his glare. “As my father said, hers was tragic, self-imposed suffering. What might have happened, he used to muse, if, instead of running, instead of cutting herself off so entirely, she had turned around and allowed the possibility of love to give her courage as she faced her fears?”
“Or,” the duke spoke for the first time since his brother-in-law had taken up the unexpected tale, his tone strangely accusatory, “if Apollo hadn’t been so blasted bacon-brained in the first place.”
“In the Lancaster family,” the lieutenant continued, “our lives have the uncanny tendency to resemble those of our ancient counterparts. I, for one, am hoping to not be strangled with my own lyre. If I possessed the smallest degree of intelligence, I would have chosen a different instrument, though at thirteen, it had seemed rather too comical a choice to turn down.” He shrugged, something of a mischievous smile hovering on his lips. Did all the Lancasters know how to produce just such a look? James had even seen Daphne’s face light with mischief on occasion.
The lieutenant continued. “How likely is it, do you think, Lord Tilburn, that our Daphne will find herself transformed into a tree?”
“A tree?” Was the man in earnest? “Not likely, I would venture.”
“On that, sir, I must beg to differ.” The lieutenant offered no further explanation.
“I place the blame entirely on Apollo,” the duke said. “If he’d been a man of purpose and determination, he not only would have wooed her with some degree of capability but would also have caught up with the stubborn girl before things got so blasted out of hand.”
James knew something about unsuccessful courtships and felt more than a bit of sympathy for Apollo. “Perhaps he realized too late what he would lose if he did not redouble his efforts. Perhaps he never was given the second chance he needed.”
“Perhaps,” the duke ventured, “he was a thick-witted buffoon.”
“But the river god might have given Apollo an opportunity to make things right before turning the poor girl into a tree,” James insisted.
Of a sudden, both men were looking directly at him, their expressions quite serious. The duke spoke, though obviously on both their behalves. “Had he—reluctantly, mind you—postponed the transformation long enough for Apollo to try his hand under very, very close scrutiny—”
“Armed scrutiny,” the lieutenant amended.
“—and only out of love for the nymph, not any degree of empathy for the bird-brained Apollo, would the addlepated man have made a mull of it, do you think? Would he have only made things worse? Made more promises only to break them?”
James understood now the reason for the story. He was cast in the role of Apollo to his modern-day Daphne. “If given the opportunity, he would have tried again. And again and again if need be.”
“The river god might still have whisked Daphne away, feeling Apollo was not good for her or good enough for her,” the duke warned.
“At least they could have discovered as much.” James’s pulse pounded in his neck. They were going to give him a chance. Daphne might still reject him, might want nothing to do with him, but he had a chance. “If nothing else, she might not have hidden herself away. Her loss of vibrancy was the true tragedy, not Apollo’s lost opportunity. She deserved better. She still does.”
“That,” the duke said, rising to his feet, “is exactly what I needed to hear.”
James rose as well. His Grace and the lieutenant walked away from the desk, pausing a few steps from the doorway. He looked back at James. “Come on, then. Time for dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“You do eat, do you not?”
“I do.” What was the duke getting at?
“You’ll be taking your evening meal here tonight.” His Grace pushed open the doors.
James took several quick steps in order to catch up with his apparent host for the evening. “I doubt I will be welcomed by the rest of your family. They were hardly happy to see me this evening whilst waiting for your return.”
“That is also not required.” His Grace motioned James into the drawing room. “If they wish to carve you alongside the braised beef, so be it. But if your presence here will help Daphne come back to us, then it is worth trying.”
“I will do whatever I can,” he promised. “I hate seeing her so withdrawn.”
“In case you are wondering,” the duke said, “you will be permitted to speak to her, look at her, be in the same room as she, but”—His Grace moved closer, eyes boring into James’s, his expression growing more ominous—“under no circumstances will you be permitted to touch her. One finger, Tilburn—you lay one finger on her, and I will break that finger and all its companions one at a time with a hot fire poker.”
“And I will drop you in the Thames with an anchor tied to your neck,” the lieutenant added.
“I understand.” James accepted the limits placed on him. He hadn’t expected to be permitted anything.
The Lancaster sisters were all in the sitting room when James and his would-be torturers stepped inside.
“Is Lord Tilburn staying for dinner?” Her Grace asked, clearly not too pleased by the prospect. “I hadn’t expected a guest.”
“Lord Tilburn is here as my prisoner,” the duke explained.
“Oh, how wonderfully horrid!” Miss Artemis sounded delighted. “I just knew you could be a dastardly, bloodthirsty guardian, Adam, if only you would put your mind to it. Prisoners! How wonderful!”
James’s attention was on Daphne. Physically, she appeared whole. But her eyes were different. The spark had disappeared. The look of forced serenity on her face slipped momentarily into surprise when her eyes fell on James. She stood stiffly, brows drawn together, lips turned downward. James stepped forward, alarmed, as the color in her face drained by degrees.
She held up her hand. He stopped a few steps from her, knowing what the gesture meant. Daphne’s eyes darted in the duke’s direction, then returned to James’s face almost immediately. She did not look at all happy to see him.
“Why have you remained?” she asked in an urgent whisper.
“Your brother-in-law invited me to take my evening meal here.”
Daphne shook her head. “The Dangerous Duke does not issue invitations. He threatened you.”
“I wanted to stay, and he is allowing me to.” It was something of a twist to the actual facts but true, just the same.
She only looked more confused. The life still hadn’t reentered her eyes, but at least there was a hint of animation in her face. “Well, then, welcome, Lord Tilburn.”
So formal. So impersonal. He bowed in response. “A pleasure, Miss Lancaster.”
She was not particularly talkative with her family, he noticed as the evening wore on. Aside from the occasional n
od or quietly offered response, Daphne kept to herself throughout the meal. James had seen her with her family before and did not remember her ever being so distanced from them.
After dinner, Daphne took a seat near the window while the rest of her family sat in a more intimate grouping around the empty fireplace. No one seemed surprised by the distance she placed between herself and her family members. How commonplace had this become?
He had hoped in time to achieve some degree of absolution from the lady he’d harmed. But his goal changed entirely over the course of that single evening. He swore to himself he would do whatever he must to see her happy again, whether or not she ever forgave him. His Daphne would not meet the same fate as her namesake.
Chapter Thirty-One
Dangerous Duke or not, Adam Boyce was going to die a slow and painful death. Daphne had spent the previous night in shock owing to James’s “invitation” to dinner. Adam, quite conveniently, was away from home nearly all the next day. Daphne walked directly to his desk shortly after his return that evening fully intending to demand the explanation he owed her.
He looked up at her only briefly, nothing in his demeanor seeming at all concerned at the fierce look she flung at him. “Do not attack me with glares, Daphne. You know I am quite immune to them.”
“How could you?” she asked.
“Grow immune to glares? I could not help it. The talent developed naturally.”
She had no patience for jests. “You forced Lord Tilburn to have dinner with us last night.”
“The poor boy was starving to death.” Adam flipped over a page in the stack of papers he was reading. “Hartley hasn’t been feeding him.”
Why could he not simply give her a direct answer? “Lord Tilburn is not starving to death. The duchess would never allow such a thing.”
“That shows how little you know of the matter, Miss Daphne.” Adam only ever called her “Miss Daphne” when he meant to tease her, something the ton likely thought him incapable of. “The recently impoverished Lord Tilburn has accepted employment but is just stubborn enough not to accept a single morsel more than he feels he has earned. Some of those morsels go to feed a tiny mongrel who is overly fond of him, meaning there is a puppy living in the Hartley’s back gardens that is growing fat while its master goes hungry. I believe that qualifies the lad as a miserable wretch in need of a free meal.”
“What do you mean by ‘newly impoverished’?” Persephone had said as much when she’d first revealed James’s residence at the Milworth House.
Adam set down the quill in his hand. The slightest of sighs tinged a bit with impatience escaped as he looked at her once more. “Generally the phrase indicates that a person has very little money at his disposal and that the situation has come about only recently.”
“I know what the phrase means.” Why must he be so infuriatingly difficult? “What I do not understand is why you have applied it to him.”
“Because he has very little money, and the situation has come about only recently—”
“Adam, do be serious for one minute.”
The Duke of Kielder adopted a truly jesting mood only on the rarest of occasions—fewer than two or three times a year. Why must he do so at precisely this moment?
“Please stop speaking in riddles and talk to me.” Daphne could feel herself growing more upended by the moment. She had fully expected to confront Adam, receive some ridiculous explanation of his motivations, offer him a stinging set down, and then leave with head held high, having bested the most feared man in the kingdom. He was being maddeningly uncooperative.
Adam leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest. When she realized his stance exactly mimicked her own, Daphne dropped her arms to her side. She couldn’t be entirely certain he wasn’t needling her. She would normally have called him on it, insisted he take her seriously. Her feelings had been pricked far too often of late, however, and she knew herself unequal to the task of enduring mockery.
“Now you wish for me to talk? Now you want conversation?” Adam allowed a single, dry, unamused chuckle. “Have you finally decided to break your seemingly impregnable silence without being marched about the gardens of Westminster by force?”
In the six years she had lived in Adam’s home, he had never once ridiculed her, but in the little more than two weeks since the disastrous picnic, he had done so on more than one occasion. She felt all the bravado and indignation she’d built up in order to sustain her through this confrontation slip away.
Daphne whispered, “Could you not simply say ‘You are an idiot, Daphne’ and leave it at that?” She knew she had mere minutes before the tears she’d fiercely held at bay would break past all her barriers.
Adam stood and reached her side so swiftly she hardly realized he’d moved. “Daphne,” he said, his tone softer than it had been but still firm and a touch exasperated. “Come sit with me.”
“No, thank you,” she answered.
“There was no question mark adorning the end of that sentence.” With one hand at her back, Adam guided her gently but forcibly to the sofa where they had spent many a pleasant interval the past half dozen years. Those enjoyable interludes seemed ages ago.
“Allow me to answer the various questions you have posed,” Adam said.
Daphne kept her gaze on her folded hands, attempting to regain control over her emotions. Tears were useless, and she refused to indulge in them. She’d not cried during their walk in the garden. She’d not grown teary during dinner the night before. Where had this emotional upheaval come from?
“The Techney estate is solvent and in no particular financial danger,” Adam said. “Lord Tilburn, however, is in quite the opposite state, having been cut off by his father in light of what is viewed by that man as his son’s recent failure.”
Daphne stiffened. Was that why James had returned to her life? To have another go at courting her in hopes of reconciling with his father’s pocketbook? “Then he truly came here last night because he’s impoverished?”
Adam rested his heels on the ottoman in front of him, legs crossed at the ankles. “He came because I told him to, and he remained because I insisted upon it.”
Her heart dropped. James hadn’t come in order to see her specifically. That came as more of a blow than she would have expected.
“Lord Tilburn may be a lot of things,” Adam said, “but he is not an imbecile. Had I not required his presence last night, he would not have been here.”
Daphne nodded, the misery of understanding rushing over her. She had hoped at least part of James’s motivation had come from missing her the way she missed him in spite of everything. Obviously her heart wasn’t as guarded as she thought.
“Wipe the tortured-puppy look off your face,” Adam instructed. “That was not intended to serve as an unflattering assessment of you.”
How could she possibly take it otherwise? Harry had more or less been forbidden to court Athena, but that hadn’t kept him away. When Persephone and Adam had been separated in the early days of their marriage, Adam had crossed several counties despite his intense dislike of leaving home in order to be with her again. James came to dinner only because he was forced to, just like he’d been forced to feign interest in her in the first place.
“Though I do not particularly like Lord Tilburn and certainly don’t entirely trust him,” Adam said, “I think he stayed away in order to avoid upsetting you further than he has.”
“Stayed away? He’s been living two doors down.”
“And has not yet attempted to beat down the door. That shows both sense and self-control.”
Daphne rose, confused. “If his presence upsets me, why did you make him stay?”
“Does his presence upset you?”
“Of course it does. How could it not? After everything he did, after everything I have endured, his presence most certainl
y upsets me.” The impulse to shout in frustration proved nearly as unshakable as the need to cry out all her pain. “This is supposed to be a safe haven, Adam. I am supposed to be safe here, safe from him and from the tabbies of the ton and from . . . from . . . everything.”
Adam said nothing for the space of several uncomfortable moments. Daphne glanced back at him. He wore the expression that always indicated he was sorting out something complicated. Daphne had no desire to be dissected and evaluated.
“Daphne.”
She waited for whatever final assessment he meant to offer.
“There is a vast difference between a safe haven and a hiding place,” he said. “One brings a person peace, the other unending loneliness. I refuse to watch you dwindle away in fear.”
She faced him, attempting to look determined and confident despite the unnerving ring of truth to his words. “I am not afraid.”
“You are terrified.” The declaration came without pity or question. “Terrified of being brushed aside and forgotten.”
“Adam—”
“I’ve hired Lord Tilburn away from Hartley. He will be staying here for the remainder of the Season.”
“You what?” Daphne felt her eyes widen even as her stomach dropped to her toes. “Are you mad?”
“I am tired, is what I am. Tired of waiting for you to pull yourself out of this hole you’ve dug for yourself.” His expression was stern, unrelenting. “No more sulking, Daphne. No more hiding.”
She could feel herself closing in at the prospect of facing James every day, of reliving all the pain he’d caused her. “I cannot do this, Adam. Though you no doubt see it as a weakness and a failing, I cannot so easily dismiss ridicule and censure and heartache. Those barbs may bounce off you, but they pierce me. They pierce me every time.”
The look of disappointment that entered Adam’s eyes came as a blow. “Life is never entirely painless, Daphne. But you cannot have the happiness without passing through the sorrow, and doing so makes you stronger. Hiding from it only makes you a coward.”
Romancing Daphne Page 25
