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 certainly 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.”

She flinched at the declaration. While Adam had at times been stern with her, he had never spoken so harshly.

He left her standing there in the doorway. Without another look in her direction, he sat at his desk and took up his paperwork once more. A single set of tears pooled in her eyes, followed closely by another. For the first time in years, she made no attempt to stem the tide of emotion.

She slowly made her way to her bedchamber. Curled in a ball on her bed, she allowed a lifetime of heartache to escape. The tiny child desperate for her father’s affection wept alongside the young lady in love with a gentleman who did not love her in return.