Chapter Forty-Two

“Please drink it, Papa.” Daphne held a cup of steaming tea near her father’s mouth. “You need your rest, and this will help you sleep.”

He didn’t object. Daphne had tended to her father over the past week, her devotion to him evident in every tender ministration. James had declared her remarkable, but he was finding the word insufficient.

“Has he drunk it all, Miss Lancaster?” Mrs. Ashton slipped past James and into the room. Daphne’s attentions to her father had allowed the nurse a moment to herself now and then, something for which she’d praised the heavens. “I’d like to see him resting more peacefully.”

“As would I.” Daphne rose, though her concerned gaze didn’t leave her father’s face. “He does seem a little improved this past week.”

“That’s your tonic’s doing.” Mrs. Ashton took Daphne’s vacated chair. “Now you just leave Mr. Lancaster to my care. His lordship’s anxious for your company, I daresay.”

Daphne looked over at James, giving him that secret smile she only ever offered him. “You’ve been very patient.”

He dismissed the apology he heard in her words. “It is always a pleasure to watch you healing.”

She slipped her hand in his without hesitation, without worry. How far they’d come in so short a time. He was quite possibly the luckiest man in all the world.

Artemis stood in the corridor, just to the side of Mr. Lancaster’s bedchamber door.

“Papa is awake if you wish to see him,” Daphne told her sister.

Artemis shrugged a single shoulder. “I was only passing by.”

“But you haven’t looked in on him even once this past week.” Daphne set her hand on Artemis’s arm.

Artemis pulled free. “He hasn’t mentioned me once these past fifteen years. He doesn’t miss me, and I don’t miss him.” She flipped her hair as she walked away, chin held defiantly high.

James didn’t believe the show of indifference. Daphne likely didn’t either.

“It seems your entire family has been wounded in one way or another by your father’s decline.”

Daphne nodded, her eyes still trained on Artemis’s retreating form. “We will all have to make our peace with it in our own way.”

He heard tears in her voice. “Darling?”

“I worry about her, is all. And Linus. And Athena. And Persephone.” She turned a tremulous smile up to him. “Now you’ll likely tell me I worry too much.”

“You care, Daphne. I love that about you.” He ran his finger along her suddenly rosy cheek. “And I love the way you blush.”

“How fortunate for you, then, that I blush so easily.”

He took her hand once more and walked with her toward the back of the house. “How soon does your family mean to leave for Northumberland?”

“In only a fortnight or so. Persephone and Adam wish to begin preparing the Falstone Castle nursery and interviewing for a local nursemaid.”

Only two weeks. “I suppose you’ll have to go with them.”

She rested her head against his shoulder as they stepped outside. “I can’t very well stay. Father is hardly an acceptable chaperone.”

“No, he is not.” It was an unfortunate thing for many reasons. “This house will be so empty without you.”

“I have always been the one who was left behind,” she said. “I’m not at all accustomed to being the one doing the leaving.”

James’s heart lodged in his throat. He forced his next words out despite the impediment. “You could stay. I wish you would, in fact.”

“I can’t. We aren’t family.”

He pressed forward while his courage held out. “I’d like us to be, my dearest Daphne.” He stopped and turned to face her, taking her hands in his. “I know I have a great deal yet to atone for, and I do not yet deserve your full trust, but someday, someday soon, I hope—I pray that I will have proven myself worthy of your love and affection.”

She kissed his cheek, something she did more and more often of late. “You have it already, James.”

“But do I have enough of it to hope that one day we’ll never have to be apart?”

Her eyes flew to his face. “What is it you’re asking of me?”

He lifted her hands one at a time to his lips. “I am asking if you . . . Will you marry me, Daphne?”

Her smile blossomed on the instant, though she didn’t answer his hastily posed question.

“My dear?” he pressed nervously.

“Of course my answer is yes. A thousand times yes.”

Relief rushed over him. He pulled her into his arms, pressing light kisses to her hair and face. “I will do everything in my power to secure your happiness,” he said between kisses. “I swear it.”

A yelp followed that sounded strikingly like agreement.

He ceased his show of affection long enough to cast his meddlesome puppy a disapproving but amused glare. “Have you been eavesdropping this entire time, you unmannered mongrel?”

“The little scamp,” Daphne added.

James chuckled. Then, wrapping his arms around her once more, lifted her from the ground and spun her about in a show of unabashed celebration, their laughter echoing through the trees around them.