Chapter Nine
"You sent her a note?"
Daniel looked up from his breakfast to find his sister standing in the doorway of the morning room, her expression hovering somewhere between disbelief and delight.
"Good morning, Rosanne."
"Do not try to avoid me." She swept into the room and took her customary seat across from him, her eyes never leaving his face.
"The servants are talking, Daniel. Apparently you sat in your study until midnight, writing and rewriting something on your best stationery, and then you had it delivered to Hartfield by hand. At midnight."
"The servants should mind their own affairs."
"The servants have nothing better to do than observe our affairs. That is the nature of domestic service." Rosanne reached for the teapot, her movements precise and deliberate. "What did you write to her?"
"That is none of your concern."
"Everything about Lillian and you is my concern.
I have been engineering this situation for weeks, Daniel.
I have manufactured headaches, forgotten shawls and convenient absences.
I have done everything short of locking you both in a closet together.
The least you can do is tell me what you wrote in your dramatic midnight missive. "
Daniel set down his fork. He had not slept well, had not slept at all, if he was being honest, and his patience was in short supply.
"I apologised."
"For what?"
"For my behaviour yesterday. I was not myself."
Rosanne's eyebrows rose. "That is what you wrote? I was not myself."
"Words to that effect."
"And nothing else?"
"What else should there have been?"
Rosanne stared at him for a long moment, her expression cycling through several emotions that Daniel could not quite identify. Then she let out a breath that was half sigh, half groan, and dropped her head into her hands.
"You are hopeless," she said, her voice muffled. "Absolutely, utterly, irredeemably hopeless."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You saved her life, Daniel. You threw yourself off a horse and into the path of a runaway cart to save her life.
And then you stood in the entrance hall and told her you were terrified, you, who never admits to feeling anything at all, and she looked at you like you had hung the moon and stars in the sky.
" Rosanne lifted her head, her eyes bright with frustration.
"And your response is to send her a note that says 'I was not myself'? "
"What would you have me say?"
"Something! Anything! Something that acknowledges what is happening between you!"
"Nothing is happening between us."
"Everything is happening between you! Everyone can see it except, apparently, the two of you!
" Rosanne pushed back from the table and rose, pacing the length of the room with an agitation that reminded Daniel uncomfortably of their mother.
"She cares for you, Daniel. I do not know how or why, you have done everything in your power to be cold and distant and impossible, but she cares for you nonetheless.
And you care for her. Do not bother denying it; I have seen the way you look at her.
The way you watched her at the dinner. The way you nearly came undone when you thought she might be hurt. "
"Rosanne..."
"You are afraid." She stopped pacing, turning to face him with an intensity that was almost startling.
"You are afraid of feeling something real, because our parents felt things that were real, and it destroyed them.
But Lillian is not our mother, Daniel. And you are not our father.
Whatever love might grow between you would not be the same destructive passion that tore this family apart. "
Daniel stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor.
"You do not know that."
"I know you." Rosanne's voice softened. "I know that you have spent your entire life trying to be the opposite of our father; controlled where he was volatile, rational where he was passionate, cold where he was consumed by heat. And I know that it has made you miserable."
"I am not miserable."
"You are not happy."
The words landed like stones in still water, sending ripples through his carefully constructed composure.
"Happiness is not the purpose of life," he said quietly.
"Then what is?"
He did not have an answer. He had never had an answer. Duty, he might have said; responsibility, honor, the obligations of his position. But those were purposes imposed from without, not reasons for living. They were the framework that held his life together, not the substance that filled it.
Lillian filled it. The thought surfaced unbidden, treacherous and true.
Lillian, with her steady gaze and her practical wisdom and her ability to see past his walls to the man beneath.
Lillian, who brought peace wherever she went.
Lillian, who had looked at him yesterday as though he were worth knowing, worth wanting, despite all his efforts to prove otherwise.
"She is coming today," Rosanne said, breaking the silence. "For our usual visit. I thought you should know."
Daniel's chest tightened. "I have work to attend to. I will not..."
"You will be here." Rosanne's voice was gentle but implacable. "You will face her, and you will stop hiding behind your work and your walls and your ridiculous notes. You owe her that much, at least."
"I owe her nothing."
"You owe her everything. She has made you feel again, Daniel. After all these years of cold and emptiness, she has made you feel. That is a gift beyond measure, and you are treating it like a burden."
She left before he could respond, sweeping out of the morning room with the dignified fury of a young woman who had reached the end of her patience.
Daniel remained standing by the table, his breakfast forgotten, his thoughts churning.
Lillian was coming. He would have to face her. And he would have to decide, once and for all, whether he was going to continue running from what he felt or whether he was finally going to stop.
***
Lillian arrived at Wynthorpe Hall at eleven o'clock, precisely as she had every other day for the past several weeks.
But today felt different.
She had spent the morning turning Daniel's note over in her mind, analyzing every word for hidden meaning, trying to reconcile the stiff formality of his apology with the raw terror she had seen in his eyes when he pulled her from the path of the cart.
I was not myself.
But he had been entirely himself. That was the contradiction she could not resolve.
The man who had flung himself into danger to save her, who had held her with shaking hands and demanded to know if she was hurt, who had called her Lillian in a voice that broke on the word; that was not a man who felt nothing.
That was a man who felt far too much and did not know what to do with it.
"Miss Whitcombe." The butler's voice was warm as he admitted her. "Lady Rosanne is in the morning room. And His Grace..."
He hesitated, and Lillian felt her pulse quicken.
"Yes?"
"His Grace has asked to be informed of your arrival. I believe he wishes to speak with you."
"I see."
She followed the butler through the familiar corridors, her heart beating harder with every step. The morning room door stood open, and she could hear Rosanne's voice within, but she paused at the threshold, suddenly uncertain.
What would she say to him? What could she say? The careful distance that had governed their interactions had been shattered by yesterday's events, and she did not know how to rebuild it. She was not even certain she wanted to.
"Lillian!" Rosanne's voice broke through her hesitation. "There you are. Come in, come in. I have ordered the most wonderful tea, and Mrs. Gerald has made her famous cakes, and..."
She stopped, her gaze moving past Lillian to something, someone, behind her.
Lillian turned.
Daniel stood in the corridor, close enough that she could have reached out and touched him.
He was dressed with his usual precision, not a hair out of place, his expression schooled into careful neutrality.
But there was something in his eyes, a tension, an uncertainty, that she had never seen before.
"Miss Whitcombe." His voice was formal, but his gaze held hers with an intensity that made her breath catch. "I wonder if I might have a word. Before you join my sister."
"Of course, Your Grace."
She followed him to a small sitting room a few doors down; a space she had never seen before, decorated in shades of green and gold, with windows that looked out over the east gardens.
He closed the door behind them, and suddenly they were alone, separated from the rest of the world by walls and silence.
"About my note," he began.
"There is no need to explain."
"I feel there is." He moved to the window, his back to her, his shoulders rigid beneath his coat. "My behaviour yesterday was…… Unprecedented. I frightened you."
"You did not frighten me."
"I imposed upon you in a manner that was not..."
"You saved my life." Lillian's voice was firm, cutting through his halting explanation. "You acted on instinct, without thought for your own safety, because you..."
She stopped, uncertain how to finish the sentence.
"Because I what?" He turned to face her, and she saw the struggle in his expression; the war between control and something deeper, something that refused to be contained.
"Because I could not bear the thought of losing you?
Because the idea of you being hurt, of you being gone, was more terrifying than anything I have ever experienced? "
The words hung in the air between them, raw and exposed.
"Yes," Lillian whispered. "Because of that."
Silence.
Daniel's hands were clenched at his sides, his jaw tight with the effort of maintaining his composure. He looked like a man on the edge of a precipice, unsure whether to step back or to leap.
"This cannot happen," he said finally. "Whatever this is, whatever I feel, it cannot happen."
"Why?"