‘And I hope Juno is young enough to throw off the past and grow into a woman of character.’
‘I might have known everything would lead us back to that topic and I am sure you could do better than me as her companion and watchdog.’
‘And I know I could not.’
‘Then give me the space I asked for and I promise I will go and have the bath I have been looking forward to all afternoon and to stop harrying your poor put-upon staff, my lord. I am too weary to argue with you just at the moment.’
‘I doubt you are ever weary enough for that, Marianne,’ he told her grumpily and turned round and strode off into the dusky shadows of the great hall, leaving her in possession of the field.
She was not sure she wanted it at the cost of all he had forced himself to tell her in the hope she would agree to his plan. And of course she was right not to tell him she feared her own weakness as far as he was concerned. It would be one way to get him to stop persuading her with his deepest darkest secrets how much Juno needed her. But she was not sure she could endure the humiliation of him knowing how much she longed for him in her bed of a night now he was staying under Darius’s roof as an honoured guest instead of a patient forced on them by circumstance.
If she accepted Alaric’s offer of employment, how could she resist the urge to throw herself at him when she was living under his roof instead and might well decide her self-respect and the family honour could go to blazes as long as she could be his mistress?
And he was such an honourable idiot he would probably ask her to marry him if they gave in to this ridiculous attraction that had sprung up between them more or less at first sight. She had not been with child even once during her five years of marriage to Daniel, so she could not let Alaric wed her if they did weaken and become lovers. However he felt about the Defford succession, she could not live with herself as year after year went by without an heir to his wealth and possessions and noble name. He was too fine a man to make her his mistress and she was too much of a lady to let him marry her, so she would do better to say no and go back to Bath.
However, the thought of never seeing him again—except in the distance, perhaps, when he escorted Juno on a trip to see Fliss and she happened to be there as well—stung her so hard she was not sure she could bear it. So was she in love with the man? Perilously close to it, she decided, but not quite there yet. Best if she did not give herself time or chance to fall the rest of the way, then. But, oh, how she would miss him when he went away thinking she was so hard-hearted that even that wrenching tale about his mother’s inhuman conduct towards him as a child could not move her to make up the similar gaps in poor little Juno’s life until now.
Chapter Twelve
‘I can see what you have been doing with yourself all morning, Marianne,’ Darius informed her from his place just inside the door of the last untouched bedchamber on the main level a week on from her last tête-à-tête with Alaric.
‘Indeed, most of this dust seems to be on me instead of the furniture,’ she said ruefully and turned around slowly so it would not shake back on to the clean bits. ‘And what are you doing upstairs in all your dirt at this time of day?’
‘The same as you, I should imagine—wishing I was clean.’
‘I must get this room clean and cleared then put back together as neatly as I can before I can take a bath. Mama will carp endlessly about being given a lesser bedroom than Viola’s or Miss Donne’s if I do not get this room done in time and neither of us want her feeling put upon and prickly on your wedding day.’
‘You do not have to do it all on your own. Fliss sent me up here, dirt or no, to tell you so because she is worried about you and so am I.’
‘There is no need,’ she forced herself to say calmly and stared at a spider that was daring to crawl into the light now she had stopped pulling down bed curtains and the dust-laden webs of its distant ancestors.
‘You are avoiding us all and I will not let you, Marianne. I thought you liked living here, but maybe I am wrong and you intend to go back to Bath with Mama and Papa after the wedding.’
‘No, I am not a martyr.’
‘Then if you cannot endure our company why not accept Stratford’s offer of employment he tells me he has made you and stop worrying about what to do next? I hate seeing you like this, Nan. I understand that my happiness with Fliss may be reminding you of what you and Daniel had and maybe living without him feels worse than before we fell in love, but we will not make you feel like an unwanted third if you stay.’
‘No, please do not think that, Darius, never think like that. I am so very happy to see that you are as loved now as you have always deserved to be. I knew you could find joy and laughter with the right woman to laugh with you and remind you what a good man you are now and again when you forget it and brood about all the things you saw and did in
