This is how it starts.
The thought had been circling through his mind all night, a vulture waiting for something to die. This was how his parents had begun; with declarations of love, with passionate embraces, with the firm conviction that what they felt was special, different, immune to the corruption that destroyed lesser loves.
His mother had told him the story once, in the folly, during one of her rare moments of calm reflection. She had met his father at a ball in Florence, when she was eighteen and he was on his Grand Tour. They had danced twice, spoken for hours, and by the end of the evening, they had both known, with the certainty of the young and the foolish, that they had found their other half.
"It was like lightning,"she had said, her eyes distant with memory."One moment I was myself, complete and whole. The next moment I was not. I was half of something larger, something that could not exist without him. It was the most beautiful and the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me."
Beautiful and terrible. Yes. That was precisely what love was.
His parents had married within six months. They had been deliriously happy for a time. But the lightning that had struck them had not faded into gentle warmth; it had continued to burn, hotter and hotter, until everything around them was consumed by the flames.
The jealousies had started small. A lingering glance at another woman. A letter from an old friend that arrived at an inopportune moment. Tiny sparks that should have been easily extinguished but instead were fanned by the very passion that had brought them together.
"We loved too much,"his mother had said."That was our sin. We loved each other so completely that there was no room for anything else. No room for patience, or forgiveness, or the small compromises that ordinary marriages require. We wanted everything, and in wanting everything, we destroyed it all."
Daniel had been seven years old when he first witnessed one of their arguments. He had been playing in the nursery when the shouting started—his mother's voice, high and wild with accusation; his father's, cold and cutting in response. He had crept to the top of the stairs and watched through the banisters as they faced each other in the entrance hall, their faces twisted with rage, their words like weapons designed to wound.
His mother had thrown a vase. His father had caught it, barely, and set it down with deliberate precision before turning and walking out the door. His mother had collapsed onto the floor, weeping, and Daniel had stayed frozen at the top of the stairs, too frightened to move, too young to understand what he had witnessed.
That had been the first time. It had not been the last.
Over the years that followed, he had learned to read the signs; the tension that preceded the storms, the false calm that followed. He had learned to disappear when the shouting started, to hide in the folly or the stables or any of the dozen places where their voices could not reach him. He had learned that love was not a comfort but a curse, not a shelter but a battlefield.
And he had sworn, sworn with every fiber of his being, that he would never let himself be caught in the same trap.
But you have, whispered the voice in his mind.You have let yourself fall, and now you are doomed to repeat their mistakes.
Daniel rose from his chair, his body stiff with the long hours of stillness. He moved to the window and looked out at the grounds, grey and mist-shrouded in the early morning light. Everything looked the same as it had yesterday—the same lawns, the same trees, the same careful order that he had spent years cultivating.
But everything had changed. He had changed. He had opened a door that should have remained forever closed, and now he did not know how to shut it again.
Lillian.
Her name surfaced in his mind, bringing with it a flood of images: her face in the firelight of the folly, soft with understanding; her hands cupping his cheeks as she told him he was not his parents; her lips against his, warm and yielding and utterly devastating.
He had kissed her. He had told her he loved her. He had promised to face whatever came, together.
Together.
The word mocked him now. What did he know of togetherness? What did he know of partnership, of companionship, of the steady, sustaining love that Lillian had described? He knew only the love of his parents; consuming, destructive, a fire that burned until nothing remained but ash.
He would not do that to Lillian. He would not subject her to the volatility that seemed to run in his blood, the capacity for obsession that he had inherited from both his parents. He would not watch her eyes fill with fear, would not hear her voice turn sharp with resentment, would not see the love she offered him curdle into hatred over the long, bitter years.
It was better to end it now. Better to retreat before they went any further. Better to accept the cold comfort of loneliness than to risk destroying the person he cared for most.
The decision settled over him like a shroud; heavy, suffocating, final. He did not want this. Every part of him rebelled against it, screamed that he was making a mistake, begged him to reconsider.
But he had learned, long ago, that wanting was not the same as having. That feeling was not the same as acting. That the safest course was always the one that hurt the most, because pain was the price of protection.
He would protect Lillian from himself. Even if it destroyed him.
***
By the time his valet arrived, Daniel had composed his features into the familiar mask of ducal indifference.
Fletcher was a perceptive man, one did not serve as a duke's valet for fifteen years without developing a keen eye for his employer's moods, but even he seemed taken aback by the coldness that greeted him that morning.
"Your Grace." He set down the hot water and began laying out Daniel's clothes. "I trust you slept well?"
