Disbelief sent Delia reeling away. “I do not believe it!” she cried out.
Tears filled Daria’s eyes.I must be strong.
Too late, her twin instantly caught Daria’s wavering.
“You do not have to do this!” her sister cried out.
Lady Raina’s concern-filled query rent into a no longer private moment between sisters. “Gregory? Are you forcing this young woman to marry you.”
All eyes went to the Duke of Argyll. A damning silence swept over the room.
“How little you must think of me, little sister,” Gregory said pleasantly.
“And with good reason,” Lady Raina snapped.
He pressed a hand against his chest in false affront. “Youwoundme.”
What accounted for such strife between siblings? The air thrummed with an undercurrent of tension between brother and sister.
It exploded in the powder keg that was Lady Millie. “You wound all of us!”
Lords Rutherford and Kilburn caught the girl gently by her arms.
“Everything you do is motivated by selfish interests, Gregory,” she cried.
Panic knocked away at Daria’s chest. Her body grew hot.
It was spiraling.
“Millie,” Lord Kilburn said with a gentleness Daria believed him incapable of.
“It is true!” She fought against her human restraints. “He sent me away to live with you and Raina!”
Lady Raina rushed to comfort her sister. The older woman spoke in aching tones that caused a greater weight to settle across Daria’s breast. “Is it so very bad…?”
Raised voices rolled over raised voices and combined with Delia’s incessant cajoling. “Do not do this. Please, do not do this…”
Her pulse filled her head and pounded, and she wanted to scrape her hands over her arms.Run.
From the din of quarreling siblings in every quarter—her Shakespeare-quoting sister included. Lord Rutherford, Lord Kilburn, and Lord Lyon shouting over one another to reign everyone in, it was too much.
“May I urge calm, ladies?”
There were but two silent figures through the storm, and only one of them imperturbable.
“You tell us to becalm…”
Gregory angled his neck slowly to the left and then to the right, stretching the muscles, a model of equanimity. His calm amidst a tempest an incongruity. The sight of it broke before the dam within Daria burst. It steadied her. He steadied her.
“Of a sudden, he’ll marry a woman he doesn’t know and whom we do not know! That does not set off enormous warning bells for—”
Lady Millie’s voice faded to muted folderol.
Anxiety receding, Daria’s unblinking gaze fixated on Gregory, the source of the room’s rage.
The brittleness of Gregory’s dazzling smile.
The tight lines at the corners of his hunter’s eyes.
