“What is going on?” Olivia asked Thalia as she led the little girl to the breakfast room.
“What do you mean?” Thalia asked.
“That smile.” Olivia frowned up at her. “Why are you smiling?”
“Oh… am I?”
“Yes!” Olivia cried. “Is something funny? What? Tell meeeeeee.”
Thalia laughed to herself, not even realizing that she had been smiling. But she had been, and she knew the reason. Although the duke had not said as much, she felt certain that this morning, he would be joining them to break his fast.
The breakfast room was empty when they arrived, but Thalia did not let that get her down. Still, she remembered the moment she had shared with the duke, and how honest he had been with her.He wants to make this work. I know he does. All he needed was that little push…
“Is His Grace joining us?” Olivia asked once they were seated.
“I am not sure.” Thalia shrugged. “Maybe…”
It was raining heavily by the time they were settled. Thunder shook the manor, and lightning lit the room brightly. Olivia cried out each time it did, for she had always hated storms. But Thaliahardly noticed, her stare was trained on the door through which she fully expected the duke to appear.
Only, he did no such thing.
“Does His Grace not eat breakfast?” Olivia asked, pouting.
“He… I am sure he is just sleeping.”
“He is always sleeping,” she complained. “Why does he not join us?”
Thalia wished she had an answer.
She tried to remain positive. She tried to remind herself that this was not such a strange thing—it was not as if he had joined them before. But it was hard to stay in that space, as she had been so darn sure that last evening changed his perception of this marriage and what it might be.
And that wasn’t to say that she expected him to suddenly grow warm to her. That he would start to laugh and joke with them, that he would seek them out, that he would behave in ways that were once anathema to the stern, surly duke.
I had thought he would at least try. That he wanted to try. The way he looked at me… I know there was something there. I just know it.
It did not matter what Thalia knew. As things stood, the duke was acting as he always did. He wanted little to do with Thalia and Olivia and despite what he might have said, nothing was going to change.
So it was that Thalia’s mood soon matched the dreariness of the weather. A storm raged inside of her, wet and horrid, one not to be messed with because to be caught in it would suggest the world was ending.
She spent the morning in the library, curled by the fire, reading to Olivia because there was nothing else to do on a day like this one. The story she chose was a romance, because Olivia liked those best, but it was hard to read, the happiness of the heroine in the story clashing horribly with her own torrid emotions. Before long, with the storm raging and the fire flickering, Olivia found her eyelids growing heavy… her mind drifting… the comfort of the rug too much to resist and she drifted off to sleep.
When she woke up, what must have been hours later, it was dark, and she was alone.
She shook her head to clear it, looking about the dreary library and shuddering from the cold. “Olivia…” She called for her daughter. “Olivia…”
A thunder clash had Thalia jumping where she sat.
The fire had long since simmered to ash, so the library was nearly pitch black. Thalia felt a chill ripple up her spine, and she suddenly felt… not afraid. Rather, she was worried. Olivia hatedthunderstorms, and in a home like this one, she couldn’t begin to imagine where the little girl might have gone.
“Olivia…” Thalia started from the library.
It was not yet night, but the hallways were cloaked in dark shadows, the only light to guide her coming from the odd torch bracketed into the walls, and the random flashes of lightning. But they were always joined by claps of thunder that shook the walls, and even Thalia found herself growing anxious.
“Olivia!”
She hurried to the little girl’s bedroom, peering her head into the black-drenched room. She wasn’t anywhere in sight, and the room was cold and musty and lifeless.
“Where on earth…”
