“I am both satisfied and pleased,” Persephone insisted.
Adam wondered if she meant it. She was precisely the sort of person who would accept less than what she wanted in order to please another, in order to have peace and harmony. He didn’t want her settling. He didn’t want her merely contented. Adam wanted her to be happy. He wanted Falstone to be her home. He wanted her to have everything she wished for.
Rubbing his forehead with his hand, Adam let out a long, silent breath. “I sound just like my father,” he said to himself. For the first time in his life, Adam wasn’t at all certain he liked the idea of having inherited one of his father’s traits. Father had spent Adam’s early years catering to Mother, trying to give her everything she wanted. In the end he’d been left lonely, and, Adam realized with some pain, Father had been broken, undone by her defection and his own inability to please his wife.
Now Adam was attempting to do the same thing. He meant to keep Persephone at Falstone through bribes, entertainments, visitors, whatever he thought she wanted. “It will never work,” he told himself. “It didn’t before, it won’t now.”
“You really must let me help with the next entertainment,” Mother was saying when Adam’s ears returned to the ladies’ conversation. “I could recommend a few individuals whom you should consider including.” Her enthusiasm grew with each word. Adam felt himself stiffen with tension. “Friends of mine who are simply delightful.”
Mother’s friends walking the corridors of the very home they’d pulled her from? After all Father had done, after all the time Adam himself had spent praying, begging her to stay, Mother was suddenly so willing to be at Falstone? And she wanted to bring with her the sort of people who had pulled his family apart when Adam was only a child.
“Excuse me,” he said, his voice stern enough to cut through their conversation.
Both ladies looked up at him. It was the perfect opportunity to end all of Mother’s schemes. He could tell her that there would be no other entertainments once the blasted ball was over.
But something in him felt five years old again, running to the front doors because Mother had returned, promising to be a good boy if only she would stay for a while. He would cling to her skirts and beg her to tell him about her excursions and to come to the nursery to read to him. Father would smile at her and greet her with a fond kiss on the cheek and tell Mother how happy he was that she had returned.
Sending her away would feel like letting Father down, which made no sense. Father was no longer there. Neither was that tiny boy, yet Adam could clearly see the pain in his face as his mother had slipped away again.
“Excuse me.” His voice emerged softer than before. He walked back to the door of the drawing room.
“But dinner,” Mother protested.
At least she’d left off the “my poor boy.”
“I am not particularly hungry, Mother.” Anger gripped him, but he could not explain exactly why.
“You are ill, you poor—”
“I am not ill,” he snapped. “I am simply not hungry.”
“But skipping a meal is not good for you.” Mother used the tone she had employed when he was still in the nursery.
“Adam is perfectly capable of deciding what is good for him,” Persephone said, a gentle scold in her voice.
“Thank you, Persephone.” His tension only grew as he stood in the doorway. “Excuse me, ladies.” He offered an abbreviated but strictly appropriate bow and left the room.
Only two weeks remained until the ball. In the week since Adam had proposed the mad scheme, he had more than once regretted it. But as he’d told Persephone, he was a man of his word. There was no question of calling it off.
Every invitation extended had been accepted—except for the Jonquil family, they being still in deepest mourning over the passing of the earl—so the ball would be precisely the sort of crush London idolized and Adam despised.
He stood in the middle of his book room, having arrived there without even noticing the path his feet had taken. Just as automatically, Adam’s eyes turned to the portrait of his father and himself. What had happened to “Dukes do not depend on people” or “We are better off without her?”
If they had been so much better without Mother around, why had Father tried so hard to keep her there? Adam stared at the portrait as if it would answer. She’d left anyway. And Father had died a frustrated and lonely man, despite Adam’s attempts to be something of a balm. It hadn’t been enough.Hehadn’t been enough for either of them.
Mother had left him. Then Father had, too. And Persephone, he felt certain, would be next. How often he had told himself that he didn’t care, that he needed no one? He was no longer a child begging for his mother’s affection or his father’s approval. He didn’t need it anymore.
Adam muttered a curse and stormed across the room to the French doors. It was too dark to see Persephone’s garden, so standing there was pointless, and yet he didn’t move away.
What was happening to him? He’d been calm and level-headed and undisturbed by anything for decades. He kept his head in every situation. He dealt with problems swiftly and decisively. And suddenly, Adam was wandering his own home, confused and frustrated. And he, who never bothered with emotions of any kind, was angry, tense, and boiling.
With a sound filled with anguished frustration, Adam pounded his fist against the wall, feeling the pain of flesh connecting with thick, solid stone. Another curse slipped from his lips, not at the pain but at his own inability to keep himself in check.
Adam felt a soft, gentle hand slip over his fist where it still lay against the wall. Persephone.
“You will hurt your hand if you keep doing that.” She tenderly pulled his throbbing hand from its punishing block.
He did not want Persephone saving him from himself. It would simply be one more thing he depended on her for. “Go eat your dinner, Persephone,” Adam muttered, pulling his hand free and returning his gaze to the darkness outside.
