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“Margery,” Lady Tesh said, all agog with shock. “What’s come over you?”
“I’m sorry, Gran,” her granddaughter said, fairly shaking with rage, “but I cannot sit here and listen to a charlatan denounce someone I—” She cut herself off, and Daniel found himself holding his breath, both eager and dreading what might come next.
In the end she threw her napkin on the table and stood abruptly. The chair gave a grating scrape on the floor.
“Please forgive me,” she said to no one in particular—and most certainly not to Daniel, who she hadn’t looked at once since their return from the picnic with the Pickerings earlier that day. “I believe I have a headache. I’ll take my dinner in my room.” With that she stormed out into the hall.
A thick silence followed. Suddenly Gregory’s voice sounded. “Goodness, wasn’t that an overreaction to a bit of ribbing?”
Unable to take even a second more of his cousin’s company, Daniel pushed to his feet and grabbed his cane. “If you’ll all excuse me?” Before anyone could reply he limped out the door.
Margery was pacing the floor in her bedroom when he pushed inside. Myriad emotions had swirled through him on the long trek upstairs, but one stood out from the rest: frustration. Both at himself and at her.
He closed the door with more force than warranted. She continued to pace, her gaze focused on the rug beneath her, her skirts snapping as her feet ate up the space. He thought for a moment she had not heard him enter, so completely did she ignore him. But as the seconds ticked on and the clock on the mantel kept time with her agitated footsteps, the bright flush of anger on her cheeks spread down over her neck, proof that she was not as unaffected by his presence as she appeared.
Finally, when it became glaringly apparent that she would wear a track in the floor rather than acknowledge him, he spoke. “You need to stop defending me, Margery.”
She stopped abruptly and glared at him. “Ineed to stop defending you? You need to start defendingyourselffrom that—that—” She let out a little growl and stomped her foot, looking for all the world like an enraged kitten. He might have laughed if the subject didn’t pain him so damn much.
Suddenly achingly tired, he let out a sigh. “What will it accomplish if I fight back?” he demanded wearily.
She gaped at him. “So you would have him run roughshod over you? You would allow him to demean you in such a way?”
“You don’t understand,” he muttered.
“So enlighten me.”
He blew out a harsh breath. “I know the man is a pompous arse who doesn’t know when to leave something alone. But he’s had a hard history. I grew up with him, Margery. He’s had much to overcome.”
“That does not give him any right to treat you as he does. And I’m willing to bet he’s part of the reason why you are determined to settle for a cold, loveless marriage.”
He gritted his teeth together with such force he thought they might shatter. “I told you why I don’t want affection in my marriage.”
“Because of Erica?”
He sucked in a sharp breath at that name falling from her lips. “Don’t bring her up.”
She scoffed. “And why not? Your cousin was certainly willing to, in his efforts to get under your skin.” Suddenly her voice dropped, the tone of it so raw it fractured something in him. “And it worked, didn’t it? You’re more closed off than you ever were. But you cannot sit huddled behind the barricade you’ve built up around your heart forever, Daniel.”
“It’s a way to survive.”
“But no way to live, forever in the past.”
Anger boiled up in him, so swift that he said the first thing that came to mind. “As you live, forever mourning Aaron?”
The color left her face. And Daniel had never felt so low in his life.
“Ah, God,” he said, running a hand over his face, aching to go to her and pull her in his arms but knowing he never could, not if he wished to keep the distance between them that he so desperately needed to keep his heart intact. Or, as intact as it could be, considering she’d already undermined his careful defenses. “I’m sorry, Margery,” he rasped. “That was inexcusable of me. And I know it’s not the same for you. You know your husband loved you. He didn’t leave you willingly.”
“Didn’t he?”
The words appeared to shock Margery as much as they shocked him. She pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide in her pale face. But she recovered quickly enough. Though still alarmingly pale, she straightened and looked him full in the face. “But this is not about me. This is about you and your need to marry.”
He frowned, his frustration back. “I have decided who to marry. And if you had not cut our afternoon short owing to some meaningless words that such a man would spew about my appearance, I would be a good deal further along in that endeavor.”
She bristled. “They were not meaningless words.”
“To me they are,” he lied.
