Loved by a Duke (The Heart of a Duke #4)(84)

“You’re gone,” she whispered. Not gone. “You died.” Those two words, unspoken until now, sucked the breath from her lungs. Through the years of listening at the keyhole to her parents speak of Lionel’s murder no one had dared utter the words, as though in speaking them, they became true.

Only, they’d always been true. There could be no undoing. Whatever guilt carried by Auric would not bring Lionel back. A sob escaped her. She sat up and drew Lionel’s pillow close to her chest and rocked back and forth, crying so hard her chest hurt. He was gone and it was not Auric’s fault. And then she cried all the more, the sobs threatening to tear her in two at the guilt she’d thrown upon his already weighted shoulders. She wept until she thought she might break and then there was nothing left but a shuddery, wet hiccough. None of them had truly lived these seven years. Not her mother, not her, and not Auric, and she’d venture not Marcus. Even though she’d put forth a fine act of laughing and attempting to enjoy life, she never really had, truly, deeply. Rather hers had been a carefully constructed fa?ade of a woman who sought to prove to her family and Society that her heart was healed and there was no need for pitying stares and whispers.

“I want to live again,” she said softly into the empty chambers. “I think you would want that, too, Lionel.” Reluctantly, Daisy sat up and remained perched at the edge of his bed. Loathe to leave for this felt more a parting than she’d ever truly had with Lionel. She ran her palm over the surface of his side table and absently pulled out the drawer. From within the darkened confines of the compartment, a stark, white kerchief embroidered in the bold, black letterings of Lionel’s name, snagged her notice. With trembling fingers, she withdrew the cloth. Something slid to the floor and landed with a metallic clang upon the hardwood. Daisy dropped her gaze to the floor and her heart stopped. A daisy pendant attached to a gold chain lay in a sad little pile upon the floor. Emotion clogged her throat and she swiftly retrieved it, involuntarily crushing the delicate piece in her hand.

Her gift.

I’ve gotten you something special, Daisy-girl…

I don’t need anything special…

You deserve something special because you are special…but you’ll have to wait to see, my girl…

Daisy stood, cradling the piece close to her. It was time to go home. Both of them—she and Auric. She crossed to the chamber door, pulled it open, and stepped out into the hall.

“Daisy.”

She started and then turned.

Her mother stood in the corridor, her head tipped in consternation. As though she sought to make sense of her daughter’s presence outside the sacred door, she alternated her gaze between Daisy and Lionel’s chambers.

“Hello, Mother.” They studied each other a long while until Daisy spoke, breaking the silence. “He is gone.”

She furrowed her brow. “Who is—?”

“Lionel.” The woman aged by grief jerked as though she’d been struck. Daisy walked over to her mother. She took in the wrinkled lines of once smooth, elegant cheeks. “He is gone, Mama,” she repeated words that had needed to be said by all of them some years ago.

“Wh-what are you on about?” her mother squawked, clutching her neck.

“Lionel is—”

“Of course I know he’s gone,” she snapped with more force of emotion than Daisy recalled, more than she imagined the broken woman capable of. “Do you think I can forget that?”

Daisy shook her head. “Not forget. You should always remember him, but he’d not have wanted you,” Nor me, or Auric, “to become this.” With her free hand she took her mother’s cold fingers in her free one. “Let go of your grief, Mama. It is time.”

Her mother wrenched her fingers free and spun away. “How dare you, Daisy?” she hissed. “You’d come here and berate me for loving my son. You’d have me smile again? What is there to smile for?” The halls echoed with her cry.

There is me. There is me to smile for.

And standing there, amidst the sad, quiet corridors with her mother’s chest heaving with the force of her angry, shallow breaths, Auric’s silence all these years at last made sense. She took in her mother’s tightly drawn features and the bitterness seeping from her blue eyes. Pain pulled at her heart as she imagined the guilt and responsibility her husband must have felt through the years coming here, brave enough to bear witness to her mother’s and when he’d been alive, father’s, agony. Of course Auric would live with the guilt of Lionel’s passing. How could he not have felt the weight of it pressing down on him?

He’d kept his secrets from her because he’d feared she would react—precisely as she had. Daisy closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, back and forth. When she opened them, she looked at her mother and truly saw her. The older woman stared at her with fire snapping in her eyes. Mama could never be free and if Daisy held onto the pain and bitterness, then she too would become no different than this woman she no longer recognized. “Goodbye, Mama,” she said softly. She walked over and placed a kiss on her cheek. Her mother stiffened. “It was not my intention to upset you.”

The truth would have never given her parents any form of solace. Auric had known that and it likely accounted for his silence. “I love you.” Daisy started down the corridor, ready to put the sadness of these years behind her and attempt to set her world with Auric to rights. He might not have wedded her for love, but their relationship had been forged on something so much deeper than most all other wedded couples. He was her best friend. And that had to mean something.