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Her blood turned into ice at the suggestion in his voice, spoken and unspoken. “Regardless of your poor opinion of me, I am their mother, my lord. I have been the most constant presence in their lives since the day they were born, and I will remain to be. I bid you good day.”
How she hated him. But she wouldn’t weep. She would never give him the satisfaction of seeing how distressed his attack had made her.
Ophelia didn’t wait for his response before she sailed from the sitting room.
CHAPTER 19
Abloody week.
It had been an entire, interminable seven days since Apollo had last seen Phee. And as he sat down with a plate of Bayonne ham, poached eggs, and hothouse pineapple at the town house he shared with his mother and sister, he was struck by the mad desire to toss his entire plate into the fireplace at the far end of the table. Shattering something—destruction—felt eminently preferable to the misery threatening to swallow him whole.
Was she thinking of him?
Had he crossed her mind at all?
Once?
He ground his molars and reached for a cup of coffee that was too hot. But he didn’t give a damn as he took a hearty sip and felt it scald all the way down. This act of self-destruction, too, felt better than wallowing in the heartache that had relentlessly held him in its unforgiving grasp ever since he’d walked away from Phee at the gamekeeper’s cottage at Wingfield Hall.
Ever since he’d watched her dancing with other men at the ball until he had finally been too drunk and the room had become blurred, and he had stumbled into the gardens in an effort to clear his mind. Clearing his mind was as elusive as Phee was.
“Good morning, brother,” Aphrodite said as she waltzed into the breakfast room in a cloud of light-blue silk skirts.
Her voice was cheerful. He frowned. “Is it a good morning? I confess, I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’ve certainly been very Friday-faced since you returned to London,” Aphrodite observed.
“Strangely, I didn’t miss the lack of respect you pay me whilst I was gone,” he drawled.
But in truth, he had missed his sharp-tongued sister. Ro was a true original, and she was also more stubborn than any mule. He rather admired that about her. She had never fallen into any of the traps polite society set for women. She was independent, determined never to wed, and she was one of the most intelligent women in his acquaintance.
“Is something amiss?” she pressed, unbothered by his quip.
Yes, he thought. Everything. Everything is amiss. I’m in love with a woman I can never have, one who doesn’t want me in return.
“Nothing is amiss,” he lied through gritted teeth, reaching for more coffee. “Other than that, the day is yet another in an endless sea, each one almost indistinguishable from the last.”
“That is a particularly grim view of things,” she said, frowning at him.
“Or honest.”
“Come now,” she countered brightly. “This day seems to be quite an excellent one. The sun appears to be shining, breakfast smells heavenly, and I spent last night reading the loveliest book. I sighed this morning when I woke just to think of it, to relive it anew.”
“From where I sit, the day looks remarkably gray, breakfast smells just as it always does, and I barely slept at all last night on account of Mal taking me all over London.”
Mal had tried to improve his spirits, but Mal’s idea of encouraging cheer involved activities of dubious morality, and Apollo simply hadn’t had the heart for any of it.
“Wrighton,” his sister scoffed, saying his friend’s name as if it were an epithet and she would later need to beg forgiveness from a clergyman for her sin in uttering it aloud. “Where did he take you? A brothel?”
Apollo’s brow furrowed. Just where the devil was his sister getting all this information?
“Why should you think such a thing?” he demanded, even though her suspicion was true.
She pinned him with a pointed look. “Do you mean to tell me he didn’t take you to a brothel?”
Blast. How to lie whilst holding his sister’s gaze? He found that he couldn’t.
“It is not done to speak of such things, Ro,” Apollo said.
