Say Yes to the Marquess (Castles Ever After #2)(77)
Author: Tessa Dare

“It’s your last chance to go first,” she told her sister, smiling sweetly. “Once I marry Piers, I will take precedence.”

Daphne smiled. “That’s the spirit.”

She waited until Daphne and Sir Teddy had walked through. And then she ducked into the nearby alcove, reached up with both arms, and pulled the lever.

With a groan and rattle of iron, the portcullis smashed shut.

“It’s been lovely having you visit,” Clio told her shocked sister and brother-in-law, waving her fingers through the barrier of the iron grate. “Please do come back at Christmas.”

“What on earth are you doing, dumpling?” Teddy asked.

“Using my castle for its intended purpose. Protection. And kindly refrain from calling me dumpling. Rafe taught me how to punch, too.”

Teddy blinked in alarm.

“First you’re letting Lord Granville slip away, and now this?” Daphne asked. “Clio, have you gone raving mad?”

“Perhaps.” She shrugged. “Daphne, you are my sister, and I love you. I know you mean well. But you can be astoundingly hurtful at times.”

Clio had Phoebe’s well-being to consider. She just couldn’t be accommodating anymore. Teddy and Daphne were one of those things best taken in small amounts. Like ground cloves. Or smallpox.

“I know that once you leave, I shall miss you,” Clio told her sister. “I’m looking forward to missing you.”

“You can’t do this!” Daphne rattled the gate. “You can’t just boot us out.”

“Actually, I can. I might still be a spinster. I might never be a lady, or even a wife. You might always be my social superior. But I am mistress of my own castle. On this property, I make the rules. And today, I’m feeling a bit medieval.”

Clio waved good-bye to her shocked sister and brother-in-law through the iron grate. “Do have a safe journey. I hope you don’t encounter much traffic on the bridge.”

That done, she turned to Phoebe. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in helping me start a brewery?”

“I’m not sure what help I’d be.” Phoebe fished a bit of string from her pocket. “But I won eighteen hundred pounds in the card room last night. I want to invest.”

“The stewards tell me these fields could be put to better use.” Rafe drew his mount to a halt on the southern border of Oakhaven. “How do you feel about barley?”

“I don’t know that I possess strong feelings about barley.”

“I don’t know that you possess strong feelings at all.”

Piers gathered his reins and set his jaw. “Actually, I do have a few. None of them especially charitable at the moment.”

Rafe walked his gelding in a tense circle. They hadn’t been back on Oakhaven land for ten minutes, and already they were back to their old, familiar boyhood conflicts. If Clio hadn’t asked him to do this . . .

“Maybe we should have it out, the two of us,” Rafe suggested. “Take off our coats, roll up our sleeves. Get it over with.”

“I’m not going to fight you. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Rafe puffed his chest. “I was heavyweight champion of England for four years.”

“I know how to kill a man with a letter opener and make it look like an accident,” his brother said coolly. “I meant it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “You’re so damned predictable. For as long as I could remember, I lived in your shadow. Always failing. Always envious. Fighting was the one thing I could do better than the perfect, upstanding Piers. But no. You had to go and one-up me on that score, too.”

“Of course I did. You weren’t the only one with envy.”

“Why the devil would you envy me?”

“For a hundred reasons. You did as you pleased. Said what you liked. You had more fun. With considerably more girls. You had that roguish air they all like, and your hair does that thing.”

“My hair does a thing?” Rafe made a face. “What thing?”

His brother declined to explain. “I took assignments I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. Dangerous work. Because even though you were a continent away and the truth of what I was doing must be kept secret from everyone, I couldn’t help but feel I was still in competition with my little brother. As it turns out, we were in competition. In one way, at least. And there, it seems I lost.”

So, it would seem he had gathered the truth about Clio. Rafe had won that round, hadn’t he?

About damn time.

“I don’t feel guilty about it,” he said. “I’m far from perfect, but I am better at loving that woman than you could ever hope to be. I know her in ways you don’t. I need her in ways you’d never understand. And I’d fight to be with her, to my last breath.” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “But she doesn’t want us fighting. She wants us to be friends.”

“Friends? I don’t think we’ll ever be friends,” Piers said.

“You’re right. It would be stupid to try.”

Damn. Rafe was doing it again. Speaking words in reckless anger. Words he didn’t mean.

He faced down that vague, ill-formed cloud of resentment that had been roaming through his chest ever since he left Twill Castle. It was an anger born of self-loathing and all that wasted time. If only he’d been man enough eight years ago, he could have offered to marry Clio first.

But that would have been a disaster. They would have married too young. He would have had no means of supporting her. Perhaps his father would have given him some kind of living, and Rafe surely would have failed in spectacular fashion. Clio would have been isolated, pregnant by the time she turned eighteen, still suffering under the dangerous strictures her mother had placed on her.

If he had any chance of making her happy, it was only because they’d been forced to wait. In that respect, perhaps he should be grateful to his father, and to Piers.

The time was only wasted if he didn’t learn from it.

“I didn’t mean what I said just now.” Rafe faced his brother. “I’m sorry. We should try.”

“To be friends? I don’t see how—”

“Just hear me out. I’m no great speechmaker, but I do have things to say every once in a while. If my fighting career has taught me anything, it’s that friends are easy to come by. True opponents—the rivals who force you to work harder, think faster, be better than you knew you could be—those are rare. If that’s what we are to each other, why change it?”