Chapter 4

Four

THE TURQUOISE ROOM

I already knew something was going wrong, I just didn’t know what it was, before we entered a dining room that was a study of turquoise.

The tablecloth was white.

The wood was cherry.

There was a massive tapestry on the wall that looked ancient.

But everything else, including the trim on the china, the vases that held extraordinary flower arrangements, the embroidery on the serviettes, and the cast to the crystal glasses and candelabra, was turquoise.

The table could seat three times our party, but even so, the fullness of it was set for us.

Head to foot.

Two place settings swimming in the long trail of the port side, three on the starboard.

We had not all been arranged at one end so we could easily see and talk to each other.

We were all going to have to yell at each other.

The thing was, there were only six of us.

Richard led Jane to the foot, Daniel leading Portia to the two-seating side.

Daniel explained things as Lou and I lingered in confusion at the door.

“Allow the seat between you, Ian will be here…eventually.”

Hang on.

The prodigal son was returning?

And no one thought to mention that?

Of course, during our allotted forty-five minutes of cocktail time, the feel of the evening deteriorated as the minutes ticked by, but I thought it was because Richard and Jane were more and more beleaguered at having to spend time with us.

Now it would seem, considering the hard mask (or harder mask) that slammed down over Lady Jane’s face at the mention of her eldest, it was because they were growing more and more annoyed that he’d broken the rules and not turned up at the appointed cocktail forty-five minutes.

And now we were to start dinner without him.

Which was what happened after Richard did triple duty of seating Jane, then moving to Lou to push her chair under the table, then to me, simply to stand there in a wasted display of chivalry, his hand on the back of my chair, for I was already seated and had tucked myself under the table.

His expression said I should have waited for him.

He was a man. Even if he’d seen my shoes, he couldn’t know that no way was I standing on them for longer than I had to. Nor generally waiting for someone to help me do something I was perfectly capable of doing myself.

I ignored his expression, took hold of my napkin and flung it out to the side before draping it on my lap.

And thus, Richard had a hard(er) mask on his face when he finally seated himself.

He immediately turned to the butler who was hovering. “Soup, Stevenson,” he murmured.

The man bowed then took off at a good clip to disappear behind a hidden door in the cherrywood paneling.

“This table is beautiful,” Lou tried gamely, offering this to Jane.

The woman slowly tipped her head to the side in a regal, yet birdlike manner that had me glaring at Portia.

If recent memory served, Lady Jane hadn’t uttered a single word since we’d met her.

Portia shot me a pleading look.

I took a fortifying breath.

And then another one.

“I hope our cook can impress the likes of a student of Le Cordon Bleu,” Richard remarked.

I turned to him and saw his tone might have been dull, but he was attempting to be game too.

“You have excellent taste in champagne,” I noted.

“I’m glad you approve,” he replied.

“So I have every hope.”

He jutted his chin toward me.

“Daniel’s taking us to some ruins tomorrow,” Portia announced as Stevenson returned with the young man who took my car. He was now wearing a black vest, matching trousers, a black tie (again adorned with the family shield), a crisp, painstakingly ironed, white shirt, and a long white apron tied meticulously around his waist.

He was also carrying a turquoise and white soup tureen on a gold platter.

“We’re having a day of it. Starting with a tramp around the village. I hope you girls brought warm clothes,” Daniel declared.

The soup was served to Jane first. I watched carefully as she helped herself. Although I’d been formally served before, the traditions of the house could vary.

I should have known in this house they would not.

The man went to Lou next, and fortunately she’d been watching too.

“Portia gave us deep insights on what to pack,” I assured Daniel.

“Excellent,” he squawked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know the story. How did you two meet?” Lou asked.

Portia blushed. Daniel fidgeted with his tie. I halted in the endeavor of serving my own soup, because Portia had told me they’d been set up by mutual friends, which should not earn a blush or a tie fidget.

“Weren’t you set up?” I asked.

“Yes,” Portia answered quickly.

Meaning: Lie.

I finished ladling my soup.

Nothing more was said on the subject of their meeting, though I made a mental note to bring it up when I had some time alone with my sister.

We all fell into uncomfortable silence as we sipped our soup.

It was a heavy, but delicious cream of brie.

I was on spoonful number three when a deep, droll, silky voice noted, “It seems the family text string has failed us yet again.”

I had my spoon over my bowl and my eyes on the double doors that led into the Turquoise Room as Ian Alcott sauntered in.

Well, hell.

He wasn’t just dark to Daniel’s light.

He was two inches taller than Daniel at least. He was broader. He had the thighs of a rugby player. And if the Alcott blue eyes were startling with Daniel’s fair coloring, they were disconcerting with Ian’s dark.

Striking blue, the deep color of the Mediterranean.

I tore my gaze from him to see Portia’s face pinched in a way reminiscent of when she was studying for an exam she should have started studying for days earlier, and Daniel’s face was creeping with red, because his cover had just been blown.

Handsome, magnanimous younger brother was out the window.

He was the spare.

The real deal had just strolled into the joint, and damn, but if Ian Alcott didn’t make that brutally clear.

I’d seen pictures of him too, and his good looks were not lost on me.

However, the man in the flesh was so much better, I was suddenly finding it hard to breathe.

He was magnetic.

And he knew it.

“And the family expands,” he drawled, those preposterously beautiful, blue eyes pinning me to my seat. He stopped at my side. “I take it you’re Daphne.”

I put my spoon down and offered him my hand. “I am.”

He didn’t take my hand at first, not out of rudeness, he was caught up in the perusal of my cleavage.

And that was rude.

There was a slight smirk on his full lips when his fingers finally closed warm and tight around mine.

He also, I didn’t fail to note, had big hands, and he might have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but somewhere along the line, he’d earned callouses on his fingers.

“Pleasure,” he murmured, the word roaming my skin like a physical touch.

I pulled my hand from his and replied in a way it couldn’t be mistaken I didn’t mean, “Mutual, I’m sure.”

The smirk turned into a sexy sneer.

While I dealt with that, he looked beyond me.

“The famous Louella Fernsby,” he greeted Lou, moving her way.

She offered her hand.

He held it for a shorter period of time before he shrugged off his suit jacket and slung it with sheer and unmistakable in-your-face nonchalance on the back of the empty chair between Lou and me, a gesture that seemed like the smack in the face I was sure it was to his father. His tie was already gone, if he’d been wearing one, and his light-blue shirt was open at the tanned column of his throat. His blue suit was three pieces, the vest still in place, and the cut was superb and fashion forward.

He’d barely seated himself before the man was there with the soup tureen.

“Cream of brie,” Ian stated, helping himself. “Bonnie isn’t pulling any punches.”

“Dinner is at seven fifteen,” Richard asserted at this juncture.

The man with the tureen slunk away.

Ian shifted only his eyes to his father. “Thirty-seven years of that drilled into my brain, Dad, I didn’t forget.”

“It seems you did, since you’re late. You were to meet us for cocktails. Those start at six thirty on the dot,” Richard decreed.

“I texted I’d be late.”

“We hardly bring our phones to cocktails,” Richard sniffed.

“Perhaps you should,” Ian suggested. “You’d not waste needless emotion at me running late if you knew that was the case.”

It was then Lady Jane broke her long silence with a practiced, “Can we not?”

“Yes, can we not?” Daniel chimed in.

“Delighted to drop it,” Ian murmured as he bent to his soup and took his first spoonful.

Richard wasn’t delighted to do the same, I knew, when he declared, “We have guests.”

Ian looked to me. “My sincere apologies for my tardiness,” he said insincerely.

“You said you were going to drop it,” Daniel reminded him.

“I’m apologizing to our guests,” Ian retorted.

“Let’s move on,” Lady Jane requested.

“It’s insufferable,” Richard denied her.

“Jesus Christ,” Ian growled to his soup.

“It’s a simple request. Be in the Wine Room at six thirty, properly attired,” Richard demanded.

Yes.

I knew that suit jacket thing was a slap in the face.

Ian rested the side of his hand to the table and said to his father, “I’m here now.” He raised his dark brows. “Shall we eat?”

“Yes, let’s eat. I’m happy you could make it, darling,” Lady Jane put in.

“Thank you, Mum,” Ian said to her.

“I’m going to vomit,” Daniel declared.

“No need to be dramatic,” Richard chided.

Portia was staring at me with big eyes that shouted, Do something!

But I had no idea what to do.

Someone else might find this amusing or be diplomatic enough to smooth things over by offering an interesting conversational gambit.

That wasn’t me.

I detested confrontation, any I might be involved in, and even more, witnessing the same. I thought it was rude beyond bearing for anyone not to have enough control of their mouths to be able to leave it until they could discuss things in private.

And at that moment, I was painfully aware I not only didn’t have my car fob, I didn’t even know where my car was.

But from the moment my little sister’s mother took the millions my father offered, she disappeared without the barest shadow of a care of what became of her daughter after her absence, and I’d slid in to do the best I could in that role.

Which was what I endeavored to do now.

“I know there was a castle here before Duncroft, but when was this home built?”

“Mason work started in 1617, and the house was finished in 1632,” Daniel answered swiftly.

“Fascinating,” I said.

And that was the end of my attempt at an interesting conversational gambit.

Ian made a noise in his throat that was part amusement, part something else, and the something else part I felt in my nipples.

He was bent over his soup.

I glared at his profile.

He ignored me, continued eating and, I decided, doing both knowing perfectly well not only that I was inept at salvaging a dinner party gone awry, but also what he did to my nipples.

“Was the castle razed before Duncroft was built?” Lou asked.

Ian answered her. “Yes. It and the murder and mayhem within its walls were swept clean away. Except the house might have been new, but the bent toward murder and mayhem remained.”

“Ian!” his father snapped.

“If they have Google, Dad, they know the history of the house,” Ian reminded him.

“We don’t talk about such things,” his father bit off.

“No, you don’t. Everyone else in Great Britain and beyond does,” Ian retorted.

“You goad him on purpose,” Daniel accused.

“And?” Ian asked his brother.

I almost laughed, but not with amusement (well, not entirely).

And I thought Dad and his marital high jinks, Lou being my stepmother and young enough to be my older sister, Portia and her shenanigans, and me with my rabid bent toward cynicism were a mess.

These people put the dys in dysfunction.

It was my experience it was always the ones who thought they were superior who were, in reality, anything but.

And I still didn’t know where my car was.

“Do you think that perhaps this dinner might mean something to me…and Portia?” Daniel asked.

“Portia, my love, I forgot about you,” Ian drawled.

Oh…hell no.

“You may be the future king of all you survey, but that’s my little sister, so be careful,” I warned.

Ian turned instantly to me.

“Daphne, no,” Portia begged.

My eyes clashed with pure blue.

And I didn’t fucking back down.

It took some time before he said, genuinely this time, “My apologies.” He looked to Portia. “Apologies, petal.”

Her cheeks turned pink.

I harrumphed.

“Can we please just enjoy our dinner?” Jane requested.

At that point, it was an impossible request.

But I exchanged a glance with Lou, and we both sent careful smiles in Portia’s direction.

Which meant we were going to try.

It ended up an epic fail.

But we gave it our best shot.