Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 36

The following day is awkward. Darcy notices that there’s a distance between her and Gregory that wasn’t there before and it stings, so she decides to make it better, she was too harsh she guesses. When she asks him to come to her room in the evening, she can tell that his smile is a mask, his confidence put on, and once she has gotten him to rest his head on her lap she asks him to please drop the act.

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 35

Llew stares at the box. She made something for him, now that’s weird, but humans are weird, bloodsuckers are worse. But damn, if she gets any more emotional, and sweet emotions like that, he’ll pop a boner any second now. Wait? Did she just make him feel something? Oh dear, is she flirting at him? How did she know fey go weak in the knees if you actually tease an emotion out of them? That woman, damn! Oh, right, gift, he’ll rub his sister’s nose in that! Hah, a human, no, a bloodsucker, made him a gift! So much for him being impotent, failing to get emotions out of them!  He takes the box from Darcy with a wide smile, opens it and blinks- she made him a scarf? With floral decorations? Oh, that is so sweet… and there’s the boner he predicted, whew, sweet emotions of that calibre, what is a fey supposed to do here? He puts the scarf on and grins only wider, thanks her, he’s glad that they can start over. He doesn’t want her to avoid him. Damn, that’s even the truth. He chuckles, she’s doing a number on him here. How about they discuss how they can be friends now over a cup of tea?

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 34

Darcy shows the Harkers to one of the bedrooms on the first floor and then leaves to figure out what Gregory got up to.

She finds him downstairs, not the cellar, all the way through the fey door and down those winding stairs into the nexus, where he is using the open area of the meadow to train away from human eyes. The sight of him moving in demon form is interesting, but then she gets close enough to smell him and has to hide behind her fan to hide the very-much-not-a-blush on her face, that redness to her cheeks has different reasons. Him rushing over at her squeak does the opposite of calming her down and she all but stumbles backwards, fangs extending instantly, always that terrible sense of need at smelling him, that must be what desire and longing always is described as. She quickly tells him to get cleaned up for dinner with the Harkers and flees back to her room, more than happy to just hide from all these guests and her own body for a few moments, she’ll be a married woman soon, she can hold out, right?

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 33

They do their best to prepare- they can’t really fake having staff, but maybe they can just have tea and biscuits waiting for them in the salon so it looks like their staff is just staying out of the way? As long as the Harkers don’t stay too long, Arthur thinks they might get away with that. 

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 32

Can this paperwork and the constant need for excursions and riding her lands finally please let up? Darcy has enough to do with wedding preparations! But of course, no, there’s not going to be a sudden lull, this is apparently how a barony works. It’s not what the books have told her, which tells her that she read the wrong books. Clearly, those authors were bad at giving instructions. But that doesn’t mean she can ignore everything, no matter how inconvenient it is. Constant distractions or not, she has to hunt down and buy up Gregory’s parents’ house!

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 31

“Are you really alright?” Arthur murmurs to Darcy, keeps his voice pitched low under the sounds of the carriage- after all, the duchess is loaning it to them (probably that’s embarrassing and makes them look poor, not having their own carriage?), and he doesn’t trust the driver not to report back if he overhears something. 

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 30

Fifteen paces pass quickly, even with tension hanging in the air like… like the magic did when he did the ritual, thrumming and greedy. 

The baron turns first, smoothly, and so is the gun coming up, and him firing. 

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 29

In the aftermath of the confrontation with the baron and arranging the duel, the ball itself is almost anticlimactic to Arthur. 

The baron’s second is some noble he knows, the son of a viscount or something. He’s at least a decade younger than the baron, in his early or mid-twenties, and dressed very finely, and very amused by the whole thing in a supercilious way. At first, Arthur is intimidated by him, but then the man makes some oblique comment about how it’s so unfortunate when girls don’t avoid those kinds of rumours, or something like that, like it’s Darcy’s fault the baron is awful and a dick, and he decides he doesn’t like this man any more than the baron himself. So he sets his shoulders and jaw and locks down his emotions and asks whether they could get to the arrangements- he wishes he could think of some snide comment of his own that would be subtle enough that he couldn’t get in trouble, but the only things coming to mind are crude things people yell at each other in the East End. While it’d be very satisfying to say those to a noble, it would also be very stupid. 

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 28

Knowing nobody is useful all of a sudden, it gives Darcy the perfect excuse not to approach anybody and merely stay on the sidelines. That tactic fails spectacularly when the baron appears to make a beeline for them right when they are the furthest away from any other people.

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Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 27

Gregory hasn’t returned by the time the hour is up, and so Arthur, with a gulp, pulls on the cord to call a servant. One shows up a few minutes later, and only says: “Of course, Sir,” when Arthur asks for directions to the garden party, like maybe that request isn’t weird and he wasn’t somehow supposed to have known that. He leads Arthur along another maze of corridors and stairs, and bows him into a small parlour where, to his relief, Darcy and Gregory are already waiting. 

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