Page 96 of Rivals
“Also not bad. Especially now that I know how you can put down a plate of tacos.”
“On special occasions only,” Daphne clarified, though she was smiling. “I don’t know. That sounds kind of nice.”
Daphne knew what her mother would say if she overheard this conversation.It’s a trap!Rebecca would exclaim.You can never trust other women, Daphne! They’re all out for themselves, and will take any opportunity to tear you down.
She was starting to think that her mother had been wrong. Perhaps because of everything she and Nina had been through together—because Nina had already seen everything Daphne was capable of, the good and the ugly—they could be honest with each other in a way that most women couldn’t.
When her phone buzzed a third time, Daphne finally broke protocol and unclasped her clutch. She glanced down at the screen and sighed. Speak of the devil; it was her mother.
“Sorry, I need to take this.” She held the phone against her dress and ducked into the hallway, waiting until she was past all the lingering royals and bustle of servers before she answered.
“Mother? I’m at the ball.”
“I’m aware.” Rebecca Deighton sounded angrier than Daphne had ever heard her; each word was as clipped andvicious as the pluck of the harp strings inside the ballroom. “I just thought you’d like to know that your father has been stripped of his title.”
No.
Daphne’s mouth formed the word, but she hadn’t actually spoken it aloud. She closed her eyes, clutched the phone tighter in her hand, and whispered, “No. That’s not possible.”
“I assure you that it’s true,” Rebecca snapped. “A messenger just arrived at the house to let us know the committee’s verdict. And to collect our things.”
Daphne knew precisely whichthingsher mother meant. Her parents’ coronets, their ermine-trimmed robes, their papers of nobility.
“Daphne,” her mother went on, and somehow her voice had gone even sharper and icier. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
It was an automatic response, the same thing Daphne used to say when she was a child and her mother slapped her for reaching for a cookie, or tracking mud in the house, or any of the other thousand transgressions she was constantly committing.
“Why did you get involved? Iexplicitlytold you to speak tono one! Your father and I were handling it, but then you had to go antagonize Gabriella and ruin all our hard work!”
Daphne turned aside, leaning against a doorframe and lowering her voice. “I don’t understand. Gabriella said she would get her father to drop the charges.”
“She clearly lied to you!”
“But that can’t be right; Nina got her scholarship back.” Why would Gabriella have carried out Nina’s request but not hers? Was it because she saw Nina as an irrelevant nobody, whereas Daphne was Jefferson’s girlfriend, and an actual threat?
“What are you babbling on about? How is any of this related to Nina?” Rebecca spoke the name like a dirty word.
“I…nothing. Never mind.” There was no use explaining her plan to her mother, not when it had gone so horribly wrong.
“You made a real mess of things, Daphne. You kicked the hornet’s nest, and now the Madisons are out for blood. You should have come to me for advice before you tried whatever moronic scheme you came up with!”
“I was trying to help,” Daphne said weakly.
“You failed! Peter was lobbying the committee members one at a time, trying to get them on his side. If you hadn’t gotten involved, he might have had a fighting chance. But since you went after Gabriella, Ambrose Madison spoke out against Peter—and after that, there was no hope.”
Daphne felt sick to her stomach. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorrydoesn’t make up for the damage you’ve done.Sorrydoesn’t win us back our title. Do you even understand what position we’re in now, Daphne? We’re common! We aren’t entitled to attend court events, our names don’t appear in the social register, we’re a plainMr. and Mrs.now! We might as well be dead!”
“That’s a bit of an overstatement, Mother.” For some reason, Daphne thought of what Nina would say to all of this. “We’re all healthy and safe, and things could certainly be worse.”
“Healthy and safe? Things could be worse?” Rebecca repeated. “What iswrongwith you? I would rather you were in the hospital, critically ill, than that you had disappointed me like this!”
Daphne recoiled as if she’d been slapped. She had always known that Rebecca wasn’t the warm and cuddly, bedtime-story type. Yet it stung, hearing how little she cared about Daphne as anything but a vessel for her own ambition.
“Does everyone know?” Daphne whispered, eyes already cutting back down the hall in the direction of the ballroom.
