The room fell silent. Lady Fleurance and Grace had their mouths hanging open before it twisted to the question of how an average vampire could ask for a pureblooded vampiress hand. Maggie had turned her head as if the air had knocked out of her body. She blinked looking at Jerome.
As Gerald had not spoken a word yet, contemplating the situation, Lady Fleurance started, "Do you think a lowly vampire like yourself will end up with a pureblooded vampiress?" and when the woman had just finished her words, Gerald said,
"Okay. You have my permission," and the room turned even more silent than before.
Penny who was sitting there watching everything play out, she couldn't tell how much respect she had for Damien's father right now. Not only had he been surviving all these years with a woman like Lady Fleurance but he had decided to give Jerome a chance. A man who was of not equal social status compared to Quinn's.
"What are you doing?" Lady Fleurance placed her hand on her husband's arm and Gerald turned to meet his wife's eyes, "We are supposed to keep the bloodline clean and pure."
The man gave his wife a smile as if she were an innocent lamb who knew nothing, "Jerome is a good man if he and Maggie have a shot I would give it," and the lady looked at him as if her husband had lost it.
Gerald would have been on the same page as Fleurance if his daughter had not been engaged previously but he had seen how the smile had been stolen when it was not her fault. Previously, when they had got her engaged to a pureblooded vampire named Sven the man had broken her trust and the events that had occurred after that still haunted his daughter. Maggie usually kept her thoughts to herself but he could see the pain in her eyes. It was the very same time he told himself that he wouldn't force his children to get married. If they fell in love with someone or showed interest in another, he would not come to cross it.
Maybe if his first wife was still alive things wouldn't be the same and the matter would be looked into in a more stringent manner but it was the matter of his children's happiness.
Maggie had gone through enough when it came to love and if there was an opportunity for her to feel the love again, Gerald would not come between her and the person.
"Durik, could you get a glass of wine," Gerald said without looking at the butler who was quick to leave the room to breathe some fresh air where people were not about to throw things at each other,"Now if you both will sit down and have lunch," he said looking at both Maggie and Grace. Maggie didn't know what to say with the sudden turn of events and she was the first one to sit while Grace who found herself to be the odd one out sat down immediately after her sister did.
The rest of the meal went quiet except for the glares that were directed towards Maggie and her father.
Penny saw Maggie speak to Jerome and she smiled, leaving them alone she went back to her room. She was glad that there was someone who was courting Lady Maggie, especially after meeting her ex-fiance, she had only hoped for the woman to find happiness.
Locking the doors and windows while pulling the curtains and firing up the fireplace so that she could look in the darkroom. Though Quinn's mansion didn't have a separate room like the one in Delcrov's, Penny had to adjust herself in making use of little things and then throwing it away in the fire. Right now, she was trying to read the spells from the spellbook that she had failed to imprint in her skin. Apparently, there were a few spells that didn't work like the others and she had to actually memorize it and tell it in her mouth.
She wanted to learn to bind the magic back if this was all the spells that were there, then maybe these very spells needed to be tweaked and worked together to form a bigger spell, thought Penny to herself.
She moved her hand in the air, bringing the ball of light back in the room smiling as she played with it. Closing the book, she ran her hands across the thick binds. To think that she would have to burn these books which belonged to Lady Isabell, Penny was somewhere not ready for it but she knew that was what had to be done.
Exhausting the light which she had created, she pulled out the curtains to let light pass back into the room while also being able to see the birds flying in the sky.
She opened the doors to the patio but didn't dare to step outside because she knew what fate awaited her. Three steps out would lead to many feet down the water. She was still trying to learn to swim and she could barely keep herself up on the surface right now before gargling the water as she sank down in the sea bed.
Taking two steps back, Penny returned back to the bed as she plopped on it and let her back fall to look at herself in the ceiling's mirror.
She waved her hand back and forth as if it were the waves, moving up and down she looked at herself in the mirror again before dropped her hand to her sides. Staring at her green eyes she heard the words in the back of her mind,
'I will be waiting for you...' the voice sounded distant and somewhere far away which Penny couldn't tell if it was made up by her own mind or there was another meaning to it. Was it her father's voice? asked Penny to herself.
There was a sliver of hope that her father was still alive and maybe it would have stayed that way before Bathsheba told her that her father was dead. She knew that not all black witches were and maybe there would have been a ray of hope if her mother truly loved and cared for her father and her but that had gone down the grave.
Damien had told her that he had put up her mother's posters all around Bonelake, it made her wonder how her mother was doing now.