Guilty Series by Laura Lee Guhrke Page A

for nothing. Marc Antony was a brilliant general, and he should have known he would lose at Actium. Octavian had marshaled all the forces of Rome against him. Reason dictated that he retreat.”
    â€œBut what makes you think reason had anything to do with it?” she countered. “He loved her, and that power she had over him went beyond his reason.”
    He made a sound of impatience. “Trust a woman to bring emotion into an intellectual discussion.”
    â€œTrust a man to denigrate the power of love.”
    He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Love should never conquer reason.”
    â€œBut it so often does.”
    â€œWith tragic results.”
    â€œFor Marc Antony and Cleopatra, perhaps,” she was forced to concede. “But not for everyone. Some people can be made quite happy by it.”
    â€œIn the short term, perhaps.”
    He could tell his firm resolve in this discussion frustrated her. She lifted her gaze heavenward, clearly frustrated with him. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she cried, “have you never known anyone who was happy in love?”
    A memory flashed through Anthony’s mind of the night he’d found his father dead, four empty vials of laudanum beside him. “Yes, I have,” he answered. “And the results were tragic.”
    He found he was no longer in the mood for conversation. Abruptly, he stood up and gave her a bow. “Forgive me, but I must have that bath or it will get cold. Good night.”
    He left her without another word.
    First Viola, and all her uncharacteristically romantic talk of love. Now Miss Wade. Damn it all,love was not everything. Why did women always think that it was?
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    As much as Daphne had come to enjoy the lush, beautiful countryside of England, it did present its share of problems to excavation work, particularly in the reconstruction of frescoes. In the deserts of Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, sand could be brushed away to reveal an intact, beautifully preserved wall painting, but in England and other damp climates, it was different.
    It was bad enough that mud made unearthing the plaster pieces of a fresco a messy, difficult task. The damp soil in which the fragments had lain for sixteen hundred years tended to degrade the plaster itself, making Daphne’s job of reassembling fresco pieces into a complete painting much more difficult. Matching the color and design details of hundreds of crumbling fragments could take days of exasperating work. Some days, she found, were more exasperating than others. This was one of those days.
    She had already gone through the baskets of fresco pieces the men had uncovered so far and sorted them into groups by the images painted on them. Now, using a tiny trowel, she was fitting and cementing the pieces back together. Like the floor mosaic she had finished repairing the day before, this piece of the bedchamber wall was painted with an image of Venus. Reassembling it was a bit like putting together a child’s picture puzzle, but the work was much more painstaking.
    She was not accustomed to frescoes that crumbled so easily, and the task required all her attention, but she found her mind preferred to wander, taking her back to that very odd evening in the library a few evenings ago, when Anthony had tried to engage her in conversation.
    Daphne remembered his words that he had known someone who was happy in love but with tragic results, and she wondered who he had been talking about. Himself, perhaps? That might explain his cynicism about marriage, she supposed, and his cold, logical approach to it. She forced such speculations out of her mind. She did not care whom he married.
    Since that evening in the library, he had gone out of his way to thank her for each task she accomplished, added the word please to all his orders, and had an occasional chat with her about the weather and how the cooler temperatures this week must