Page 94 of Duke of Wickedness
Ariadne bit her lip until it hurt—properly hurt—then turned to her friend. Phoebe was looking back and forth between Ariadne and David, her expression concerned.
“Are you all right?” she asked gently.
Ariadne nodded, though it took some effort to manage it.
“I knew it would happen eventually,” she said softly, keeping her words intentionally vague. She couldn’t tell if discretion was something that aided her in the long run—as at least she didn’t have to explain what had gone wrong to thetonat large—or hurt her—since it felt as though the widespread ignorance of her connection to David made it feel strangely as though it had never happened at all.
“It would,” Phoebe agreed, reaching out to touch Ariadne’s hand affectionately. “But he is…staring. A bit.”
Ariadne dared another glance back at David. He was doing a relatively poor job of hiding his attention. He was looking at her the way someone might stare if they saw a ghost.
“Yes,” Ariadne said, turning her back, because she didn’t trust herself not to stare directly back at him otherwise. “He is. But let’s just…”
She didn’t need to finish the statement. Phoebe took her by the arm and led her toward the ladies’ retiring room, where they spent a pleasant half hour gossiping about whose gown had torn a hem and whose slippers were simply ridiculous, given the slipperiness of ballroom floors.
Throughout it all, David lurked in the back of Ariadne’s mind.
She felt…
Well, she felt an awful lot of things whenever she thought back to those hazel eyes on her. After all, he had been the one who had called things off between them. If it hurt him… Well, he had nobody but himself to blame, did he?
But there was a part of her, the part that cared even when she oughtn’t, that had felt an acute sense of sympathy. Yes, this hurt. And it was terrible—miserably unfair—that she couldn’t talk tothe one person who might understand just how bad the pain could get.
And then, the smallest part of all was the part that was goddamn furious.
Because how bloody dare he?
He had been the one to send her away. And yes, maybe these exact feelings were proper evidence as to why he’d been sensible to send her away. A rational person would have admitted that, but Ariadne was not feeling particularly rational, not in that secret, deep-down part of her that was blisteringly angry.
Because how could he? How could he make her feel as though he wanted her, with that stare of his? How could he look at her and remind her what it had felt like to be adored by him? How could he remind her of how good it felt to be looked at like that?
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
And then…
It kept happening.
At the Cadford musicale, she caught David’s eyes on her from across the room.
During the garden party hosted by the Countess of Anderfaire, he had stood a few paces from her, close enough that she could hear the gentle murmur of his conversations, but not so close that she could make out the words. In the few instances (fine, she could admit it—it was more than a few) that she could no longer resist the urge to look over at him, he was always,alwayslooking at her in return.
At the Frampton ball, she’d thought, for a moment, that hewasn’tlooking at her—she feared, by contrast, that she had fully been lost to madness brought about by the stress of this whole thing—until she looked closer and saw him standing, broodily, in the shadow of a column.
All of it made Ariadneblisteringlyfurious.
She wanted to shake him. She wanted to shout at him until she was blue in the face. She wanted to kick him roundly in the shins.
But she refused. Because he had been the one to send her away. And apparently Grandfather Cornelius’ blood really did run strong in her veins, because she refused—absolutely, outright goddamn bloodyrefused—to be the first one to approach him.
Her pride wouldn’t allow it.
If this meant that she had a lot of imagined arguments with David? Well, that was a private humiliation, and therefore did not count.
“How dare you?” she railed in mind when, in truth, she was pacing around her bedchamber.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” imaginary David retorted archly. The version of him that participated in these arguments had none of the finer qualities of the original; it was far simpler for Ariadne to win every fight that way.
Pivot, turn, pace.
