Page 70 of Duke of Wickedness
“Oh.” Ariadne cleared her throat rapidly. “I, ah—” More throat clearing, so she took a sip of tea. Like any good Englishwoman, she found this grounding enough that she managed to tell the truth.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t deny that there are…emotions involved, but I also know what is and what isn’t possible. This is temporary. It’s temporary and…” She paused, then made herself say the thing she needed to say. “And this is likely the end of it all. I know that.”
It hurt to say. She’d known it would, and it did.
“But,” she went on, because this next part was true, too, “I fear I will regret it if I don’t more than I will regret it if I will.”
Phoebe gave her a look that was understanding and full of kindness.
“You’re very brave, do you know that?” she asked.
This startled Ariadne. She was many things, for good or for ill, but she hadn’t really ever thought of herself as brave. During her first Season, she’d been so frightened of everything and everyone that she’d practically flinched at her own shadow. It was only when she’d started mimicking Catherine, had started carefully tallying every rule of thetonand following them all to the letter, that she’d felt anything beyond that terror.
Ariadne opened her mouth to say as much, to tell Phoebe that she wasn’t really brave, that she was just very good at putting on a mask, when she realized…
It had been a long time since she’d noticed herself going to the effort of donning that particular costume. It had been a while since she’d paused in the middle of an interaction to ask herself whether the consummate young lady—the one that was faintly modeled after her sister but who existed, in reality, only in Ariadne’s mind—would do this thing or that one.
She hadn’t quite noticed until now, but that way of being had faded away.
And she suspected that one particular duke was to blame.
So she didn’t deny it. She sat up taller and let her pride show, and thought about howgoodit felt to do so, even if it wasn’t recommended for proper young ladies to ever feel anything like pride.
“Thank you,” she told Phoebe. “I do think I am beginning to recognize that in myself.”
This time, David was glad to see Percy.
Yes, yes, it was still a bit disastrous that Percy was Ariadne’s brother by marriage. It was foolish of him to go to Percy’s house, given that Percy’s wife lived there, and Catherine would be well within her rights to murder David if she learned of what he and Ariadne had been getting up to together.
But he needed advice, damn it. And he really only had the one friend.
It was, however, perhaps not hisbestmove to say so.
“I need advice,” he declared as he sauntered into Percy’s study. “And since I really only have one friend, you are the one who has to give it.”
Percy, with exacting deliberation, set down his pen, put aside his correspondence, and folded his hands.
“Do you think you’d like to try that again?” he asked with the same tone that one might use on a small, recalcitrant child. Percy would be a good father when the time came, David decided upon hearing that question, laced with patience and careful reprimand.
But David was thirty years old, a man grown, and he was too set in his stubbornness to be guided. He threw himself into the chair across from Percy, all rakish insouciance, hoping that he could hide the simple, mortifying fact that he wasjealous.
He was jealous! He was very, very jealous. He was jealous of all the men who had danced with Ariadne at the ball—even the old fellow. He was jealous of her hypothetical future husband, because that unknown man would get her smiles and her cries and her sighs, and David would have none of them.
He was jealous of Percy, who knew his place in the world and knew what he wanted.
He had even, insanely, found himself briefly jealous of George Stunton, because surely Lord Hershire was too stupid to be burdened by these complicated feelings. David had banished that one bit of jealousy very quickly, it was true, but it had been there, however briefly.
He was, in short, in a very bad way.
“Did I make you be polite and prim about things when you were courting Catherine?” he asked peevishly, scowling at Percy.
He cursed his mistake when his friend’s eyebrows rose.
“When I was courting Catherine?” Percy echoed. “You mean my wife, whom I adore, with whom I intend to spend all the rest of my days—something about which I am blissfully happy?”
“Jesus Christ,” David said, starting to push himself upright. “Forget it. I’ll ask someone else.”
Percy flapped a hand at him, indicating that David should stay right where he was, and David complied, not because he was feeling agreeable, but because moving seemed like far too much effort at the moment.
