Page 100 of Duke of Destruction
Xander had looked wholly unsatisfied with this response, but appeared resigned to this state of affairs. “…any blasted notion what’s going on around here,” he grumbled to himself. Then he fixed Catherine witha look. It reminded her a great deal of their father, that look.
“I trust, then, that we won’t have any reason to rush the wedding,” he said, with a dangerous note to his voice.
“Of course not,” Catherine said with more confidence than she felt, not bothering to remind her brother thathiswedding had been a rushed affair, done by special license after he’d been caught in a compromising position with Helen, a woman whom, at the time, he had aggressively professed to have no regard for.
But discretion and valor and all that.
When Catherine had conveyed this conversation to Percy, he’d gotten a very long stare.
“Oh my Lord,” he said. “I didn’t even think… You don’t think that you are…”
But Catherine had not, in the end, turned up with child from their first night together. Percy had very quickly changed his tune from relief that Xander wouldn’t be coming for his head after all to disgruntlement.
“How long to do we have to wait, then?” he’d demanded. “I want you as my wife. I want you in my house. I want you in mybed.”
Catherine wanted those things, too, but she found, to her surprise, that she wasn’t all that sorry about the wait. She was enjoying being betrothed, she learned—something that she hadn’t expected at all, given that she’d resigned herself to it never happening.
She liked the giddy anticipation of Percy coming by to take her on an outing, and she liked watching as Xander’s grumpy elderbrother's attitude gradually softened into a genuine regard for her intended.
And she liked planning the perfect wedding. And ithadbeen perfect, down to Cornelia, now almost a full year old and confident in the power of her vocals, shouting baby babble intermittently as her parents frantically tried to shush her.
There wasn’t anything that couldn’t have made it perfect, not when she got to be married to Percy at the end. But still, the details were very nice.
Now, coming up next to her brother in her wedding dress, Catherine nudged him with her elbow slyly.
“Enjoying watching over your domain?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Happy that you are finally married. It means I can finally admit that I actually like Seaton.”
“You could have admitted that before,” Catherine ventured, but her brother gave her a skeptical look that said she knew nothing in the way of gentlemen.
“Moreover,” he said, completely ignoring her apparently nonsensical statement, “I feel he and I will make excellent political allies.”
“Well,” she said. “So long as my marriage benefits you, then I’m happy, as well.”
He rolled his eyes again, but reached over and pulled her in to kiss her on the temple.
“Shouldn’t you be off bothering your new husband?” he asked in a slightly thick tone that said that he really would miss her. “You’re his problem now.”
Though there were any number of little sister-ish responses to this—and they all flew through Catherine’s head, inviting her to partake—he did introduce a good question. Wherewasher husband?
“I haven’t seen him,” she said, glancing around the ballroom. No Percy, no triplets. Good thing there were only about a dozen other rooms in the house where they might have sequestered themselves. “Have you?”
Xander shook his head. “Over by the morning room a little while ago, but not recently. He was talking to Wilds, then.”
That made sense. David Nightingale had spent the past several months positively giddy with delight over their pending nuptials—for which he had taken full credit, of course, given that he had invited them both to the house party that had started it all.
“I knew it,” he had bragged one night over a cozy dinner at Waverly House, Percy’s London residence, only for family andclose friends. Percy had invited the Duke of Wilds, and looked as though he regretted it. “It was my plan all along.”
“It was not,” Percy retorted. “I didn’t like her at all?—”
Xander cleared his throat ominously.
“Oh, hush,” Helen told him.
Catherine just smiled.
“—and she didn’t even know who I was!” Percy went on.
