Page 20 of Duke of Destruction
Her low expectations meant that Catherine was initially rather pleased with herself. The game started off casually enough. Most of the ladies had only a passing interest in the game, and a few quickly drifted off to linger where a tent had been set up with refreshments. Several of the gentlemen, too, proved more interested in chatting with the ladies than in the sport before them. Catherine thought she might even detect the blossom of aromance between Lady Reid, who was quite lovely even in her late fifties, and Sir William Pearce, who, like the lady, had lost his spouse several years prior.
Catherine was so distracted by this—indeed, was so caught up in actively seeking distractions—that she failed to notice that the reduced number of players meant that the game had grown tighter, closer, more intensely played.
By the time she realized it, it was too late.
“Well, well,” the Duke of Wilds said grandly, tearing himself away from flirting with a woman who had to be at least a decade and a half his senior. Catherine was almost certain the woman was here as someone else’s chaperone. “Look at how close the game has come!”
Catherine, who had very intentlynotbeen looking at any such thing, felt her shoulders creep up toward her ears.
Perhaps she was losing! Perhaps she was losing so very desperately that it would be the dignified thing to laugh, bob a teasing curtsey to the leaders, and go enjoy some lemonade.
“Lady Catherine,” the Duke of Wilds called, because Catherine had no luck to speak of, “you are…” He looked down at a little tally he’d apparently been keeping on a small tablet of paper. He’d beenkeeping score? Could he not be a proper rake and flirt so much that he had no attention for anything else?
“Well, very nearly the winner,” he said with a chuckle.
As though this were some sort oflaughing matter.
“Oh dear,” Ariadne murmured.
“Very nearly?” Catherine echoed, her voice sounding as though it was coming from very far away.
“Indeed.” Why did it seem as though there was agleamin the duke’s eye? This was not about gleaming, either! “You’re within just a few strokes worth of points of my dear friend Seaton.”
“Ohdear,” Ariadne said more loudly.
Catherine turned and looked at the Duke of Seaton.
He looked back at her.
And then he did the worst possible thing that he could have done.
He grinned.
It wasn’t a snide grin. It wasn’t sarcastic or angry or condescending.
It was—God help her—the man who was having a good time winning a game.
It lasted only a second before he seemed to realize who he was looking at—then it vanished, replaced by his usual scowl. But it was too late. She’d seen it. And he was…
Well, drat it all, he was just a bit beautiful when he smiled like that.
And thinking he was beautiful led to thinking about when she’d been close enough to see more of him, which let her think about kissing him, and kissing him had been the one thing—theone thing—she was not supposed to be thinking about.
She felt her cheeks go pink, and now his smilewasa smirk.
I know what you’re thinking, that smirk said.I know how it made you feel.
Catherine was now no doubt not pink, but bright, furious red.
If I do not win against him,she thought, the words clear and precise in her mind,then I will have no choice but to die trying.
It really was a shame that Ariadne had been so against the whole plan to strike her with the mallet.
The next half hour… Well, Catherine couldn’t recall it all that clearly, after the fact, as it happened. This, she could only assume, was for the best.
There were a handful of further rounds; at the end of each, a few more players dropped out, preferring refreshments to increasingly tense game play.
But she would remember how it ended—probably until the end of her days.
