Page 30 of Duke of Destruction
His tongue licked minutely at the corner of his lip, then he bit down there, as if he was stopping himself from smiling.
That felt like victory.
For a long moment, they just regarded one another, the tension thick between them as the barmaid brought the duke his food.She glanced quickly between them, then left with an exasperated sort of air.
The duke looked down at his plate, then jerked his chin back up in surprise at her.
“Catherine,” he said, and it was a jolt to hear him use her real name—without her title. “Are you drinkingale?”
“No,” she said reflexively. This was, of course, foolish, as he’d ordered the same meal as her, and he could clearly see—and smell—his own drink. “Oh, very well,fine,” she said with a sigh.
He looked positively delighted.
“How very scandalous,” he teased. “The esteemedMiss Pettigrew—” She shot him another unimpressed look. “—drinking ale alone in a pub. Imagine what the papers would have to say about this!”
In truth, it likelywouldbe a scandal. Truly, the gossip pages loved to print things about the Lightholders, and they so rarely had anything interesting to say about Catherine that they would doubtless make a meal of her…well, having a meal.
Never mind that her cousin Hughran a gambling den, one that he tried to keep secret, but there really wasn’t any such thing as a secret in theton. And her cousin Ezra! Ezra was always up to something!
But they were men, so it was not nearly as interesting to report on their misdeeds as it would be on Catherine’s.
Catherine didn’treallythink that the Duke of Seaton would go running off to the gossip rags—he was cantankerous, annoying, and too argumentative for his own good, but she didn’t think he was truly villainous enough to purposefully destroy her reputation—but still, she decided to act unbothered as a distraction. Just in case.
“Please,” she said, giving him a pitying look. “I’m a spinster having luncheon. Yes, perhaps the location is a touch unconventional, but it’s hardly an interesting tidbit.”
The duke frowned. “You’re not a spinster,” he told her sternly.
She laughed, genuinely and out loud at that.
“Yes, I am,” she told him. “I’msix and twenty.”
His eyes narrowed in a challenge. “I’m three and thirty.”
Part of her had been faintly curious, but…
“That,” she told him crisply, “doesn’t mean a thing. You’re a man. And a?—”
She cut herself off before she could saya duke. It was true, and they both knew it. Nobody would even overhear them, not now that the barmaid was off quietly talking to the elderly man.
But she didn’t want to bring their titles, their reality, into this moment.
Another realization came on the heels of that first one.
She wasenjoying herself.
How utterly horrifying.
The idea was so shocking that she let him prattle at her for several sentences without interruption.
“Relegating women to spinsterhood merely because they haven’t married in the first bloom of youth is one of the most foolish things that the aristocracy has ever come up with—and they’ve come up with a fine few bits of foolishness. My own mother was eight and twenty when she married my father! And yes, she’d been affianced before, only her betrothed died, and perhaps they were not yet aristocrats, but?—”
“Your mother wasn’t part of theton?” Catherine asked, surprised enough to interrupt. This conversation had held far too many surprises in a row. It couldn’t be good for a person.
She took a steadying gulp of ale.
The duke, for his part, looked equally startled by her question. “I—no,” he said. “No, my father inherited from a distant cousin. Before that, he had been a landowner, aye, but a common one.” He paused. “It is common knowledge, my parentage.”
Catherine wanted to roll her eyes at this addition. Oh, right, it wascommon knowledge. She was clearly ridiculous not to have this in her mental list of facts about the Seaton dukedom.
