Page 36 of Duke of Destruction
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“Well…” She’d run out of objections. “Good.”
“Good,” he echoed.
With that settled, she began making her way toward the woods, since that was no doubt where most of the things they needed would be found. She’d made it a few paces before the duke’s voice followed her.
“You’re very lucky to have me as your partner, in that case…since I was the one who won at pall mall.”
Catherine clenched the paper in her fist, his merry laughter following in her wake.
“This one!” Catherine said triumphantly, bending down to pick a leaf from a holly bush.
Percy tried—with what he truly felt was the kind of valiance for which they gave men medals—not to look at her arse as she bent at the waist.
“That one?” he asked politely, as he thought about things that wouldnotmake him grow hard in his trousers.
The fellow who sat next to him in Parliament who always seemed to be suffering from phlegm. That time one of the barn cats on his estate had snuck into the house to proudly present him with a half-rotten mouse carcass.
Blancmange.
That did the trick. He hated blancmange.
“Yes,” she said happily. “This leaf is replete with majesty insofar as it reminds me of my Grandfather Cornelius.”
Percy stiffened at the reference to the late Lightholder patriarch.
He had, over the course of the past hour, almost managed to forget that there was any enmity between himself and Catherine. When he was competing with her instead of against her, he discovered, he found her intensity delightful, charming, even adorable. Her cheeks got all pink, her eyes went bright, and she made this pleased little sound in the back of her throat whenever she found something that she felt fit one of their mystifyingly opaque clues.
Percy’s pockets were filled with all sorts of odds and ends foraged in these woods. He’d even found himself starting to feel a touch sorry whenever they checked another item off the list, as it meant the game would soon be over.
This was a good reminder, he told himself. Heneededthis reminder that Catherine—and her whole family—was his enemy.
Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to fight with her, not just now.
“I see,” he said noncommittally instead.
He hadn’t asked—hevery specificallyhadn’t asked—but Catherine explained herself anyway.
“He was considered to be the next best thing to royalty by most of theton,” she said, tracing a finger over the edge of the holly leaf she’d chosen. Percy had a powerful impulse to snatch it away from her before she could risk pricking herself. “And I suppose he was rather grand, in his way. I never really knew that side of him, though.”
Percy braced himself for hearing a loving recollection about just howwonderfulthe late Duke of Godwin had been. He could bear to hear it without shouting. For Catherine, he could.
“I suppose I never knew him all that well,” Catherine admitted, still looking at the leaf. “I was only six when he died. But, to me, he was always…”
She tapped one of the points on the end of the holly leaf, not hard enough to hurt herself, but still hard enough to make Percy flinch.
“Prickly. He had very little patience for girls; he was openly displeased at having so many daughters. My brother, my male cousins—he saw them as the next generation. He planned to school them to be just like him. But us girls?” She shrugged. “He didn’t care for us very much.”
Percy might have thought he would be relieved. It would have been hard, to hear her talk about Cornelius adoringly.
But somehow, he hated this even more, this admission that someone would look upon Catherine—not even as she was now,with all her prickles and barbs ready to sting, but as an innocentchild—and think her anything less than wonderful.
Not that Percy himself found her wonderful. But her grandfather ought to have done so. Of course.
“He sounds like he was a right bastard,” Percy said, unable to resist.
This was likely the rudest thing he had ever done in Catherine’s presence, spilling in his trousers as he ground against her notwithstanding.
