Page 40 of Duke of Destruction
“That’s not—” Percy kicked at the floor peevishly. How did David always manage to make everyone else around him seem ridiculous when David was obviously the one always playing the fool, always chasing his indulgences and hedonistic pleasures?
“It’s different,” Percy insisted. “Our ranks might be similar, yes, but she’s aLightholder.”
“So?”
Cursed David. Only a man as confident as he in his status in the world could ever ask such a thing.
“They are anoldfamily,” he reminded David. “Ancient. And they have titles; they don’t need titles. They want…prestige.”
“Prestige that you fear you lack?”
Well, yes, but that wasn’t even the crux of it, not really.
“Prestige that I want no part of,” he said after a moment’s consideration.
Yes, that was the real problem. Catherine cared about her family—that much was obvious in the way she watched over her sisterand in the way she’d leapt to her family’s defense the first night they’d been here. And maybe she didn’t care about his birth. Maybe she would laugh when he insulted her grandfather.
But what about the brother, whom she’d listed as one of those select few that Cornelius had tried to mold in his image?
If Percy let himself become attached to Catherine, he would have to face down Xander Lightholder, too, and those male cousins who had each inherited dukedoms of their own.
He would be forced to spend a lifetime biting his tongue or else risk a fracture between Catherine and the family she so loved.
He would not do either. He wouldnot.
And…
And part of him resented Catherine, too, for loving those people. He understood it, he truly did. Family was family, even when it was hard.
But they weren’t his family. His father had been his family. And Percy could still hear the thud of his even-tempered father slamming his fist on a desk after mere minutes spent in the company of Cornelius Lightholder.
Percy didn’t think he could ever forgive those people.
“It cannot be,” he said quietly, aware that David had been patiently letting him think. “This party…it is a closed door. Once we leave it, we cannot open it again.”
David regarded him again, then nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “I can stop, if that is what you wish.”
“It is,” Percy confirmed, even though he was not at all certain this was true.
CHAPTER 11
Catherine leaned her head back against the lip of her bath, letting the steam stick tendrils of hair to her forehead and cheeks.
Getting into a hot bath—taking off all her clothing and luxuriating in the scented water—likely hadn’t been the most sensible way to banish the lingering arousal that nagged at her even after she and Percy had been interrupted (by Miss Reid) and he had left the clearing (with Miss Reid) and returned to the house (still with thrice-cursed Miss Reid!).
The fact that Catherine actually liked Isabella Reid mattered little to her at the moment.
All she could think of was Percy.
She had tried to return to thinking of him asthe Duke of Seaton, but it was as though speaking his name aloud had unlocked something in her, had opened a door that couldn’t be closedagain. She couldn’t think of him by anything other than his given name, and every time she did that, she thought of him as he’d found his pleasure beneath her, his eyes wide and hungry, his jaw set, his hair disheveled.
She clamped her lips tight, but still a whimper emerged.
Almost without realizing it, she had moved her hands from her side until they were coasting over her ribs, then her belly. She moved beneath the water, the motion causing little ripples that caressed her heated skin.
A wicked, devilish idea occurred to her.
