Page 65 of Duke of Destruction
Ariadne was clearly just waiting for something—anything—to happen and trying to assess the social demands of the situation when it didn’t.
And Helen looked upsettingly like she was havingideas.
“Xander,” Helen said just when it seemed like her husband was about to speak. “Ask me to dance.”
“I—what?” Xander looked away from Percy to frown down at his wife.
Helen frowned far more emphatically up at him.
“Alexander Lightholder,” she began, which never boded well;nobodycalled Xander by his full name, not anybody. “You have been nattering at me forweeksto come out. Abandon your baby, you told me?—"
“I didn’t sayabandon,” Xander interjected.
“—and come out in Society, never mind that it’s not even the Season, never mind that it’scold.” From the way she said the word, it was as though Helen had been cast out in the Arctic to die and not, say, as though she was a woman from the North who regularly commented that Londoners were fragile flowers about a bit of bite to the wind.
“And now,” she went on, drawing herself up to her full—yet still not terribly impressive—height, “you won’t even dance with me?”
Poor Xander looked so terribly confused. Catherine spared him a moment’s pity. Her poor brother never had expected to fall in love, and still sometimes seemed baffled to find himself so fully in the thrall of this woman whom he so desperately adored.
“Of course we can dance,” he said, because really, there wasn’t any other answer for him to give.
Catherine began to wonder if teaching Helen about the subtler ways of Society hadn’t been a mistake. The woman was downright dangerous.
She led her husband away before he could make another protest. And darn it all, Catherine thought, if Xander didn’t seem completely fine with it.
Ariadne actually had a previously arranged dancing partner; a gentleman who was so young that Catherine could only assume he’d been dragged here by a mother or sister came and gave Ariadne a deep, deferential, and highly nervous bow before taking her to the dance floor, where the couples were lining up for one of those exuberant country dances that left everyone breathless.
“Should I ask you to dance?” Percy asked when they were standing alone, or sitting alone, as they could be surrounded by a room full of people.
Catherine was already breathless.
“Goodness, no,” she said. It would have been more proper; the whole point of dancing was to give men and women a proper reason to interact with one another at balls.
And yet, Catherine just wanted to stand here with him a moment longer. She wanted to talk to him, even if it was awkward. She just wanted to be here with him.
The thought should have been terrifying, and she supposed it would become so, once she let herself pause to think about it.
But right now, everything inside her was screaming that he washere.
And then, Percy being Percy, he had to ruin it.
“Of course not,” he huffed. “This is London now, right? And the eminent Lady Catherine cannot be seen gallivanting. The horror.”
God, she wanted to kick him.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said conversationally. “How is that strange illness of yours?”
“My what?”
She smiled. “You know, the thing where, if you go for a full hour without being rude, you die a gruesome death? I’ve been thinking about it, and surely, that must be why you act the way you do.”
He was trying not to be amused, she could tell, but hewas.
“Have you been planning that one?” he asked dryly.
“Yes,” she admitted, unbothered. “But doesn’t that suggest that you are so consistently rude that people make up retorts in advance? I might ask what it said about myself, personally, but I encourage you to do what you think is right.”
He washighlyamused, and the idea thrilled her. Why did she find it so terribly exciting to quarrel with him?
