Page 70 of Duke of Destruction
“Oh, Kitty,” she said absently. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just…thinking.”
At that hesitation, Catherine’s worry redoubled. She crossed into the parlor and sat on the settee across from her sister’s armchair.
“Are you certain?” she asked.
Ari’s look didn’t get any less sad, but her nod was confident.
“I’m certain,” she said. “I just have some things on my mind. But I don’t want to trouble you with them.”
Catherine frowned. “You’re nottrouble, Ari,” she corrected. “If you have something bothering you?—”
“I said that poorly,” Ariadne interrupted gently. “It’s not that I don’t want to trouble you. It’s more that… I think I want to puzzle through this on my own for a while. I want to try to sort things out all by myself.”
Catherine heard the hint of stubbornness in her sister’s words, the same stubbornness a young Ariadne had exhibited when she had wanted to avoid taking her bath. It was, after all, a family trait.
But there was something else underlying today’s exhibition of iron will, Catherine thought, then realized, with a jolt, what it was.
Maturity. Her little sister was all grown up, or at least she was trying to be.
The idea made Catherine glow with pride, even as it made something inside her ache. She had essentially mothered her younger brother and sister, and seeing them grown thus encouraged a mother’s natural melancholy at seeing her children no longer need her.
“Of course,” she said, feeling she did an admirable job of keeping this sadness out of her voice. “Though I have to remind you that if you ever need me,ever, I shall always be here.”
Ari smiled at her, and Catherine felt it again, that staggering blow of how adult her baby sister had become.
“I know that,” she said kindly. “And, Kitty, please don’t take this as a criticism, but that’s part of the problem.”
Catherine would never admit this, not for love or money, but her immediate reaction was to take this very much amiss. Their family was the most precious thing in the world to Catherine, large and raucous and chaotic and ever-growing as it was. How could Ari suggest that any part of the support they found in one another was aproblem?
“I’m not sure I take your meaning,” she said, the words only coming out a touch stiffly.
Ari could, of course, see right through her. She pressed her lips together to hide a laugh, as if this was Catherine being sotypicallyCatherine.
“Well,” she said patiently, “I have been thinking of late about that thing that Helen said. About you meeting someone at the Duke of Wilds’ house party.”
Catherine froze. Of all the things she’d expected her sister to say, that had not been one of them. It was, incidentally, also the very last thing she wanted to discuss.
“Helen was just teasing,” she said dismissively.
“I know,” Ariadne said, and Catherine tried not to slump with relief. Apparently, she hadn’t becomeentirelyuseless at keeping things to herself. “But, Kitty… Maybe she’s right.”
“I don’t understand,” Catherine said. Either Helen was right or she wasn’t—and shewasright, but Catherine was prepared to go to her grave declaring the opposite.
Ariadne let out a little breath through her nose, which Catherine recognized from her own repertoire. It was theI’m trying not to sigh at this child, even though they are being difficultbreath. Catherine was, once again, torn between pride and affront at seeing it deployed against her.
“Kitty, you raised Jason and me,” she said, more flatly than any of them had ever really acknowledged it. “Father was dead, and Mother was so absent that it was scarcely as though she was alive, either. Sometimes I think of her the same way I think of Father—as someone I can barely remember.”
Catherine’s heart broke at that. Ariadne had beensoyoung when the fire had taken so many members of their family. But Catherine and Xander, at least—and Jason, to a lesser extent—had memories of a time before their family fractured. Ariadne, only four years old on the night of the blaze, didn’t.
“No,” Ariadne interrupted before Catherine could go much farther down that line of thought. “Don’t look all tragic about it, Kitty. What I’m saying is that I never lacked—because I had you. Xander, too,” she added as an afterthought, one Catherine was glad her elder brother was not present to overhear. “But he was busy being the duke and all that. And then being the most appalling rake.”
Ariadne wrinkled her nose in distaste, and Catherine changed her mind. She desperately wished Xander had been present to see that.
“You’re not meant to know about such things,” she scolded, more out of habit than anything.
“Then Xander ought to have been more circumspect,” Ari retorted as crisply as any judgmental Society matron. “I can read, you know. And the gossip pages arrive at the house daily. Not that it matters anymore,” she allowed. “Now that he had Helen and has become hopelessly domesticated.”
Catherine made a mental note to get Ariadne to actually repeat this in front of Xander—and Helen. Helen would enjoy it so much that she would swoon from laughing.
