Page 72 of Duke of Destruction
For now, this was the chance that she had. And she was going to make the most of it.
No matter what destruction this path promised to yield.
CHAPTER 18
Catherine felt like a complete ninny trying to sneak out of the house in the dark.
She had missed her time for this sort of misadventure, she reckoned as she put on one of her few front-lacing gowns and pulled a dark cloak over the top. This was half for discretion, half for warmth. It was mid-October, and the nights were properly cold now.
Sneaking about was the purview of the young, and Catherine had spent too long being on the shelf—no matter what pillow-throwing siblings wanted her to believe—to remember with any acuity what it had felt like to live the constantly-observed life of a younger lady. There was something blissful about not being terribly eligible any longer. People let her do as she pleased.
But sneaking through Mayfair was still scandalous, even at her age. So, she waited until the staff had gone to bed, then waited a little bit longer, before dressing and tiptoeing out of her bedchamber, down the stairs, and toward the back kitchen door.
“Good evening, Lady Catherine.”
Catherine let out a highly undignified squeak of surprise. Edwards, the Lightholders’ elderly butler, was sitting in front of a banked fire and polishing silver.
Drat it all.
“Good evening,” she returned, trying to sound as innocent as she could while very clearly involved in something she ought not to be doing. “Couldn’t sleep?”
The butler gave her an assessing look. “Afraid not,” he said.
“Hm. Me neither.”
Perhaps if she acted as though everything was just fine, that would make it so. Yes. That would work. Probably. Maybe.
“I thought I would just…slip out to the garden?” She winced when it came out sounding like a question. Also, this door did not lead to the garden.
Edwards nodded thoughtfully. Catherine knew he wouldn’t forbid her from leaving; he was more the type to give disapproving glances until you collapsed beneath the weight of your own guilt.
No, he wouldn’t try to stop her, not that he really could, not truly.
But hemighttell her brother. And that would be a whole mess. Xander would have questions, the kind of questions that—and she didn’t want to cast aspersions on her brother’s good sense, but he’d been known to be atouchoverprotective at times—might lead to pistols at dawn.
A year or so ago, Catherine wouldn’t have worried. Edwards had done little to hide his radiating disapproval at Xander’s rakish ways, while he’d always liked Catherine. But Edwards worshipped Helen like she was the sun, given that her arrival had curbed Xander’s behavior entirely.
Eventually, the butler nodded again.
“Enjoy the garden,” he said, turning back to his silver. “But…do be safe, my lady.”
Catherine felt a rush of relief.
“Thank you,” she said. “I will. I promise.”
She was already in a hired hack before she considered that perhaps encountering the servant had been a sign that she was meant to turn back.
She was, after all, despite her promise to Edwards, being unthinkablyunsafe. She would likely be safe from most of thephysical perils of London at night if she stayed in Mayfair, which she unquestionably planned to do.
But the risk to her reputation was immense. Even this late in autumn, the Season long over for the year, there were plenty of young gentlemen out and about on the streets late at night, coming home from their clubs or even the theater. If she weren’t staying far back from the hack’s windows, she might have even recognized some of them.
And none of that even addressed the emotional risk she was taking. Every encounter with Percy embroiled her feelings more and more, wounding her up like a spinning top or a marionette that had got caught in its own strings.
She might have tried to keep matters of the heart and matters of the body separate, and perhaps it made her an utter cliché to fail at doing so, but there it was. Shefeltthings when she and Percy were together. And it hardly mattered that she knew that none of this could last, that even as they kept snatching away more time for themselves, sheknewtheir luck would run out.
She still felt. And she wanted to keep feeling it. And so she would, even if it crushed her in the end.
Waverly House, the London home of the Duke of Seaton, was not nearly as ostentatious as Oldhill House, where the Lightholders lived. Catherine found she liked the way it was nestled into a corner, slightly away from the bustle of city life. Her own home was on a fashionable square, which meant there was always something going on outside. But the comparativequiet suited Percy, she thought. Perhaps it suited her, too—not that she would ever get to find out.
