Page 81 of Duke of Destruction
“Fine,” David said. “Some people care. Perhaps as many as seven of them. The seven crustiest, most miserable old bastards care. But fortunately for us—and their miserable, miserable relatives—they will be dead soon. But the rest of Britain? Everyone besides those seven walking corpses? They hear ‘duke’ andimmediately forget everything else. Even your good qualities. Which you have. Though I cannot seem to remember a single one of them right now.”
“What is your point here, Nightingale?” Percy grumbled. He had no drink. No drink at all.
“Mypoint—well, one of my points is that I am thoroughly incensed with you for makingmebe the one to talk about yourwretched feelings—but I guess my larger point is that if you are having all these filthyfeelings… Just marry her, mate.”
Percy didn’t need a drink to choke half to death, it turned out.
“Marry her? But she’s—” He cut himself off.
David—who, Percy only very belatedly remembered, thought Percy was torn up over some buxom merchant’s daughter—took this abrupt silence to mean exactly what Percy had allowed him to think it meant.
“There will be talk,” he allowed. “But there would be talk no matter what. You could marry a pretty duke’s daughter who had been born and raised to become a pretty duke’s wife?—”
Percy chokedagain. It was not a good day for successful breathing, it turned out.
“—and people would still talk.” David drank his stolen drink. “So. To hell with them.”
“To hell with who?”
“All of them!” David threw up his free hand. “The whole damned point of having a title is?—”
“To effect positive social change in Parliament?” Percy interjected, just to be difficult.
“Oh, fine, that too, you high-minded bugger. But the morefunpart is that nobody can tell you what to do. And if they do, you can remember that talk is just talk. Thetonacts like it’s the most important thing in the world, but that isn’t actually true. You get to decide how much it means to you. And if you let it bother you, that’syourdoing. Now.” David slumped back in his seat. “That is more sincerity than I’ve allotted for the year. Let’s go back to drinking away our troubles like our forefathers intended, eh?”
“God. Yes.”
Percy didn’t need more alcohol. He really didn’t. But he did need David’s words to stop rattling around in his mind.
Talk is just talk. You get to decide how much it means to you.
He couldn’t think about that because if he did, then he would think about Catherine defending her sister by marriage. He would think about all the ways he had accused her of being snobbish, and she had met him with kindness. He would have to reimagine all of it. He would have to go back and back and back. He would have to think about all the work he had put intobecoming the man that he had become, all the times he had labored to do something right for someone who had less than he did, and he would be forced to ask himself.
He would have to truly reckon with the question of whether he had done it because it wasrightor because it had made him feel more powerful than the small, scared little boy who had sat under his father’s desk and listened as his father—a man he had thought so powerful as to be unstoppable—be treated like an unruly child by a larger, scarier monster of a man.
And if he did all that…
Well then, he would have to face the fact that he had been the one to be monstrous. That he had taken something irreplaceable from Catherine and then turned her away as callously as possible.
Andthatwould break him.
So he drank with his oldest friend, the one he likely didn’t deserve, until he could think of absolutely nothing at all.
Catherine had spent the past few days experiencing a proper tumult of emotions. She’d been hurt. She’d been sad.
Once she’d settled into anger, though, she’d decided to stay there.
The part that she decided was the worst was that he had acted as though she was some sort of conniving seductress trying to trap him. Like she had connived to rob him of his senses to enact some nefarious plan.
And whatever stupid idea he had gotten in his stupid little head had made him take something nice—and ithadbeen nice; she didn’t need any other experience to realize that it had been nice—and turn it into something…tawdry.
So. She was mad. She was going to remain mad. Maybe forever, but probably not.
ShewasCatherine Lightholder, after all. She was stubborn, but she was also pragmatic. She would probably only stay mad for a few months. Or a year. Certainly not as long as a decade.
But that was plenty of time. So, for now, she fumed.
Her siblings were starting to notice.
