Page 84 of Duke of Destruction
“The two of you are very difficult,” Ariadne said, but she was smiling.
Xander evidently had decided that this little skit of theirs—as entertaining as Catherine was finding it—had gone on for long enough. He hauled the earl back up to a standing position, then nodded to the footman, who was waiting, perfectly poised to open the door. The staff was too well trained to be openly gleeful, but the man had a faint air of someone who was enjoying himself immensely.
“Now,” Xander said. “Get out.”
And then he threw the man—actually, bodily threw him—out the front door.
The footman slammed it, which was proof enough of Catherine’s suspicions. The staff never slammed doors.
The silence that echoed afterward was…deeply satisfying.
“Well,” Ariadne said.
Then she sat down very hard on the bottom step of the staircase.
Catherine crossed to her side.
“Are you okay, sweetness?” she asked.
Xander came and sat on Ariadne’s other side.
“I will go back out there and hurt him more if I need to,” he said.
Ariadne let out a very wet-sounding laugh, but she did not start to cry.
“No, he’s… He’s just a fortune-hunter, or a reputation-hunter or something like that. He didn’t care about me. He just wanted to marry a Lightholder and did not take kindly to it when I showed him that he couldn’t.”
“I think I am going to kill him,” Xander remarked mildly.
Ariadne laughed. “I promise, Xander, it didn’t go beyond letters. Letters that included some very,verybad poetry—though I suppose ‘Ariadne’ is hard to rhyme—but just letters.”
“Is this the thing you said you wanted to handle yourself?” Catherine asked as the pieces fell into place in her mind.
Ariadne pouted. “Yes. Well. I thought that not answering the letters would solve it. I was not right about that.”
“It isnotyour fault,” Xander said, all fire and rage. “No, it is all that—that—louse’sfault. He has behaved in a manner that is so ungentlemanly?—”
“All right,” Catherine interrupted when Ariadne shot her a desperate, wide-eyed glance. “Calm yourself. This is not helpful.”
Xander’s outraged look made Ariadne laugh, which was helpful, in its own way.
“Oh, yes, I want to defend my sister, how terrible,” he grumbled.
Ariadne leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek, which seemed to mollify him.
“You’re an excellent brother,” she said. “And you, Kitty. I love you both.”
“We love you, too, darling,” Catherine said, wrapping an arm around her little sister.
Ari leaned her head on Catherine’s shoulder. It was a nice, quiet moment.
Then, disruption?—
“So,” Ariadne asked. “Do you want to tell us why you’ve been in such a temper recently, Kitty?”
Catherine surged to her feet. “My goodness, look at the time! See you both later! Goodbye!”
It turned out that she had an urgent appointment to be somewhere where nobody was going to pester her with questions.
