Page 98 of Duke of Destruction
This was…an acceptable compromise. Her decision was not affected just because the broth actually smelled quite good.
She took a sip. Drat. It tasted good, too.
“You really are the most difficult man,” she commented as he sat and watched this with undisguised smugness. “Do you realize that you contradict me ateveryturn?”
“You never answered me,” he said.
“What?”
“I asked you to marry me, and you never answered.”
She could have taken pity on him, she supposed, but it wouldn’t be clever to begin any other way than how she intended to go on.
“Technically,” she told him sweetly, the warmth from the broth making her feel a great deal better, actually, “you didn’t ask.”
“Yes, I?—”
“No, you said you wanted to marry me, and then you said you loved me—” Just saying it made her smile. “—but you did not ask.”
He didn’t seem annoyed, which would have irked her, except he looked extraordinarily fond, which was so much better.
“Catherine Lightholder,” he said, “will you marry me?”
She smiled broadly.
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
His smile was just as bright as hers.
“I would like to kiss you again,” he confided, “but I fear which member of your family will come in next.”
“You could do that anyway,” she said. “Take a risk.”
“Are you going to argue with me about everything?” he asked, not sounding put out about it in the least.
“For as long as we both shall live,” she promised him, meaning it with every piece of her overflowing heart.
EPILOGUE
“Excuse me, Lady Catherine?”
Catherine turned away from where she had been checking the lines of her gown to see Lady Persephone Blackwood, her cousin Hugh’s new wife, poking her head around the door.
Or, rather, her head and her extremely round stomach were both poking around the door.
“Persephone,” Catherine said warmly. “Please, call me Catherine. And come in, darling, I’m not at all sure you should be on your feet.”
Persephone—well, Catherine didn’t want to say shewaddledin, but there really wasn’t a better word for it. The poor thing really did look as though she was about to pop, enough so that Catherine was touched that she’d come. She took a seat on thesettee in the parlor where Catherine had slipped away to check her appearance before going down to the waiting breakfast.
Catherine might, as of this morning, no longer officially be Catherine Lightholder, but, well. She would always be the person who wanted to double and triple-check the details. But if Catherine Lightholder had done it because she felt she had to, Catherine Egelton, the Duchess of Seaton, was doing it because she could. Because she wanted everything to be lovely, because she felt so, so lovely today.
“Oh, I shouldn’t sit,” Persephone, the Duchess of Nighthall, lamented as she dropped the last few inches with no grace to speak of. “I may never get up again.”
“I’ll help you back to your feet,” Catherine promised with a laugh.
Persephone gave her a tired smile. “I would tell you just to leave me here, but I came in here because I cannot find the girls.”
“The girls,” Catherine had come to learn, meant Hugh’s three nieces from the Blackhall side of the family who had come to live with their uncle after their parents died. They were triplets, seven years old, and, as far as Catherine could tell, commonly considered to be absolutely terrifying.
