Page 25 of The Duke
She blushed. What did she sound like to this English marquess? “I scream in twenty-five languages. Take your pick.”
“Oh, my sweet child,” Lord Royston said in a voice as dark as sin. “With me, you’ll only need one word, and it’s the same in every language.”
My name.
That was what the marquess was going to say, a prompt for her to ask for the marquess’s name, putting them on more intimate terms. This style of flirtation was Celine’s native tongue.
“Mediocre?” she suggested.
Lord Royston blinked, sat up straight, then threw her head back and laughed. Her shoulders and chest shook as the heady sound filled the room. When she settled back into her seat, she rubbed a palm over her face, looking up at Celine over it, evaluating her in a new way.
“Who are you?” Lord Royston said at last.
“The duke tells me to stay away from you.”
Lord Royston’s mouth twitched with new mirth. “Don’t tell me my cousin’s conceded she is human and got herself a mistress? No, that’s not it. She leaves pleasure to those of us who are prepared to inflict any damage seeking it out.”
There was something about the words that made Celine wonder if the duke had said them to Lord Royston once upon a time, and they’d never been forgotten.
“I’m her ward,” Celine admitted. Lord Royston and the duke were clearly not on such terms that she could risk the truth. “She knew my father of many years, and promised to see to my future when he died.”
“A ward!” Lord Royston exclaimed. “A ward. Christ. And good luck to you, if your future is in her hands. Mine was once upon a time as well, and as you see, she won’t even walk down the hall to speak with me now.”
Celine felt a sudden, powerful kinship to the duke’s cousin. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that whatever had gone wrong between the duke and Lord Royston, it was the duke’s fault. It was what the duke did. She wrecked people.
The humour seemed to drain out of Lord Royston all at once and she looked tired, her nights of revelry weighing on her. She looked up into the ceiling, and her expression turned bleak. “I don’t know how she lives here. Just spending a single day makesme feel like I’m dying. If I had to live here, day in day out, I would go stark raving mad. More proof she has no heart to speak of.”
“No heart whatsoever,” Celine agreed, with feeling. “Did something happen here?” Lord Royston made it sound like this house was a mausoleum, or the site of a massacre.
She thought about her elegant dressing room with its single imperfection: One of the wall tapestries was singed away at the corner. She thought about how new the house was in its ancient yard. She shivered with a dark premonition.
Lord Royston laughed, her eyes looking into some painful past Celine couldn’t see. “Inthishouse? No. This house is perfect. Unblemished. Not a trace of the horror it was built upon. No, it was the other house. The house that was here before. The house we grew up in together under the total power of that woman. It’s the ghost of that house that scares me to death.”
Celine shivered again and Lord Royston looked up, seeming to come back to herself.
“I’m scaring you,” she said quietly. “Forgive me. It was all a long time ago now, and you had nothing to do with it.”
She wanted to push for more. What exactly had happened here? She felt sure it had something to do with the letter she held over the duke, and the reason it was so very effective.
But Lord Royston was right: These long-ago events had nothing to do with her. As long as the letterwaseffective, it didn’t matter why.
“Why come here, then, if you hate it?”
“Money,” Lord Royston said baldly. “I’m desperate.”
She thought—of course she did—of the duke’s offer to buy her a husband. Was Lord Royston desperate enough? It was almost irresistible, the notion of getting Lord Royston the duke’s money by such means.
But she wouldn’t put her hard-won future in the hands of a drunk and a scoundrel. No. It wouldn’t do at all.
Perhaps she could still help, though. Lord Royston didn’t have access to blackmail like she did, but there must be better ways toget the duke’s attention. “I think,” she said delicately, “I can help. But you must do just as I say.”
“You can help?” Something complicated happened to Lord Royston’s face, but all too quickly it settled back into its cynical cast. “Forgive my scepticism, but you are foreign, young, and entirely beholden to my cousin. Though it was kind of you to offer—far kinder than I deserve.”
“The duke takes me to Bond Street tomorrow,” she persisted. “You will come also. It will be a…” What was the word? “A happy coincidence.”
“She will cross the street to avoid me.”
“In public? And with you minding your manners? No.”
