Page 12 of The Duke
Celine’s vision blacked out for a moment.Eighty thousand— She could buy her own house with— No, arow of houses.
But a row of houses wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted whatshe’d always wanted and had been stupid enough to think a tender lover might one day give her: a good marriage that would mean an end to her deprivations. An accepted position in society, so that she would never be looked down on again. Her own home. People she would matter to, who would mourn her when she died.
She couldn’t buy any of that, not even with eighty thousand pounds.
And yet there sat the duke, expensive, exquisite, shaped in every way by the knowledge she was welcome in any room she entered, barring Celine entry. Her hatred writhed and contracted in her stomach. It was how she knew she was alive.
(The only whore in Christendom who— Laughable. She’d heard worse.)
“No. You’ll give me what I asked for.” Her voice sounded odd, almost like it was made up of three voices speaking together. She tried to clutch the seat harder but could no longer judge the tension in her fingers.
“At least drink some tea, Miss Genet,” the duke bit out. “You must put something in your stomach, or you’ll be ill.”
She wanted to refuse. It was almost more than she could endure to follow this woman’s orders. But she didn’t want to die. If that was what she wanted, she would’ve lain beside Mathilde on the floorboards and just… let go. Watched the light twinkle in through the gaps in the roof until she was ready to close her eyes.
She was going to live. She was going to be warm, and comfortable, and loved.
She let go of the chair and, for a moment, fought the dizzying sensation she was falling up. She managed a sip. “I want—” she said, and stopped. The walls, the table, the cup in her hand all felt very strange, like she was in a dream. No,no! She couldn’t faint now.
“With the money I’m offering, you could make a very good match even without my aid,” the duke said. “Throw a lavish party or two and your countrymen-in-exile will welcome you with open arms into their society.”
The duke had understood nothing about what she wanted.
The duke, before her, seemed the most unreal of all.
“Miss Genet,” the duke said more sharply, and when still no response came, the duke straightened out of her slouch and spoke a flurry of angry English words. The duke came to stand before her so that she could make out every detail of the lowest button of the duke’s waistcoat—ivory, with a tiny fleet of ships carved into it. It was beautiful.
“Pay attention!” the duke said in French. “You’re going to come out of this very badly if you don’t pay attention. Must I pinch you awake?”
She looked up at that. All the way to the duke’s severe face, her drowned-god eyes.
Faithless. Liar.
The duke’s fingertips landed on her collarbone and traced lightly down to meet the low hemline of her bodice. And then, without warning, a deep, painful twist of flesh.
She gasped. Not as though she had been pinched, but as though she had been brought back from the dead. Brought back into a body half starving.
Celine’s heart (she imagined her heart like a ripe fruit that had shrivelled and dried and admitted almost no life) opened up and began pumping blood around her body in earnest. To her hands, her cheeks, her throat. She could feel her heartbeat in her eyelids.
She grabbed the duke’s hand in her own, intending to push it off. Skin. Heat. She looked down at the long fingers with their elegant knuckles and squared-off nails. Such unspeakable things these fingers had done to her. Grabbing turned to holding.
The duke jerked her hand away and stepped quickly back.
Celine stared down at her empty hand, her heart pounding. Her fingers flexed around nothing. An aching nothing.
Forget that. Don’t think of it. If she could marshal herself for one more bout, she might sleep in a bed tonight. It seemed deeply unrealistic, but she told herself it was true.Think only of that.
The duke had seated herself again. Her right hand hung overthe chair arm, forefinger and thumb held subtly apart from the rest of her fingers, as though she’d dipped them in gunpowder.
“You think you can outmanoeuvre me,” Celine said, dragging her voice up from somewhere, “because you are a duke. You cannot. You know you cannot.”
Three years ago, the duke had washed her hands of Celine—left her behind and never thought of her again. And the worst of it was that Celine had done nothing but think of the duke, who could have saved her and had chosen not to. On those long, grim nights when she had no light to read by—and was sometimes being had, in the dark, Louise grumbling at her to keep it down—her hatred had been the only living thing she could hold on to.
She had done everything in her power to win the duke over, including cutting her own heart open on the blade of honest feeling. It hadn’t been enough—and that, she could never forgive.
She looked into the duke’s painful-bright eyes and said with every fibre of her being, “You.Cannot.”
The duke’s face became utterly devoid of everything soft—the true face at last. “You will live to regret this, Celine,” the duke said. Her name shivered over her skin, cold and dark and potent. “You will live to regret this very much indeed.”
