Married to the Wrong Duke (Scandal in Silk #1)

Chapter 1

Caerleon Manor, Berkshire

“You’re doing it wrong!”

Little Catherine lifted her hands from the keys and turned on the bench to look at Aaron.

Her friend was perched on the arm of the settee with one leg dangling, a stolen apple in his fist, and juice already on his chin, watching her with the particular expression he wore when he was enjoying someone else’s difficulty.

“I am not!” she pouted.

“You are. The third part. You keep rushing it.”

“I don’t rush it, Your Grace.”

“You do.” He took another bite of the apple, entirely unconcerned. “You rush it because you’re trying to get to the bit you like best, and you skip over the slow part, and my Mama would say the slow part was the best part.”

Well, it is my Mama’s piece—she opened her mouth to say, then closed it. He was, infuriatingly, correct.

She turned back to the piano and found the place again, the beginning of the melody her mother had taught her.

Not a real piece, not one with a name in any book.

Something smaller than that. Something that lived only between the two of them, her mother’s humming and her small hands on the keys, and Catherine had carried it here to Caerleon the way a bird carries a thread back to its nest.

She played it again. Slowly this time. The slow part especially.

Aaron was quiet while she played. This was one of the things she liked best about him, though she would not have said so. He listened the way other boys her age did not bother to listen. He actually heard it.

When she finished, the last note still hanging in the cool air of the parlor, he pushed off the settee and crossed the room toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

“To get something. Stay here. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“What something?”

But he was already gone, his footsteps quick and uneven down the corridor, the way they always sounded when he was excited. Catherine rolled her eyes in a way she had learned from her nursemaid and turned back to the keys.

She played the melody again. And again. Each time a little better. Each time the slow part a little slower, held out like an offering.

She was halfway through it for the third time when she felt it.

Not heard. Felt. A movement of air near the parlor door, as though someone had passed very close to it. Catherine lifted her hands and listened. The house creaked and settled. October wind pressed against the tall windows.

Nothing.

She slid off the bench and padded, barefoot and stockinged, to the doorway.

The corridor was empty. But at the far end, where it turned toward the servants’ stair, something moved. Quick. Low. Gone before she could be sure she had seen it at all.

Catherine followed.

The servants’ stair was narrow and poorly lit, and it smelled of beeswax and dust. At the bottom, a door stood ajar.

Beyond it, stone steps led down into a cool darkness that breathed out the smell of old wood and damp earth.

A cellar. Catherine had never been told she could not go down there. She had simply never thought to.

She thought to now.

The steps were crooked beneath her bare feet. She went carefully, one hand trailing along the wall, and at the bottom, the darkness was not quite as dark as it had seemed from above. A narrow window, high up, let in a wedge of grey October light. Enough to see by.

Enough to see him.

A boy stood at the far end of the cellar, half turned toward her.

Catherine’s breath caught.

“Aaron? Is that you? What are you doing down here?”

For a moment, a full and genuine moment, she thought it was Aaron. The same dark hair. The same slight build. The same face, almost. Almost.

But not quite.

The clothes were wrong, for one thing. Rougher than anything Aaron wore.

A shirt that had not been pressed, tucked unevenly into breeches that sat too high at the ankle.

And there was something in the way he held himself that was different.

Aaron stood in a room the way he owned it, easy and careless and warm.

This boy stood like he was waiting to be told to leave.

He looked at her.

Catherine looked back.

For a breath, neither of them moved. Then the boy turned and slipped sideways into the deeper dark of the cellar, quick and silent, and was gone as though he had never been there at all.

Catherine took a step forward. Her mouth opened.

“Miss Ainsley!”

She spun. Mrs. Pallard stood at the top of the cellar stairs, a basket of linen balanced against one hip, her face arranged in an expression of calm pleasantness that Catherine, even at eight, could tell was not entirely real.

“There you are, love. Come up out of there. His Grace would not take kindly to someone snooping about the house—even the daughter of his late Duchess’ friend.”

The very mention of the old and brooding Duke of Winchester had her spine tingling. Catherine looked back into the dark. It was empty. It had the feeling of a room that had been empty for a very long time.

She climbed the stairs and took the hand Mrs. Pallard offered.

Aaron was back in the parlor when she returned, sitting on the piano bench with his legs swinging and a second apple in his hand, as though he had never left at all.

“I found it,” he said.

“Found what?”

He grinned. That crooked, quick grin. “The echo. In the parlor. Listen.” He leaned forward and struck a single note on the piano, high and bright, and Catherine listened, and heard nothing but the note fading into the quiet of the room.

She did not think about the boy in the cellar again that afternoon.