Chapter Seven
Surely three hours had been more than enough time to make the conniving wretch presentable?
Kate paced the entrance hall. It was a large, classical space, walls and pillars built from marble of a golden hue. The mahogany staircase, wrapping around two sides, was the only thing that saved its elegance from feeling cold.
Finally, a sound alerted her to activity at the top of the staircase, and she turned, knocking her cane impatiently on the stone floor. “In the future, madam, you will not keep me”—she clapped eyes on the woman at the top of the stairs—“waiting.”
Her mouth fell open. A woman came slowly down the stairs, dressed in the first stare of fashion.
She was a vision, a fashion plate come to life.
She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman Kate had ever seen.
The white dress was set off with hints of yellow in shoes and gloves, and wrapped across the shoulders and chest was a deep bronze cloak whose ends fluttered among the skirts.
Her hands rested inside a large white swansdown muff.
It had the illogicality of a dream: What was this angel doing in Kate’s house? Who had let her in? It was hard to mind when Kate’s whole body pulsed with amazed arousal. Every gorgeous detail was something new she wanted to touch or lick.
The woman’s black hair curled in tender wisps about her face, beneath the brim of a straw bonnet that looked, as she turned the corner of the stairs and came face-on, like the broad halo of a saint.
For jewellery, she wore pearl-drop earrings and a simple matching necklace.
Her face was delicate; Kate would feel the bone structure if she cupped it in her hands.
The woman’s eyebrows were neat, her eyes scrupulously devoid of paint.
In their nakedness, those eyes were infinitely bewitching.
Large and deep, darkly lashed. They swept up to Kate, then away, and the woman smiled.
It was this movement of the lips that at last oriented Kate in reality. She recognised the mouth. The impossible curve of the upper lip, larger than the lower, which no makeup could neutralise.
It was Celine. Celine. But even as she became certain of this fact, she also couldn’t believe it.
She couldn’t reconcile this exquisite, sophisticated beauty with the desperate woman who’d blackmailed her with such perseverance last night.
She couldn’t even reconcile her with the eager young woman in Paris.
“Will she do, Your Grace?”
Kate started and looked up. Everett had descended behind Celine, and she hadn’t had a clue. She had neither seen nor heard her valet. Everett was too professional to smirk, but her desire to do so was palpable.
Kate’s eyes returned to Celine of their own accord.
Had she on some level imagined she would be taking the woman in the cheap, torn dress to call on Lady Pecke, the ostrich feather waving sadly from her hair?
Celine walked sedately towards Kate. She had surely never looked so wholesome, so pristine.
Wrapped in virgin white linen, she embodied the moral virtues of fresh laundry and baby swaddling, while the suggestion of bedsheets wrapped about her legs added a singed whiff of the scandalous—no more than a perfumer would have added.
She stopped before Kate and raised her brows as though to say smugly, Well? Will I do?
She was beautiful.
She was beautiful.
The effect on Kate was considerable, but it was a purely animal response to what attracted her, and it could be controlled.
With some effort, she did so. It allowed her to remember what was at stake here and what Celine’s beauty meant.
She smiled. Good. If her own response to Celine was anything to go by, this was very good news indeed.
Should Lord Burnley need any reason to propose beyond the twenty thousand she was offering, here it was.
She touched her gloved thumb to Celine’s cheek, then to her mouth.
She said to Everett, “Apply more colour here, and here, until her natural colour returns.” This close, she could smell Celine—rosemary and peaches from her hair, the bitter tang of face powder and a confounding whiff of the church.
Warm and fathomless beneath those scents, like the sea bearing up small boats, was Celine’s native scent.
The hair rose along Kate’s arms when she felt a pang of recognition. She dropped her hand.
“Follow me.” She turned sharply and strode towards the door, her cane ringing against the stones. Despite the distance she put between them, she still caught snatches of the familiar scent, as though she were being followed by a ghost.
THE FRONT YARD of the duke’s house was a large, paved courtyard with a fountain in the middle, flanked on three sides by the house and screened off from the street by a row of pillars.
On each end was an imposing iron gate for entry and exit.
Both the stone and iron looked far older than the house itself, which reared up around Celine like the white cliffs of Dover, crisp and square.
An open landau waited in the yard, with four horses on. Eight footmen and the driver attended, all dressed in blue and silver. She had no doubt whatsoever their buttons were made of pure, polished silver. The duke’s crest was inlaid into the side of the carriage in the same metal.
They swayed into motion. Sunlight travelled over the duke’s hair and face, flashing heaven-bright and then dimming to the thousand subtle shades of bleached bone.
She wore a tall hat of brushed felt that picked up a brilliant shine.
She looked out into the street, and passing shadows threw her chin and cheeks into shifting silhouettes, brutal and breathtaking by turn.
Her lips were a uniform, hard line. Celine felt a squirming disbelief, remembering how she’d once aspired to please that grim mouth.
How, knowing nothing, she had thought she could make it smile.
The duke’s shoulders were pressed back into the deep-buttoned seat, her long, powerful legs sprawled before her, one booted toe tapping out an impatient rhythm.
Her gloved hand gripped the top of a cane: a silver wolf’s head with diamond eyes, its mouth folded back into a snarl.
Celine felt a deep, spreading pressure beneath her breastbone.
She had never hated anyone like she hated the duke. Her childhood idolisation had been so stupid.
The duke turned to her and their eyes met. Only then did Celine realise she’d been staring. The duke betrayed no surprise at meeting her gaze; she had been aware the whole time of the unwavering attention.
Flustered—angry with herself—Celine looked away.
The narrow shops that stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the street, jostling for space, opened suddenly into a broad, muddy junction presided over by an imposing statue of a man on a horse. They passed effortlessly through the traffic and rubbish, pedestrians moving quickly out of their path.
“Do you have a plan to see me married?” she asked, plucking agitatedly at the downy feathers of her muff. She couldn’t believe she’d been staring—as though she didn’t know better. “I don’t want to waste any time.”
“Don’t concern yourself that I have forgotten your demands, or that I balk at them now. You are entirely aware I may not.”
Startled, Celine glanced over her shoulder at the two tall, handsome footmen who rode behind. Each looked impassively ahead as though ignorant of all conversation. Perhaps the footmen couldn’t entirely make out what was being said, but Celine wouldn’t have bet her secrets on it.
The duke said, “They don’t understand French,” then leaned forward.
“But you needn’t worry about the servants talking.
I may as well tell you—you’ll hear the rumours soon enough—there was a maid some ten years ago who sold information about me to the gossip rags, and I had her killed.
A slight overreaction, you might think, but it keeps them loyal. ”
Celine reared sharply back.
Killed!
It somehow shocked her when it shouldn’t have. The duke had let Bastien die rather than save him. The duke had left her to die. But to have a servant, no matter how badly she had misbehaved, killed …
The enormity of what she was doing rushed in on her. This was the monster she had caged. How was she going to come out of it alive?
The duke settled back into her seat, looking as though Celine amused her.
“Would that I had an offer tomorrow,” Celine said, “and could be done with you. We were speaking of a plan?”
“I have taken a survey of the field and selected the most promising of the available bachelors to be your husband. He’s from a good family, his reputation unimpeachable, and his future prospects considerable.”
They had entered a pastoral green, palaces and cathedrals brushed neatly to its edges, and drove down a treed avenue, the horses picking up pace.
She frowned. “A husband? Who?”
“Henry Farnsworth-Baxter, the Viscount Burnley, heir to the Pecke earldom.”
It was a solid, gleaming shield of a name, so grand a flush suffused her skin. She couldn’t deny her interest, or the acquisitive heat of her response. Could she win herself such a prize?
The carriage rumbled up out of the park, onto a domestic street dotted with trees.
“We are on our way to pay a call on his mother, Lady Pecke. You see, Miss Genet, I don’t wish to wait months for some callow swain to bring himself up to scratch. If we spend the next two weeks wisely, making Lord Burnley our goal, you will have your engagement.”
“Yes,” she said quickly, wetting her parched lips. “Yes, that’s what I want.”
Nervously, she touched her hair, her necklace. She was minutes away from meeting the woman who might very soon become her mother-in-law. But every detail was perfect; the duke’s valet had seen to that.
A pricking sensation made her look up, but the duke’s eyes were fixed somewhere over her shoulder, cold and distant.
She had, again, the claustrophobic sense of being bound to a caged creature that would savage her the moment it won free. She gripped the door and looked away. They were passing the entrance to another large park, and she glimpsed a pretty, old cottage by the river, a flash of white fence.
She was distracted suddenly by the idea that she would become familiar with this park.
She would drive in it when she and her spouse were in London; this foreign city was to be her home.
She felt the sudden wrench of being uprooted from everything she knew.
But then, she hadn’t been able to thrive in her native soil.
The stone wall surged up beside them again and the park was gone. She turned to the duke, determined to dwell only on what made her happy.
“What can you tell me of Lord Burnley?” she said. “What is his character? His ambitions, and proclivities?”
“I don’t know. He spent the past four years buried in books at university and has just this season emerged. He’s your age, more or less.”
Impatient, she said, “You must do better, that is unsatisfactory in the extreme!”
The duke stared at her, a banked emotion flaring before her face became once more expressionless. Cold. “He resides with his parents, so perhaps you may take your own measure of him this very hour.”
Before she had time to adjust to the speed with which her future, her brand-new life, was now rushing at her, the duke said, “We have arrived.”