Chapter Thirty-Six #2
Clever child. Celine thought she understood why Anne Howard had been amused, and more, she thought the duke had misunderstood the nature of her aunt’s amusement.
Anne would have been delighted, she thought, by what Kate was capable of at twelve, and by the promise of what she would one day be capable of as an adult, as a member of the powerful Howard family whom Anne was determined to see returned to glory.
The duke went on. “She was arrested on charges of treason and ordered to remain in Howard House under guard until her trial in Lords. What I couldn’t figure out was why she didn’t simply refute the accusation.
It took me a long time to understand the truth, though it was obvious.
I had put her in a more delicate position than I realised. She did it to protect me.”
The duke clenched her jaw tightly, the muscles moving. Her eyes had always been unsettling, but they looked almost alien now. Anne Howard’s love haunted her.
“Aunt Anne would have found a way out of the predicament,” the duke said, “given time. Sure in that knowledge I returned to school, and discovered Royce had stowed away in my luggage. I thought it an enormous nuisance, something that needed all my attention, while back in London, a mob of royalists stormed Howard House, determined to see justice done for crimes I invented. They overwhelmed the guard. They breached the walls. They burned the house to the ground, and my family in their beds. I cannot bear,” she said, “to think of Eleanor burning alive. Of all the ways one might die, it has always seemed to me the most terrifying. I think she would have been very much a child, in her last moments.”
The duke was visibly shivering now through her whole body. Had she ever said these words aloud? Celine didn’t think so.
“I’m so sorry. You must have been devastated.”
The duke gave an incredulous laugh. “Devastated? I had broken the world! I, at twelve years old, with these two hands.” She lifted her hands out of Celine’s. Upon her right forefinger was the heavy, gleaming signet ring of the Duke of Howard. “And in return I was given everything I’d ever wanted.”
“In the way most calculated to make it a punishment. How cruel.”
The duke closed her eyes. And then, remarkably, her face relaxed a bit, and she let out a soft laugh and dropped her hands. “Don’t feel too sorry for me. I coveted the title, and now I am one of the most powerful people on earth.”
And yet Celine couldn’t help thinking of Paris, of that single, hair-raising night they’d spent together.
She had never had a lover like the duke, who had no limits.
The duke had been looking for the letter then, which must have made these events feel painfully close.
She thought of how the duke’s years wearing the title had begun with the loss of her mines to Lord Wroth, a battle she was still fighting to this day.
What monster might the duke have grown into under her aunt’s guidance, unchecked by tragedy, unchecked by consequences, unchecked by loss?
Instead, without a single trustworthy adult or steadying influence to rely on, she had become someone who felt the burden of her responsibilities, and was driven by the need to make amends, and feared and mistrusted her own immense power.
And she had protected herself by remaining totally, icily alone.
“Humble, too,” Celine said, making the duke laugh again and open her eyes.
The duke blinked rapidly, tears sliding down the sides of her face.
This wreckage, this pain … This was the vein she had tapped when she brought the letter to London.
This was what she held over the duke. This cruel power.
A shiver ran over her as she understood for the first time just how significant her mistreatment of the duke had been.
The duke had been under no obligation to take her away from Paris, but she had meted out a terrible punishment anyway.
Of course the duke would never marry her—it was too great an obstacle for anyone to overcome.
As though the duke’s thoughts had turned in a similar direction, she said quietly, “My sensations when you showed me the letter … Celine, it felt right to have the knife at my neck, at last. And now it feels right to have it in your keeping.”
The words turned everything Celine had been feeling a moment before on its head, a dizzying rearrangement.
Understanding flared to life within her.
With hatred in her heart, she had stolen the duke’s secrets, and now the duke was gifting them to her, putting them in her keeping.
She was asking Celine to hold some of that old pain for her.
The duke didn’t hate her. The duke had already forgiven her.
The letter wasn’t the obstacle—at least, not in the way she had thought.
It was what was in the letter. What the duke thought that letter proved.
The duke wouldn’t consider marrying Celine because the duke thought she was dangerous to the people she loved.
The obstacle existed because the duke loved her.
More difficult to overcome, in its own way.
“Kate,” she said helplessly, “you’re such a fucking mess.”
“You have been calling me by my name,” the duke said. “Say it again.”
She had been using the duke’s name without quite realising. Suddenly, it was very difficult.
“Kate,” she said.
The duke’s eyes darkened. Her voice went rough. “Again.”
“Kate.”
The duke’s eyelids dropped, and her lips parted—an unmistakeably sexual response. Her hand came around Celine’s waist, warm and encompassing. The duke pulled her closer, and hissed in a breath, her hand suddenly fisting in Celine’s dressing gown.
Christ. “Kate.” Celine couldn’t get enough air. “Kate, I want—”
A crisp knock came on the door, and without Celine quite knowing how it happened, the duke was out of bed and standing. Celine lurched up, in shock at the sudden loss.
The duke’s large body was full of tension, her shoulders pulled forward and head down.
The hand Celine could see clenched into a fist, then released, once, twice.
The third time, a deep breath went through the duke’s body and the tension seemed to leave it.
She stood straight and tall, saying nothing.
When she turned to Celine, her expression had cooled into its habitual, aristocratic lines.
The walls had gone up. The confidences were over.
The Duke of Howard said, “Forgive me, I am wanted downstairs.”
Celine was racked with lust. She wanted to kiss the duke. She wanted to still be on the other side of those walls.
But she would make herself a home inside them. She would be the duke’s wife. Now that she understood the obstacle, what came next was simply a matter of planning.
“Please,” she said, “don’t let me keep you.”