Page 8 of A Gamble on the Duke (The Gambling Dukes #4)

FIVE

Catherine

Well, it was official: I’ve become a pet.

Perhaps that’s a little over the top—but honestly, when the Duke of Kineallen suggested this whole ‘arrangement’, this was not what I had in mind.

“I'm bored,” I muttered under my breath into the vapid and unmoving room. “Bored. Bored bored bored.”

It was astonishing. Never again was I going to wistfully dream of a time when I just got to lie around and do nothing. Do you know what you do while you lie around and do nothing?

Nothing.

My brain was itchy. I’d been sitting in this drawing room all morning and there was nothing to do here but read dull books on economics from the library, watch the fire burn, or listen to the longcase clock tick.

Honestly: no pianoforte, no cards, no books on anything of interest at all. There wasn’t even any housework to do that could keep my mind or even my hands busy .

I’d never been that person who wanted chores. Never before.

But I was a potter, an artist, I spent my days moving about and creating and thinking and using my hands.

Now I was just supposed to sit here and do…nothing?

“Did you say something?” said the Duke of Kineallen vaguely.

I glared over at him. Not that it made much of a difference. His attention was entirely taken up with the ledger in his hands, his pencil moving about every now and again as he…well, I wasn’t really sure what he was doing.

Something businesslike.

There was always a frown on his face, that was all I knew, and he had barely moved for an hour. How did anyone just sit there doing something that dull, for an hour?

I rose from my chair and moved about the room like a caged animal. “Nothing.”

Nothing was about right. Goodness, I’d never felt so restless.

I flexed my fingers as I reached the floor to ceiling windows and looked out over London.

It was a gorgeous view. If I had my pastels and a notebook with me, I could start to sketch it out.

Trail with my fingers the differing colors, shifting as the light changed.

Blues and blacks on buildings, the greens dotted about, flashes of red as the sun sparked on something new.

And yet here I was, unable to do anything but…look at it.

Something scratched at the back of my mind, an itch I could never reach.

I let out a long and heavy breath.

“What are you doing?”

“Moping,” I said with a wry grin. There was no reply, and when I glanced over my shoulder at my host, the Duke of Kineallen had a confused frown on his face.

His handsome face. His kissable face?—

No. No, I had told myself very sternly when I had arrived back here two nights ago: no more kissing. No more reckless abandon. No more feeling the warmth of his lips on mine, the flurry of excitement, the need to be close to him…

I swallowed. Come on, Catherine, you’re better than this.

“Moping?”

“I just meant…I'm restless. I want to be making pottery,” I confessed, turning to lean against the glass and sighing.

It sounded ridiculous to me, so it was no wonder that the Duke of Kineallen’s confused face looked even more confused. “Pottery? But that’s your employment.”

“It’s so much more than employment, it’s…it’s a way of life,” I said, stepping across the elegantly proportioned room and dropping most inelegantly onto the sofa. “It’s a way of being, it’s the way I think, the way I see the world. I…”

My voice trailed off. The Duke of Kineallen’s gaze had dropped back to the ledger and his frown of confusion was now applied to whatever it was he was reading on there.

I sighed, twisting my fingers together as though that would make them feel less awkward, less stuck.

I really hadn’t thought this through. A whole heap of money to pretend to be this duke’s lady friend? It sounded like a dream come true. Who knew that the dream could be so…dull?

Glancing about me, I spotted what else had been irritating the back of my mind ever since I had arrived here.

No art. No art in this place at all.

Who didn’t have art? Even a cheap print in a frame, or something a niece or nephew had made, something! Anything!

The bland white and cream, the vast emptiness of the townhouse, felt oppressive.

I moved into a cross legged position on the sofa and let out a heavy sigh.

The Duke of Kineallen dropped the ledger into his lap. “Are you going to pout all day?”

“It’s pouring with rain, it’s not like I can go anywhere else,” I pointed out, perhaps a little more heatedly than I should have done.

Something flashed in his eyes. “Then do something.”

“There’s nothing to do in this place!” I said, gesturing around me. “What would you have me do?”

Clearly he hadn’t expected that question. The Duke of Kineallen’s gaze flickered about the place and I saw with perhaps too much satisfaction that his mind immediately drew a blank.

“Fine. What can I get you?”

I blinked. “I…I beg your pardon?”

The Duke of Kineallen pulled an exasperated hand through his hair and managed to make it look even more attractive. “I need to mark up these ledgers by three o’clock, and you’re bothering me.”

“I'm bothering?—”

“So, what will it be?” He spoke over me, an eyebrow raised as though in challenge. “I can get you almost anything, that’s the joy of being a duke. So what do you want?”

What on earth was he talking about? “I want to make pottery?—”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about doing something like that,” the Duke of Kineallen said, waving a hand as though the reason for my existence was a mere hobby.

“I can get you a diamond earrings set to look at, or a bunch of flowers—all women like flower arranging, right? Or a dog, or a pianoforte, or?—”

I let him talk on for a few more minutes as he listed things that cost hundreds, if not thousands of pounds, and had absolutely no connection to me or my interests whatsoever.

A diamond earrings set? Seriously?

Eventually the Duke of Kineallen seemed to run out of steam. That, or he had noticed my complete apathy. “What, you don’t like my ideas? They’re all very expensive, they’re not the sort of things you would be able to afford normally.”

I couldn’t help it. I knew it was rude, but my nose scrunched up and I frowned at the hot mess of devilishly attractive duke.

“Is that all you can think about? The value of things?”

Kineallen

“Is that all you can think about? The value of things?”

My first instinct was to deny it. Obviously. I mean, I wasn’t a heartless monster. Everything I had, I’d worked for, earned. My friends and I, we’d built up the Gambling Dukes from the ground up. With almost nothing.

The duchy of Kineallen had been near bankruptcy when I had inherited it. It had been all I could do to save the estate intact, and that had not been an easy challenge to overcome.

Everything I spent, I had earned—not something most of the dukes of England could say.

I opened my mouth and I saw the flush of embarrassment on Miss Shenton’s face.

My mouth closed.

Well, it wasn’t like she didn’t regret it already, I could see that. She was a hard person to read most of the time, this woman I had invited into my life all for the sake of a false connection. But not this time.

Miss Shenton’s smile was wry. “Sorry. That was a bit harsh.”

“Just a bit,” I said softly.

The ledger remained in my lap, and the deadline to review it had not disappeared either—but somehow, I didn’t want to go back to it.

Somehow this was more important.

“The value of things is important,” I said softly. “Without valuing things, the really precious stuff…the really precious people?—”

Perhaps I hadn’t spoken loudly enough, because Miss Shenton cut across me. “But you can’t put a value on people.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You can’t?”

Her cheeks flushed a dark pink this time, and I reveled in the power I had over her to make her feel this disconcerted.

“—and I’ll pay you several hundred pounds for the work.”

“You want to spend several hundred pounds on having me on your arm?”

Well, it wasn’t exactly a price that I had put on her; more like her time. But still, she clearly couldn’t ignore it.

“You know what I mean,” she said quietly. “Diamond earrings, pianoforte, you really think trotting out those sorts of things would impress me?”

Well, yes.

I didn’t say the words aloud, but I thought them rather loudly. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that, after all? A diamond earrings set wasn’t just nothing, it wasn’t the sort of thing any gentleman could just offer a woman.

It had worked before.

“The value of a thing isn’t just what you pay for it,” Miss Shenton was saying.

I snorted, trying and failing not to allow the noise to echo around the room. Now I thought about it, the place was a little empty. “That’s what people who don’t have money say.”

“Excuse you!”

“It’s true though, isn’t it?” I said with a shrug. “If you don’t have money, it’s easy to sit up there on a high horse and dictate that?—”

“I am not sitting on a high horse!” Miss Shenton said sharply.

I allowed my smile to broaden. “No, you’re sitting there on a resplendent sofa, handcrafted from handwoven material.

The design is one unique to this duchy, made by craftspeople who have been trained in the skills for decades before they are permitted to even touch an item that would go to a customer. ”

Miss Shenton’s lips parted as she glanced down at the sofa she was sitting on.

“The only other places in the world that you would find a sofa like that are Buckingham Palace, the private quarters,” I told her softly, “and the Vatican Embassy.”

Her gaze shot up. “You’re making that up.”

I shook my head, confident in my exact knowledge. “I enquired when I made my order.”

“And that makes you feel more impressive, does it?” she shot back. “That only you, the royals, and the Pope have the same sofa? ”

Well, yes. Wouldn’t it make anyone feel impressive?

Somehow I knew that giving that reply was only going to antagonize her, or worse, give Miss Shenton more ammunition to make me feel small.

And she didn’t need a helping hand with that.