Page 41 of Corrupting his Duchess (A Duke’s Undoing #1)

“ I don’t mean to make you nervous, Ariadne,” Catherine Lightholder told her younger sister, who, truth be told, looked extremely nervous. “I just really feel you ought to maintain your distance from the Duke of Wilds.”

“I’d be happy to keep my distance from him,” Ariadne said, nodding emphatically. “How about I keep my distance all the way from London? There’s still time to turn back.”

Well. Evidently, Catherine had made her sister a little too nervous.

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “I’m sure we’ll have a marvelous time.”

Ariadne’s look suggested that she knew that Catherine was lying.

“Very well,” Catherine allowed. “We’ll have an adequate time. But you will meet many eligible gentlemen. And house parties give you time to really get to know them. I think you’ll find it more to your liking than the endless spin of the Season.”

Ariadne made a face that was possibly supposed to be a smile.

Catherine’s younger sister had not found her first Season to be particularly delightful, not that Catherine particularly blamed her.

Catherine’s own unsuccessful Seasons had been exhausting, one ball blending into another soiree and a subsequent musicale until she was humming bad violin music in her sleep.

Being the de facto mother for her two younger siblings had been practically restful by comparison.

Ariadne didn’t have the same distraction.

But perhaps, Catherine thought hopefully, this party would prove fruitful for her sister.

Even if it didn’t result in an engagement, perhaps Ariadne would make a connection that would lead somewhere.

There were months and months before the next Season would start.

That was plenty of time for Ariadne to make a match without having to go through the chaos of another year’s entertainments.

The mere mention of the Season made Ariadne’s expression move more overtly into a grimace.

“Can’t I just give up and become a spinster?” Ari asked, a note of genuine pleading in her voice.

Catherine shook her head. “I’m afraid not, darling. If you want to be a spinster, you’ll have to earn it. Three or four Seasons at least.”

That was how I earned my spinster title, Catherine didn’t say.

It would have smacked of bitterness if she did, and she truly wasn’t bitter about her lot in life.

She loved Ariadne and Jason, the two siblings she’d helped raise after her father’s death in a fire and her mother’s subsequent inability to see beyond her grief to do much of… anything.

Catherine and Xander, her eldest brother, had taken control of the family. And for a long time, that had worked well.

But now Xander was married and a father. Jason, too, had married—young enough that it had surprised them all. They were both charmingly, nauseatingly happy in their marriages—to a pair of sisters, no less.

And now Ariadne was on the marriage market.

Catherine wanted her sister to make a good match.

Of course she did. All Ariadne’s jokes about being a spinster aside, Catherine suspected that Ariadne was the kind of person who would thrive in a marriage to a man who truly saw her.

She’d do well being settled. And she would be a marvelous, wonderful mother.

Catherine tried not to think about how much her own life would change after she was no longer responsible for her sister’s care.

Ariadne was looking at her suspiciously. “How many Seasons did you have, Kitty?”

Catherine raised an eyebrow. Ariadne knew this answer; she was just being a little pest. Perhaps her sister wasn’t all the way grown, after all.

“Three,” Catherine replied sweetly.

“Then it sounds like you have one more before you can quit,” Ariadne said, just as sweetly.

Catherine rolled her eyes. She was six and twenty and more and more firmly on the shelf every day. Anyone who still wanted her would be after a connection to the Lightholder name and nothing else.

Catherine was not interested in someone who wanted to marry her to get access to her brother, his name, and his money.

And she wasn’t about to let Ariadne fall prey to any fortune hunters either.

Which brought her back to planning. Drat, little sisters—Ari had almost managed to distract her.

“As I was saying,” she went on—and not a moment too soon, as she could see the Wilds estate rising in the distance.

“The Duke of Wilds himself is a rake, but he is known for throwing marvelous parties, which means that there will be lots of people here. Young ladies often overlook the other women at house parties, but don’t forget—those ladies are mothers and sisters and aunts and?—”

“I’m familiar with the types of family relationships, thank you,” Ari quipped.

Catherine gave her one of her best older sister looks. “Why is it that you aren’t shy with me, hm?”

“You’re just lucky, I suppose.”

“Hm. Yes. Lucky . Anyway, don’t overlook the women, is all I’m saying. This house party will be—don’t give me that look; I’m not going to say it’s going to be fun again—it will be a valuable experience. Productive.”

“The Catherine Lightholder guarantee,” Ariadne joked.

Catherine stuck out her tongue. She might have teased Ariadne for behaving differently among family than she did among the greater environs of the ton , but Catherine was no different, not really.

She had always been adept at showing a proper, demure face to the world.

She knew the rules of the ton . They were…

well, not easy to follow. There were too many rules for it to be called easy.

But they were straightforward, and Catherine had the means to help her stay on the straight path that Society laid out.

She could only ever be her true self with her family. And maybe that was why, for all that much of her was eager to see Ariadne happily settled, a small part of her worried about what would happen after all her siblings were married and busy with their own lives, their own families.

That was a worry for later, however. For now, they had arrived.

So she pulled on the Catherine Lightholder mask and prepared to do what she did best: make sure that everything went perfectly for her family.

The first thing that had gone well, she noted with satisfaction, was their timing.

The front drive was already littered with guests and carriages still in the process of being unpacked—but not too many of them.

A perfect arrival was right in the middle.

Too early, and one risked the awkward social moment of trying to converse one-on-one with someone you’d only planned to meet with in a group.

Too late, and you were, well, the latecomer. Neither position was enviable.

As it was, however, the carriage pulled to a stop among a small crowd of interested (albeit a bit tired-looking) members of the ton . Several pairs of eyes flashed appreciatively at the Lightholder crest emblazoned on the side of their conveyance.

Catherine checked the tie of her bonnet while Ariadne took a deep, steadying breath.

“Good afternoon, Lady Catherine, Lady Ariadne!”

The Duke of Wilds appeared at their door in a flash, every inch the consummate host. Catherine ensured that she was the one to take his proffered hand down, leaving Ariadne to be aided by a waiting footman.

Keeping their flirtatious host away from her nineteen-year-old sister wasn’t just a task for Ariadne to mind; Catherine, too, played a role.

“Your Grace,” Catherine said politely. “Good afternoon to you, too. And might I say—your estate is even lovelier than I’d heard it was.”

There. A quick daub of flattery would do in a moment like this.

Indeed, David Nightingale, the Duke of Wilds, smiled broadly—though there was a flash in his gaze that suggested that he might know what Catherine was up to.

She didn’t much care. He was too handsome by half, this wild and charming duke.

Worse, he knew it. She could see it in the way he let his hair grow slightly too long to be fashionable, in the way that he quirked those full lips into a smile.

It would take more than a pretty face to turn Catherine’s head, however—or, more to the point, to distract her from her task safeguarding Ariadne.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said, offering his arm. “Shall I introduce you to our fellow revelers? The staff shall attend your and your sister’s luggage.”

“Splendid,” Catherine agreed, more than half her attention on her sister behind her.

Introduction was something of a heavy-handed word for what occurred next.

Catherine knew nearly all the people present already, after all.

Some of them she’d known since she was a slip of a girl.

One of the older chaperones, Lady Mary Margaret Catherton, she recalled as being present at her grandfather Cornelius’ funeral—one of the few memories she had of the event, given how young she’d been at the time.

Even so, she went through the motions.

“And this here is the Earl of Crompton,” the Duke of Wilds said, turning them toward a stern-faced man who was one of the few whom Catherine didn’t know by appearance.

Come to think of it, she knew little of Crompton by reputation, either—a rarity in the ton , which thrived on gossip.

If she thought back, she vaguely thought he’d taken his seat recently, though it had been an unremarkable ascension to the title.

Sometimes one’s father lived long, after all.

Catherine herself hadn’t been so lucky, but that didn’t mean that others weren’t.

Although from first glance, Crompton had the look of a man who wouldn’t consider his father’s longevity lucky .

His looks themselves were unremarkable—brown hair that flirted with blond, brown eyes, a roundness to his cheeks that suggested boyhood, though he was clearly well into his thirties—but he had a sharp, hungry sort of expression in his gaze.

Catherine wasn’t impressed.

Still, it never hurt to be polite.

“A pleasure, my lord,” she said, bobbing a curtsey.