Page 48 of Corrupting his Duchess (A Duke’s Undoing #1)

“ Y ou can do it, Kitty. I believe in you.”

Despite her encouraging words, Ariadne’s expression did not suggest that she had as much faith in her sister as she professed.

Catherine didn’t blame her little sister. She didn’t have very much faith in herself, either.

She briefly pressed her gloved fingers to her temples. “Here is what we are going to do,” she said urgently. The other guests were milling around, their lighthearted chatter a sharp contrast to the sisters’ hushed conference. “If things get…strange, I want you to strike me.”

Ariadne blinked. “I’m not going to strike you.”

“No, not with your hand,” Catherine said. “With the mallet.”

Now Ariadne looked more appalled than nonplussed. “I’m not going to strike you with a mallet , Catherine!”

“Just in the ankle or something,” Catherine said defensively. “Not in any place that would do me grievous injury.”

This did not seem to reassure her sister.

“No. I very much am not going to do that. Just…be normal.”

“I want to,” Catherine said, her tone a touch desperate. “I really, truly want to.”

Wanting, however, was unlikely to be enough.

There were not so very many aspects of house parties that Catherine found to be difficult or distressing.

Yes, it could be rather unrelenting to spend a full week or more with the same people, and yes, guests did sometimes act in ways they perhaps oughtn’t, as if the rules of Society didn’t apply merely because they were miles away from London.

But she could handle all that. After all, the Season was more or less the same people over and over, and bad behavior could happen in London, too.

But it was this that she dreaded.

The games .

It had been a perfectly lovely morning. She’d managed to get some sleep the night prior, so she wasn’t feeling as though she was about to keel over at any moment.

The Duke of Seaton had cordially taken to ignoring her, which helped her convince herself that she, in turn, was successfully ignoring him.

The sun was even shining for a second day in a row.

It was this last bit that turned out to be Catherine’s downfall.

They were just finishing up breakfast, which included some particularly delicious lingonberry jam, when the Duke of Wilds stood and, smiling, addressed his assembled guests.

“Since the weather is so fine this morning,” he said, gesturing grandly at where the sunshine was pouring into through the windows of the morning room, “I thought we might go down to the lake and enjoy a game of pall mall.”

The jam had turned to ash in Catherine’s mouth as, all around her, everyone else murmured approvingly of this plan. Ariadne had looked at her with wide eyes and alarm.

This was a problem.

But not because Catherine hated Pall Mall. Oh no.

Catherine loved Pall Mall .

But unfortunately, Catherine loved pall mall in a way that made her a little bit…

Insane.

Catherine tried not to play games with her siblings too frequently, mostly because she wanted her siblings to continue to love her.

But every winter arrived, long, dreary, and wet, and somewhere along the dark months, they would all decide that maybe this time it would be a good idea to engage in some sort of friendly competition, just to while away the hours.

It was never a good idea.

Catherine usually had a relatively cool head, but when the spirit of competition seized her—as it always did, for some inexplicable reason, when it came to matters of sport—she became rather rabid about it.

Her brother Xander found this hilarious.

He used to claim that she was being possessed by Grandfather Cornelius’ ghost until the time that young Jason had taken this literally and had broken down into hysterical tears over his sister being haunted.

Catherine, however, almost wished she could blame an apparition since, without such an excuse, she merely had to admit that her fervent desire to win lawn games—no matter the cost—was merely an unsavory part of her personality.

She might have even begged off, no matter the blow to her pride. She could have begged one of those vague concerns that everyone read to be a code for female ailments—and that, therefore, terrified men. A megrim. A general malaise. It didn’t even really matter.

Except no sooner had the duke finished speaking than the Earl of Crompton appeared at Ariadne’s side, almost as if out of thin air, that ingratiating smile on his face.

“Splendid day for pall mall. I’m sure you’ll have a marvelous time of it, Lady Ariadne.”

Catherine fought off a grimace. There he was again, telling Ariadne how she felt, not asking.

Ariadne, to her credit, handled him well.

“Indeed, my lord,” she said politely, but with a distinctly distant air about her. “I look forward to playing with my sister.”

She looped her arm through Catherine’s.

This was all well and good—Catherine was more than happy to be a shield for her sister against men who simply could not take a hint—but it did oblige her to actually play.

All of which brought her to her current predicament: strategizing escape routes if she succumbed to that eager, itchy feeling that had started to overtake her the moment she got the mallet in her hands.

“You shall just have to not…you know,” Ariadne said helplessly as Catherine searched for a distraction.

She watched as the Duke of Wilds flirted outrageously with Miss Plumeria Flittersby, the unfortunately-named cardsharp who had relieved so many guests of their pin money the day prior.

Miss Plumeria was giving as good as she got, her chaperone once more asleep under a nearby tree.

Catherine had no choice but to look away when the Duke of Seaton meandered over to join his friend, his own mallet perched jauntily over his shoulder.

His tall, athletic frame made him look as though he’d been born to play Pall Mall, and the assessing way he looked out over the course, which had been assembled near the lake on the Duke of Wilds’ rambling estate, suggested that he, too, possessed a competitive spirit.

Well, Catherine would show him. She would pound him into the dust, her victory so profound that?—

No. No, she would do none of that.

She fixed her gaze on her sister.

“I’ll be good,” she promised.

Neither of them seemed to believe it.

Her low expectations meant that Catherine was initially rather pleased with herself.

The game started off casually enough. Most of the ladies had only a passing interest in the game, and a few quickly drifted off to linger where a tent had been set up with refreshments.

Several of the gentlemen, too, proved more interested in chatting with the ladies than in the sport before them.

Catherine thought she might even detect the blossom of a romance between Lady Reid, who was quite lovely even in her late fifties, and Sir William Pearce, who, like the lady, had lost his spouse several years prior.

Catherine was so distracted by this—indeed, was so caught up in actively seeking distractions—that she failed to notice that the reduced number of players meant that the game had grown tighter, closer, more intensely played.

By the time she realized it, it was too late.

“Well, well,” the Duke of Wilds said grandly, tearing himself away from flirting with a woman who had to be at least a decade and a half his senior. Catherine was almost certain the woman was here as someone else’s chaperone. “Look at how close the game has come!”

Catherine, who had very intently not been looking at any such thing, felt her shoulders creep up toward her ears.

Perhaps she was losing! Perhaps she was losing so very desperately that it would be the dignified thing to laugh, bob a teasing curtsey to the leaders, and go enjoy some lemonade.

“Lady Catherine,” the Duke of Wilds called, because Catherine had no luck to speak of, “you are…” He looked down at a little tally he’d apparently been keeping on a small tablet of paper.

He’d been keeping score ? Could he not be a proper rake and flirt so much that he had no attention for anything else?

“Well, very nearly the winner,” he said with a chuckle.

As though this were some sort of laughing matter .

“Oh dear,” Ariadne murmured.

“Very nearly?” Catherine echoed, her voice sounding as though it was coming from very far away.

“Indeed.” Why did it seem as though there was a gleam in the duke’s eye? This was not about gleaming, either! “You’re within just a few strokes worth of points of my dear friend Seaton.”

“Oh dear ,” Ariadne said more loudly.

Catherine turned and looked at the Duke of Seaton.

He looked back at her.

And then he did the worst possible thing that he could have done.

He grinned.

It wasn’t a snide grin. It wasn’t sarcastic or angry or condescending.

It was—God help her—the man who was having a good time winning a game.

It lasted only a second before he seemed to realize who he was looking at—then it vanished, replaced by his usual scowl. But it was too late. She’d seen it. And he was…

Well, drat it all, he was just a bit beautiful when he smiled like that.

And thinking he was beautiful led to thinking about when she’d been close enough to see more of him, which let her think about kissing him, and kissing him had been the one thing—the one thing— she was not supposed to be thinking about.

She felt her cheeks go pink, and now his smile was a smirk.

I know what you’re thinking , that smirk said. I know how it made you feel .

Catherine was now no doubt not pink, but bright, furious red.

If I do not win against him, she thought, the words clear and precise in her mind, then I will have no choice but to die trying .

It really was a shame that Ariadne had been so against the whole plan to strike her with the mallet.

The next half hour… Well, Catherine couldn’t recall it all that clearly, after the fact, as it happened. This, she could only assume, was for the best.