Page 30 of Duke of Wickedness (Regency Gods #4)

“ A riadne, there’s someone here to see you!”

Ariadne ground a knuckle into the center of her brow at Helen’s words. She was beginning to have an instinctive response to anyone coming to see her.

If a gentleman was at the door, she was going to scream .

“Who is it?” she asked tiredly, looking up at her sister by marriage.

But Helen didn’t answer. Instead, a bright-eyed face with a big grin popped out from behind Helen’s shoulder.

“Hello!” Phoebe called. “It’s me!”

“Oh!” Ariadne’s mood flipped in an instant. “Phoebe, hello!” And then, belatedly remembering her manners, she said, “Helen, please allow me to introduce my friend, Miss Phoebe Turner. Phoebe, this is my sister by marriage, Her Grace, the Duchess of Godwin.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Your Grace,” Phoebe said, her curtsey extremely proper and demure, given…well, everything Ariadne knew about her.

Phoebe’s efforts were, alas, lost on Helen, who was giving Ariadne a very soft, very maternal sort of look.

“I didn’t know you had a new friend,” she cooed.

“Stop that immediately,” Ariadne commanded. “Go flutter over your own child.”

“Oh, very well,” Helen sighed dramatically. “Miss Turner, a pleasure.”

The moment Helen was out of sight, Phoebe dropped her veneer of propriety. She flounced across to Ariadne, not waiting for an invitation before she plopped down on the settee. It made Ariadne feel wonderful, that familiarity.

“I had an idea,” she said without preamble.

“I thought about our conversation last night, and then I thought about how we could not speak freely. And then I thought that if we had a private place to speak, then we could speak freely, and then maybe you would know what to do next about your, ahem, escort .”

“Phoebe Turner,” Ariadne said, grinning. “You are brilliant.”

“I know ,” Phoebe said, beaming. “It’s merely that other people so rarely notice. Anyway, let’s ring for some tea, close the door—and then you can tell me everything.”

So, Ariadne did just that.

She was discreet, of course. She didn’t use David’s name, though it wouldn’t be that hard for Phoebe to figure out his identity, not after seeing him at the ball and the theater.

But when Ariadne said that he was a gentleman who preferred temporary attachments, Phoebe didn’t seek any further information, something that emboldened Ariadne to say more.

Without giving away too much in terms of details, she explained their arrangement and how things had grown progressively more intimate—and progressively more consuming—as they had gone on.

“Hm,” Phoebe said thoughtfully, her face devoid of judgment, when Ariadne finished. “And now you’re going to?—”

She made an extremely vague gesture with her arm that, somehow, Ariadne understood perfectly.

“Yes,” she said, trying to sound neutral and level-headed about it. She must not have succeeded, because Phoebe gave her a little smile and shook her head.

“Well, I can see there’s no shaking your resolve there—not that I necessarily intended to,” she added, holding up a hand. “I was just going to make certain that you really knew this was what you wanted, but you very obviously do know that.”

Ariadne pressed a hand over her burning cheek, but she didn’t duck away from Phoebe’s gaze.

“You don’t think I’m being foolish?” she asked.

“No, not foolish,” Phoebe said, and Ariadne was as grateful for the speed of that response as she was for the thoughtful pause that followed.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say I understand it, but I don’t have to.

I have a cousin who loves fishing. Just hours and hours sitting on a little boat in a lake, with a stick and a string.

He doesn’t even like it when you talk . Just sitting. ”

She sounded so baffled by this that Ariadne had to grin.

“But,” Phoebe went on, “just because I think that this is complete madness, doesn’t mean that I think he is wrong to want to sit with a stick and a string?—”

“It does rather sound as though you might, though,” Ariadne teased.

“— so ,” Phoebe went on, giving no further acknowledgment to Ariadne’s interjection than a slight emphasis on the word, “even though I think men are approximately as interesting as fish, it doesn’t mean I think you ought to feel the same. I just want to know that you’re being careful.”

“I told you, he’s very discreet?—”

Phoebe was shaking her head.

“No, not with your reputation…though that, too, I suppose, if you care about it. I meant more—and let me assure you that I am very displeased to say something so sentimental—with your heart.”

“ Oh .” Ariadne cleared her throat rapidly. “I, ah—” More throat clearing, so she took a sip of tea. Like any good Englishwoman, she found this grounding enough that she managed to tell the truth.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t deny that there are…emotions involved, but I also know what is and what isn’t possible. This is temporary. It’s temporary and…” She paused, then made herself say the thing she needed to say. “And this is likely the end of it all. I know that.”

It hurt to say. She’d known it would, and it did.

“But,” she went on, because this next part was true, too, “I fear I will regret it if I don’t more than I will regret it if I will.”

Phoebe gave her a look that was understanding and full of kindness.

“You’re very brave, do you know that?” she asked.

This startled Ariadne. She was many things, for good or for ill, but she hadn’t really ever thought of herself as brave.

During her first Season, she’d been so frightened of everything and everyone that she’d practically flinched at her own shadow.

It was only when she’d started mimicking Catherine, had started carefully tallying every rule of the ton and following them all to the letter, that she’d felt anything beyond that terror.

Ariadne opened her mouth to say as much, to tell Phoebe that she wasn’t really brave, that she was just very good at putting on a mask, when she realized…

It had been a long time since she’d noticed herself going to the effort of donning that particular costume.

It had been a while since she’d paused in the middle of an interaction to ask herself whether the consummate young lady—the one that was faintly modeled after her sister but who existed, in reality, only in Ariadne’s mind—would do this thing or that one.

She hadn’t quite noticed until now, but that way of being had faded away.

And she suspected that one particular duke was to blame.

So she didn’t deny it. She sat up taller and let her pride show, and thought about how good it felt to do so, even if it wasn’t recommended for proper young ladies to ever feel anything like pride.

“Thank you,” she told Phoebe. “I do think I am beginning to recognize that in myself.”

This time, David was glad to see Percy.

Yes, yes, it was still a bit disastrous that Percy was Ariadne’s brother by marriage.

It was foolish of him to go to Percy’s house, given that Percy’s wife lived there, and Catherine would be well within her rights to murder David if she learned of what he and Ariadne had been getting up to together.

But he needed advice, damn it. And he really only had the one friend.

It was, however, perhaps not his best move to say so.

“I need advice,” he declared as he sauntered into Percy’s study. “And since I really only have one friend, you are the one who has to give it.”

Percy, with exacting deliberation, set down his pen, put aside his correspondence, and folded his hands.

“Do you think you’d like to try that again?” he asked with the same tone that one might use on a small, recalcitrant child. Percy would be a good father when the time came, David decided upon hearing that question, laced with patience and careful reprimand.

But David was thirty years old, a man grown, and he was too set in his stubbornness to be guided. He threw himself into the chair across from Percy, all rakish insouciance, hoping that he could hide the simple, mortifying fact that he was jealous .

He was jealous! He was very, very jealous. He was jealous of all the men who had danced with Ariadne at the ball—even the old fellow. He was jealous of her hypothetical future husband, because that unknown man would get her smiles and her cries and her sighs, and David would have none of them.

He was jealous of Percy, who knew his place in the world and knew what he wanted.

He had even, insanely, found himself briefly jealous of George Stunton, because surely Lord Hershire was too stupid to be burdened by these complicated feelings. David had banished that one bit of jealousy very quickly, it was true, but it had been there, however briefly.

He was, in short, in a very bad way.

“Did I make you be polite and prim about things when you were courting Catherine?” he asked peevishly, scowling at Percy.

He cursed his mistake when his friend’s eyebrows rose.

“When I was courting Catherine?” Percy echoed. “You mean my wife, whom I adore, with whom I intend to spend all the rest of my days—something about which I am blissfully happy?”

“Jesus Christ,” David said, starting to push himself upright. “Forget it. I’ll ask someone else.”

Percy flapped a hand at him, indicating that David should stay right where he was, and David complied, not because he was feeling agreeable, but because moving seemed like far too much effort at the moment.

“You don’t have anyone else,” Percy reminded him. “You don’t let other people get close enough. In hindsight, it’s a bloody miracle that we managed a friendship, as you hide behind your devil-may-care exterior and I was the fussiest bastard in existence.”

David felt his jaw drop.

“That’s right,” Percy said, with no small amount of smug satisfaction. “I’m not pulling my punches today, Nightingale. I’ve been waiting for my turn at retribution since you pulled that stunt with the house party.”

“I didn’t—” David protested halfheartedly.