Page 31 of Duke of Wickedness (Regency Gods #4)

“Oh, shut your gob,” Percy said amiably. “You did. I know it, you know it, and I’m grateful for it. Catherine is the finest woman in creation. I’m sure whoever has gotten you all twisted up in knots is grand herself, too, though. So. Who is she?”

“Ha! I’m not telling you that.”

Percy shrugged a shoulder. “I can’t really fault you for your discretion, but it was worth a try. At least tell me what’s going on, would you?”

David wanted to balk on principle, but…well, he had come here for advice.

“There is a woman,” he admitted.

“The one whom you said was so interesting to you, I gather,” Percy said. “I can see you spending time with more than one woman in such a short time, but I doubt that you’d let more than one partner get her hooks in your emotions in such a period.”

“She hasn’t got her hooks —” David gave up protesting when Percy feinted toward his correspondence again, as if he intended to go back to his work. “Yes. Fine . Yes. It’s the same woman.”

Percy set the pen down again.

“And she doesn’t want you back?” he prodded.

David shook his head. “No, that’s not it.” He had been practically drowning in self-doubt these past few days, but whether Ariadne wanted him back? No, that much was certain.

“I find myself…unwilling to share her attentions,” he confessed.

Percy—the bastard—laughed at him.

“Oh, sod off,” David snapped.

“I’m sorry,” Percy said, not sounding sorry in the least. “It’s just—Well, you sound as though you’ve admitted to the most grievous crime, and not feeling a bit territorial over a woman you fancy.”

David took great affront over the term fancy , but if he fought Percy on every issue of semantics, they’d never get anywhere.

“It is—it’s distasteful ,” David spat. “I’m not… I don’t plan to try to possess a woman. She’s a person, not a thing. I don’t need to hoard her like a dragon sitting upon its gold. I won’t… I’m not suited to that.”

He pushed a frustrated hand through his hair, feeling entirely at sea with all of this—this emotion . It was distracting, overwhelming. How were people supposed to get things done when they were just constantly feeling things ?

He shuddered to think of all the poor souls that felt this every time they engaged in a bit of casual bed sport. Truly. It was a burden.

Percy frowned. “Well, that’s more than one thing, isn’t it?”

David jolted out of the proper spiral of despair he’d been working up. “What do you mean?”

Percy shrugged. “Well, loving someone and wanting to possess them—I’d argue that those are always different things. Catherine is my wife, yes, but I don’t own her. If she belongs to me, it is only insofar as I belong to her, as well.”

“Most men wouldn’t agree with you,” David pointed out.

“Yes, well, most men are areseholes,” Percy said lightly. “That’s why I also only have the one friend, you idiot.”

Despite the insult—and despite the careening feelings that roiled inside him—David laughed at that.

“And wanting not to share someone, at least when it comes to matters of the bedchamber… That’s not being a dragon, David. That’s just being a person in love.”

David considered this for long enough that he missed his opportunity to respond…and, he realized belatedly, his opportunity to contest the word love .

“And as for you not being suited for it…” Percy offered another shrug. “I wasn’t either, not until I was. And now, look. I get the unending pleasure of absolutely disgusting you with my happiness.”

“Yes, well.” Once his mirth faded, David found that he did not feel improved at all. “You are the exception, I’m afraid. The rule is different. Most stories do not end happily.”

“You don’t know that?—”

“I do,” David interjected. “I understand that you have the light of your life and all that poetic nonsense. But go to any Society event on any night, and look at the nearest married couple and tell me whether they are happy or whether they feel as though they are shackled to one another and drowning for it.”

David couldn’t fight the flash of his mother’s bedroom door, closed and locked, no matter how often he pleaded with her to come out.

“Think of the bigger picture,” Percy urged. “The world is bigger than?—”

David interrupted again.

“None of it matters,” he said. “Even if I could—even if I wanted to…” He shook his head roughly. “She wants something different than what I can offer. She needs freedom and security, and I can’t…”

“Don’t decide yet,” Percy said. “Just…think about it. Don’t decide yet. If you let fear be the thing that makes this choice for you, you’ll be sorry. Trust me. I know.”

David tried to give his friend a reassuring smile, but it felt stiff on his face.

He couldn’t summon any real emotion, not when the flashes were coming back stronger.

The rage he’d felt when he heard laughter from a woman who should not have been in his family home.

The horrible, horrible silence that enveloped them as they all pretended that nothing was amiss.

The way he had felt the fractures grow, deepen, spread, until the bonds that held them together broke forever.

“I’ll think about it,” he lied.

He hadn’t convinced Percy; it was obvious.

“David,” his friend said.

David gave up trying to be reassuring. He let the melancholy in his smile come through.

“It will be all right,” he said, though he doubted that either of them believed it. “I just have one thing to do, and then it will all be fine.”

He left Percy’s house after that, desperately grateful that he didn’t run into Catherine. The two sisters didn’t resemble one another overmuch, but the little similarity that was there… Even that was too much.

Even before he’d truly made the decision, David found his feet taking him in the direction of Bond Street. He would do what Ariadne had asked him, no matter what it cost him. And if it was his pride that made him insist on giving her something of himself that she could keep, no matter how small…

Well, he would permit himself this one sin. It might be the only thing that got him through what came next with his sanity—and his honor—intact.