Page 42 of Duke of Wickedness (Regency Gods #4)

“ I f there’s a collection of anything strange in this house, I cannot find it,” Phoebe said, abjectly disappointed, as she sipped sulkily at her lemonade. “And I snuck into all kinds of places that I oughtn’t.”

Ariadne smiled, a touch tightly, at her friend.

It wasn’t Phoebe’s fault, obviously; if Ariadne had any complaint to level against her friend, it was that Phoebe hadn’t taken her along to sneak into disreputable places, but it simply hadn’t been possible.

Ariadne’s return to the ballroom after several weeks of limited appearances had been annoyingly well-feted. Her dance card was well and truly full.

Ariadne hadn’t been so bothered by such a thing since her very first Season. Now, however, she was cursing the notable Lightholder name. Her cheeks were aching from so much forced smiling.

This, she decided sourly, was another reason to be annoyed at David. She’d had much better tolerance for inane conversations about the weather before he’d come along and obliterated that particular skill.

Tonight, it seemed, she’d vacillated back toward anger.

She latched her attention onto Phoebe.

“I can’t believe that you found nothing of note,” she said. “You have such a fine nose for chaos, you’re practically a bloodhound.”

Most young ladies of the ton would have been furious to find themselves compared to a dog. Phoebe was visibly delighted.

“Well, I did catch glimpses of four separate couples in amorous embraces,” she said with a touch of pride. “But I left them to it. Nobody wants to see that sort of thing.”

You would be surprised, actually.

The words sprang to Ariadne’s mind, but, fortunately, they did not make it past her lips. Thinking about them—and about the parties, so different from this one, that had shown her just how false Phoebe’s statement was—was not a good idea.

Not ever, and certainly not here.

Instead, she gave Phoebe another lackluster smile.

“Your discretion is noted,” she praised. “If any of those eight people knew you’d seen them, I am certain they would have appreciated it.”

Phoebe sighed in an exaggeratedly dreamy sort of way.

“I really am unsung for my generosity,” she lamented, batting her eyelashes outrageously.

It was a patently absurd expression, and yet, given Phoebe’s angelic looks, Ariadne suspected that her friend could convince at least a quarter of the gentlemen of the ton of its sincerity.

Maybe more. It wasn’t as though most of them were known for their high regard of women’s intelligence.

Except for…

Ariadne squashed that thought before it could come to fruition, but it was too late, for she felt a prickling sense of something nagging at her senses, and when she turned to investigate?—

David.

Ariadne’s breath hitched at the sight of him, and, in an instant, she was of two minds, because he looked so beautiful. She’d forgotten how beautiful he was, too beautiful for a man, honestly. Dangerously beautiful.

But also… He did not look at all well. He had heavy, dark bags under his eyes, as though he hadn’t been sleeping. And there was just an aura of…weariness about him. One that she understood somewhere deep inside herself.

Even so, he was looking directly at her. And there was nothing weary or worn about the look in his eyes. Those eyes—they burned. They burned the same way she burned, in those rare moments that she wasn’t heartbroken or furious.

And she couldn’t look away. It was achingly painful to look at him, but it felt far worse to look away. She looked back, and the thread that bound them trembled and quivered with the tension.

“Ari…”

Phoebe’s voice sounded at her elbow, uncommonly cautious.

Ariadne bit her lip until it hurt—properly hurt—then turned to her friend. Phoebe was looking back and forth between Ariadne and David, her expression concerned.

“Are you all right?” she asked gently.

Ariadne nodded, though it took some effort to manage it.

“I knew it would happen eventually,” she said softly, keeping her words intentionally vague.

She couldn’t tell if discretion was something that aided her in the long run—as at least she didn’t have to explain what had gone wrong to the ton at large—or hurt her—since it felt as though the widespread ignorance of her connection to David made it feel strangely as though it had never happened at all.

“It would,” Phoebe agreed, reaching out to touch Ariadne’s hand affectionately. “But he is…staring. A bit.”

Ariadne dared another glance back at David. He was doing a relatively poor job of hiding his attention. He was looking at her the way someone might stare if they saw a ghost.

“Yes,” Ariadne said, turning her back, because she didn’t trust herself not to stare directly back at him otherwise. “He is. But let’s just…”

She didn’t need to finish the statement. Phoebe took her by the arm and led her toward the ladies’ retiring room, where they spent a pleasant half hour gossiping about whose gown had torn a hem and whose slippers were simply ridiculous, given the slipperiness of ballroom floors.

Throughout it all, David lurked in the back of Ariadne’s mind.

She felt…

Well, she felt an awful lot of things whenever she thought back to those hazel eyes on her. After all, he had been the one who had called things off between them. If it hurt him… Well, he had nobody but himself to blame, did he?

But there was a part of her, the part that cared even when she oughtn’t, that had felt an acute sense of sympathy. Yes, this hurt. And it was terrible—miserably unfair—that she couldn’t talk to the one person who might understand just how bad the pain could get.

And then, the smallest part of all was the part that was goddamn furious.

Because how bloody dare he?

He had been the one to send her away. And yes, maybe these exact feelings were proper evidence as to why he’d been sensible to send her away.

A rational person would have admitted that, but Ariadne was not feeling particularly rational, not in that secret, deep-down part of her that was blisteringly angry.

Because how could he? How could he make her feel as though he wanted her, with that stare of his? How could he look at her and remind her what it had felt like to be adored by him? How could he remind her of how good it felt to be looked at like that?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

And then…

It kept happening.

At the Cadford musicale, she caught David’s eyes on her from across the room.

During the garden party hosted by the Countess of Anderfaire, he had stood a few paces from her, close enough that she could hear the gentle murmur of his conversations, but not so close that she could make out the words.

In the few instances (fine, she could admit it—it was more than a few) that she could no longer resist the urge to look over at him, he was always, always looking at her in return.

At the Frampton ball, she’d thought, for a moment, that he wasn’t looking at her—she feared, by contrast, that she had fully been lost to madness brought about by the stress of this whole thing—until she looked closer and saw him standing, broodily, in the shadow of a column.

All of it made Ariadne blisteringly furious.

She wanted to shake him. She wanted to shout at him until she was blue in the face. She wanted to kick him roundly in the shins.

But she refused. Because he had been the one to send her away. And apparently Grandfather Cornelius’ blood really did run strong in her veins, because she refused—absolutely, outright goddamn bloody refused —to be the first one to approach him.

Her pride wouldn’t allow it.

If this meant that she had a lot of imagined arguments with David? Well, that was a private humiliation, and therefore did not count.

“How dare you?” she railed in mind when, in truth, she was pacing around her bedchamber.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” imaginary David retorted archly. The version of him that participated in these arguments had none of the finer qualities of the original; it was far simpler for Ariadne to win every fight that way.

Pivot, turn, pace.

“You’re staring at me!” she mentally returned.

“I’m allowed.” She fashioned him as unrepentant.

“It isn’t fair! The staring makes it seem like—” This, too, was something she could only admit privately. “—like you care. And that’s… It’s unkind, given everything.”

“I thought you were cross with me,” he said slyly. “Why does it matter to you if I care?”

Pivot, pace—this time with quite a bit of stomping involved.

This part of the argument was where things fell a bit apart. Because she didn’t want to care if he cared. She didn’t want to think about him at all, because every time she thought about him it hurt…

And yet she also didn’t want to stop thinking about him, even if it did hurt, most terribly so.

This was generally the point where Ariadne threw herself onto her bed in a fit of pique.

But today, for some reason, she paused and stared moodily out her window.

She was still wearing her ballgown from that evening; she’d need to summon her maid soon enough, as this wasn’t the kind of garment she could get off herself.

She’d spent the evening dancing with an endless stream of partners—and yes, it did make her angrier at David to notice that her time with him had, inexplicably, made her more popular among the gentlemen of the ton —trying to pretend that she hadn’t seen David lurking off in one corner.

And then, she’d concluded the evening by trying to pretend she wasn’t sorry about it when he’d suddenly disappeared.

It wasn’t fair . Why did his absence bother her as much as his presence? Why hadn’t these feelings gone away? It had been more than a month since they’d called things off—it had been as long as the time they’d actually spent together.

Why does it bother you?

David’s voice was a taunt in her mind.

And then, with a sudden, horrible rush, it occurred to her. She watched the rain spatter on the windowpanes and was seized by a furious urge to smash something.