The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides Book 1) by Christi Caldwell

Author:Christi Caldwell [Caldwell, Christi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503940628
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Published: 2016-10-24T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Rule 13

No friends.

Perched in her familiar spot in the window seat, Helena and Diana sat in a companionable silence.

While Helena read, the duke’s daughter, proper in all ways, bent her head over her embroidery, attending that task the way a military general attended his battle plans.

The young woman’s faint humming filled the otherwise quiet of the room. Using her sister’s distraction, Helena contemplated Lord and Lady Drake’s ball. More specifically, she thought to the tender exchange she’d witnessed between Robert and his sister. Lady Beatrice was just one young woman, amongst a sea of so many . . . and yet, early on Helena had come to appreciate all a person could learn from the number one. Beatrice was a single person, a loving sister to Robert, who believed the sun set and rose for him. And that spoke volumes more than the years’ worth of preconceived notions Helena had carried about members of the peerage.

Not everyone was as she seemed. Wasn’t Helena herself—and her brothers—proof of that?

She returned her study to Diana. And here was another young woman who threw into question everything Helena had long ago accepted as empirical fact.

When she had entered this household, she’d been determined to hate anything and everything here, for they were extensions of the man who’d abandoned Helena and her mother, whose defection had seen them in the clutches of a man who would make Satan cower in dread.

With the emerald pendant she always wore and her expensive white satin gowns, Diana represented all Helena had hated through the years. As a child begging and thieving in the streets, she’d seen the Lady Dianas of the world, flawless and perfect, and oblivious . . . with nothing but a look of disdain for the Helena Banburys and developed an easy loathing for all of them.

Or she thought she had.

Every day spent in this rapidly confusing Society, everything she’d believed to be fact proved just as murky and muddled as those early days when her mother had taken up with Mac Diggory.

Helena looked to where the young girl sat, drawing her needle through the fabric stretched out in the embroidery frame. Yes, she wanted to hate her.

Except Diana, with her innocent smile and even more innocent acceptance of Helena, had made it impossible to hate her. There was a greater likelihood of hating spun sugar and rainbows than this girl.

She was the sunny, joyful woman who gentlemen wed. Men like Robert. Men who had titles and wealth and who kept mistresses on the side, and visited scandalous gaming hells.

The duchess’s seething pronouncement from days earlier slipped into her thoughts. These two powerful ducal families who’d been so closely connected, and the expectation of at least the duchess that her daughter would one day wed Robert.

At the time, she’d not truly given the thought consideration. That when she left, Robert would find his proper, perfect bride, and why should that bride not be Diana? They would be the model of a flawless, golden English couple matched in their lineal connections and wealth.

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