The Duke's Wager by Chante Alexandria

Author:Chante Alexandria [Alexandria, Chante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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A country house full of aristocrats does not contemplate breaking its fast before eleven. It is left to the servants to rise and toil with the sun, to stoke fires and fetch Lady Snow her fripperies. Kalinda considers this with a pang of guilt, on this day especially, when she has never been more grateful for the option of rising late. After a night shamelessly rutting with the Duke of Ashbridge, she is not fit to move before four hours past dawn.

At the appointed hour, house guests shuffle into Lady Snow’s peach blossom painted dining room and help themselves to plates of plum and honey cakes, brioches, wild berry preserves, herbed butter, boiled eggs and steaming pots of tea and hot chocolate spread out on the sideboard. A few of the gentleman take their cue from the Prince Regent himself and partake in glasses of brandy first thing in the morning. A sense of bleary-eyed joviality pervades the room. Except in Lady Snow, who is grimacing at the head table and demanding that Harriet fetch her a caraway roll, with the caraway seeds scraped off.

Diana is keeping a watchful eye over her girls. Lady Fullerton, seated between her son, Algernon, and Helena, is regaling her prospective daughter in law about the dangers of having one’s boils lanced too soon.

Mr. Gallant is dutifully sitting at a table with Lord Sotherton and his cronies. Upon his face is the wax-like smile he always wears amid such company, the one that speaks nothing of his inner life, of loss, uncertainty and rage. Kalinda has new appreciation for Mr. Gallant’s fortitude in the aftermath of John Henry Goode’s death. To be able to sit with men who may well have played a role in his love’s murder, to drink with them and appear carefree…it is unthinkable. Kalinda is ashamed to acknowledge that it is her own feelings for Damien that have deepened her sympathy thus.

Her ‘feelings’… What a spineless word for the mad, violent, irrevocable, desperate love Kalinda harbors for the most ruthless man she has ever known.

For a man who blackmailed her and threatened the reputations of those closest to her.

For a man who has professed to killing.

For a man who cannot, and will never, feel love for her.

Why, out of the entire list, does the LAST item mean more than all the rest combined? What kind of nitwit is she?

Is it because some strange alchemical thing occurs when one takes a lover into one’s body? Is it because, while Kalinda is sitting here, behaving ‘respectably’, amidst smartly dressed people, platters of food and sunlight spearing through the windows, she can still feel Damien Ashbridge in her cunt?

O god.

Her quim is sore. Kalinda would not part with that soreness for the world. Every time she shifts position in her chair, she is visited by memories so good she could cry here and now into the pot of marmalade in front of her.

Kalinda is grateful that Damien is not in the room this morning.

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