“Of course not,” Lady Calliope said. “I have no quarrel with the duchess. She seems like a kind woman.”
“She is infallible,” Sin agreed. “We have known each other since our youths. She has never wavered.”
“Is it true, what she said, that the previous Lady Sinclair died by her own hand?” she prodded.
Her question took him back to that long-ago day. Although he had been desperate to gain his freedom from Celeste, nothing could have prepared him for the discovery that she had killed herself. Too much laudanum. She had left him a letter, and it had been convoluted and twisted as her mind had been. Even in death, she had been beautiful.
Deceptively innocent.
“It is,” he bit out, trying to shake himself from the painful ghosts of his past.
“There was no mysterious illness, then?” Lady Calliope prodded.
“Her mind itself was ill,” he admitted tersely. He did not like to speak of Celeste. Not to anyone. But he supposed this acknowledgment was necessary if he meant to follow through with making Lady Calliope his bride.
And everything depended upon making her his wife.
Everything depended uponher, the woman at his side.
The one who wanted vengeance against him.
Silence reigned between them once more, until the vast, imposing façade of Westmorland House loomed within sight.
“Why did you not tell me?” she asked.
“Would you have believed me?” Sin countered, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
He glanced at her once more, taking in her beauty. “And do you believe me now?”
“I am not certain.” Her dulcet voice betrayed her confusion.
At least she was being honest.
He believed her answer. But it was not the answer he needed.
“You have five more days to persuade yourself to see common sense and reason, princess,” he hissed, frustration rising, along with the same old rage. “Because like it or not, you are going to become the next Lady Sinclair.”
She said nothing, merely turned her gaze to the street ahead.
Damn her.
Chapter Ten
The Duke of W. deserved to die, dear reader. I knew it the moment I pushed him on those stairs. I watched him fall. I felt nothing.
~fromConfessions of a Sinful Earl
“You met LordSinclair’s mistress?” Jo asked,sotto voce, as she and Callie made their way through the Westmorland House orangery the next afternoon, under the guise of Callie showing off their newest pineapples.
Aunt Fanchette was blessedly easy to avoid, especially since she was drinking champagne and plotting Callie’s hasty wedding with inebriated glee.
“His former mistress,” Callie corrected grimly as they reached a row of strawberry plants bursting with ripe, red fruits, which needed to be collected soon.
She did not know why she bothered to make the distinction. Perhaps because she had seen how beautiful the duchess was. Perhaps because she had taken note of the glances the earl and the duchess had exchanged. They cared for each other, and that much was certain, in spite of his vehement declaration that love was naught but a chimera. Callie could not help but to wonder, with a bitterness that did her no credit, whether or not every woman in the Earl of Sinclair’s life had been a golden-haired goddess. She had never been more aware of her dark hair and eyes.
“Former mistress, then,” Jo corrected, waving a hand as if it were neither here nor there.
