“Well.”
“This was my Rage,” she confirmed, not trusting herself to move her head in a nod or open her mouth any wider than she had to, for fear she’d get sick all over the Victorian carpet. “I’m in now.”
“Not yet.”
To her surprise, it wasn’t Captain who spoke. It was Graham, not that it mattered who made the declaration. A dangerous streak of injustice blazed behind her cool mask of indifference.Maybe they mean you’re not in today… Maybe they are holding out until tomorrow. She tried to bargain with herself, tried to see the sunny side, tried to partition out the benefit of the doubt. These guys didn’t deal in the sunny side, or in optimism. They dealt in making people jump through fiery hoops only to land in a pit of snakes.
“What?”
“You have one last task.” Captain spoke this time, his posh British accent as smooth as poisoned butter and twice as deadly.
Sam winced. Was this when they finally took advantage of her, like Thomas always promised they would? Was this her inevitable downfall, the price of being a woman in this strange, foreign land of rich men?
“Listen, I’m not going to have sex with you,” she slurred. Was she hungover or still drunk? She couldn’t tell for sure. “I may be wasted, but even wasted me has standards.”
Standards had nothing to do with it. Well, maybe standards were part of her refusal. She wasn’t going to touch any of these guys, but… In another life, when she didn’t know anything about him, she probably would have fallen at Captain’s feet. She was his perfect target: the frumpy, overlooked girl with daddy issues. He had the entire Downton Abbey package: a title, good looks, and charm. Too bad she knew about everything rotting beneath his glistening surface.
“You have to bring someone to the Mud Duck Ball.”
“Fine.” Her hand fluttered in what she hoped was the vague direction of the least offensive member of their party. “PJ, you want to go with me to the Muck Ruck Ball?”
“Mud Duck. We hold one every year. We court one of our servants for a while, make them fall for us, feed their hopes, invite them to a fancy ball, and then we vote on who brought the worst date. Whoever she is gets to be Queen of the Mud Ducks. It’s a tradition. Goes all the way back to 1864. You know, it’s really quite something.”
Vomit burned toward the back of her mouth. It wasn’t from the alcohol poisoning she’d given herself.
“Mud Ducks.” Graham chuckled, as though the archaic slang was something very clever indeed. “They aren’t quite swans and have to cover themselves with makeup to hide their faces. Though… I suppose you can bring a man. Makeup is not a requirement.”
“And if I bring someone…ThenI’m in?”
“Oh, no, Piggy. You have to win.”
Under the guise of procuring some kind of breakfast, Sam escaped the suddenly tight air of the smoking salon. First order of business… A shower. She reeked of day-old champagne and cigars. Another sniff of herself and surely her stomach would try to escape from between her teeth.
Once her skin was clean and her hair sweet with the smell of vanilla, she felt incrementally better. At least, she no longer stumbled every time she moved her feet and didn’t have to brace the hallway walls for support.
If only her mind were so easy to clean.Mud Duck Ball. She shuddered. At first, it seemed…unbearably cruel. To convince someone you were in love with them, only to shatter the illusion in such a public way.
But then… There was the other perspective. The perspective of her calcified heart, the person she’d created to survive Animos. Maybe someone who believed in something as stupid as love needed to be hurt. It would teach them a worthwhile lesson in reality. It was like a vaccine, a little bit of controlled heartbreak to make the person stronger in the long run.
Amidst this storm of feelings, she arrived in her brother’s suite, a grand set of rooms that appeared straight from a Jane Austen illustration. Stiff and sturdy, composed of harsh lines and limited ornamentation done up in blue and white, it was as British as they came. Not a speck of dust or stray sock littered the glistening surfaces. Even though he sat with his full weight on the bed, he didn’t disturb the perfectly tightened sheets or their hospital corners. It could have been a museum, and not a bedroom used by a real, human man for all a stranger knew.
After being around him for two years, she’d never known him to drink more than a glass of wine or wear his bow ties crooked. He even went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. A six-mile run commenced every morning at the manor gates at five fifteen on the stroke. He was scheduled, predictable. How the man went from an Animos regent tothis, she would never understand.
When she entered, he drew his gaze from his computer screen. With the reflection of the screen playing on his glasses, she couldn’t get a read on him. Was he still as disappointed in her as he was yesterday?
“You’re alive. Having fun?”
“You didn’t tell me about this Mud Duck Ball bullshit.” She sank into the two-hundred-year-old blue-and-gold bergère armchair situated beside the unlit fireplace, folding her arms with all the dignity of a pouting child.
“The ball is where you cross the line?”
Ah. So, disappointment it is, then.
“Don’t,” she warned her brother in dark tones. The rumbling danger in her one syllable made her sound more like Captain than herself.
Off came Thomas’s glasses, and there it was. That look again, the one she’d not been able to escape since she announced her intentions of following in her family’s footsteps. She shut out the cold, broken-egg sensation of his focused accusation. If she was going to survive this, if she was going to see glinting approval in her father’s eyes, soak in the glow of having a family again… If she was ever going tobelong, she couldn’t let anything affect her. Not her brother. Not some mystery Mud Duck she’d have to destroy. Not even her own feelings. They didn’t have any place in the Animos Society, and they didn’t have any place in her heart.
“Hard to grow morals halfway through hell, isn’t it?”
