Isabel seemed as uncomfortable with this topic as she was, but she let out her breath in a long sigh and stammered, “I-I have found out that you are the subject of some very ungentlemanly…er…wagers.”
Chapter Three
Katherine’s ears began to ring as she stared into Isabel’s gentle face and those horrible words she’d said sank into the very heart of her.
“Wagers?” Katherine repeated. Her voice sounded like it was coming from under water. “Whatever do you mean?”
Isabel shifted with great discomfort, and that revealed the kind of wager even before she explained further. “The circumstances of the earl’s death are obviously under scrutiny—I would be foolish to pretend that you didn’t know it.”
“I didn’t murder him!”
Katherine tried not to recall the earl’s face, strained and purple as he gasped out his last breath beneath her. Of the horrified servants as they came to find her naked and screaming for help. The facts of what they had been doing were too obvious not to be spread through her household and beyond. She knew what they said below stairs and above it.Allthe horrible things that the collectivetheysaid behind her back. She’d known it even before she returned to Society.
“Of course you didn’t,” Isabel gasped. “Ineverthought you did. That is a cruel whisper that others should be ashamed of. The man had an apoplexy, clearly. It just as easily could have happened when he was out for a walk in the park.”
“Only it wasn’t. It didn’t happen in the park.” Katherine folded her arms. “The thing that makes it so enjoyable for all those biddies to cluck about is that it happened in our marital bed.”
Isabel ducked her head. “Unfortunately, yes. And that fact seems to have drawn the interest ofsomeof the men in Society, as well. They think the circumstances have to do with…with…”
“My prowess?” Katherine whispered. Yes, she’d heard that, too. Quieter, but there in the background.
Isabel nodded, her cheeks suddenly dark with color. “Yes. And now they are clamoring to see who might take you as a lover first.”
Katherine jumped to her feet as shock rushed through her. “What?” she burst out even though every word Isabel had said rang clear in her ears. She’d known they talked, but not like this.
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Isabel said. “Or to embarrass you. But I thought you deserved to know what their wager was about.”
“About who would take me as a lover?”
Tears of humiliation flooded Katherine’s eyes, but beneath that, in some wanton place she tried to push aside, she felt something else, too. Something wickedly drawn to the idea that men were interested in her body, her pleasure.
After all, hadn’t it been the pursuit of that same pleasure which had killed Gregory? That need she felt deep within her? The one he’d liked to tease her with. The one he’d never truly fulfilled.
She shook the thoughts away. “How do you know this? Were these men so uncouth as to discuss this in mixed company?”
Isabel ducked her head. “No, of course not. I-I overheard a friend of my husband’s discussing it in private. I gave him a dressing down, I assure you.”
Katherine stared at her. One of her hesitations about the duchesses as a group had to do with the fact of who their husbands were. Lifelong friends, a club of dukes. Everyone knew the men were as loyal to one another as brothers. And one of them was the man she despised more than all others. The one who had dared to try to approach her at the party a few days before.
Roseford.
That was the only friend of Isabel’s husband who might speak of her in such a blatant manner. Only one of that group of dukes who was so cruel and heartless.
“The Duke of Roseford,” she whispered. A statement, not a question.
Isabel drew back. “I—yes. How did you know it was him I was talking about?”
Katherine shoved to her feet and strode across the room, hoping to keep Isabel from seeing her face. The strength of her reaction, not just in its anger but in the call of longing that doubled as she recalled Roseford’s handsome face swinging in toward hers all those years ago.
“The dukes are spoken of as highly as you duchesses,” she managed to say, and hated how her voice trembled. “Save one. The Duke of Roseford. A cold-hearted snake of a man.”
Isabel caught her breath and Katherine glanced at her. The duchess’s face was pale and she was shaking her head as if to deny the charge.
“Robert is…misguided, but he is no snake,” Isabel said.
Katherine managed to bite her tongue. She would not waste breath arguing that point with the woman. She knew Roseford in a way no one else did. After all, that near kiss on the terrace wasn’t the only time she’d been alone with the man. There had been one more encounter after that.
And nothing would ever change her mind about his character. Or the fact that she hated him down to the center of her being.
