Free Duke of Thorns (Heiress Games 1) by Sara Ramsey Page A

Rafe didn’t need a wife — he needed something that would soothe his demons, and Thorington didn’t think any of the Briarleys could do it for him. And Lucretia’s dowry couldn’t pull Thorington out of debt for more than a few months.
    Still, he sympathized with her, if only a little. She couldn’t have taken it well when her grandfather had set up this contest. She must have taken it even less well that she was forced to play the hostess for the gathering that might see her lose the house.
    She was not his concern, though. He needed to capture Callista and convince Anthony to marry her — between Callista and Lucretia, there was no contest. Every fortune-hunter at Maidenstone would target Callista as soon as they saw her.
    And he was enough of a fortune-hunter to know she wouldn’t be pleased to be hunted.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    At a quarter to five, Callie stood outside one of Maidenstone’s drawing rooms and willed herself to focus. Her hair, mostly dry after a bath that had felt woefully quick, was stuffed into the most secure chignon Mrs. Jennings was capable of. She wore her best white muslin, spangled with an intricate design in silver thread down the front and around the hem. Her dressmaker in Baltimore had cut it according to a fashion plate from one of Ackermann’s 1811 volumes. She had never been invited to something to which she might have worn it in Baltimore, and she had looked forward to wearing it here.
    But now, she took a deep breath as she stared at the carved door frame. She realized, suddenly, horribly, that if she let it out all at once, she might scream.
    Between Lucretia and the man in the woods — a duke , because of course he was a duke, and not someone she could avoid for the duration of the party — she’d used up her bravado. She pictured herself walking into a grandly perfect drawing room, with a lot of grandly perfect people, wearing a dress that had once been perfect but was now at least two years out of fashion…
    She had thought she was ready for whatever she would have to do to marry someone appropriate for her ends. But the reality of it — the crowd, the surroundings, the man from the woods — wasn’t something she had prepared for.
    She let her breath go slowly, through lips pursed tight enough to keep her scream inside. She wasn’t going to let herself fall apart now.
    She could do this. She had successfully managed a shipping company. She had run the British blockade. She had survived a sea battle.
    Surely she could walk into a drawing room.
    Surely she could ignore the way the man — the duke — preferred to look at her, as though luring her to her doom.
    Callie walked through the open double doors. The sound in the room fell away, then renewed itself with more sibilant undercurrents.
    She could tell herself that they weren’t whispering about her. But she didn’t believe it.
    “Miss Callista Briarley,” the butler announced in his stiffest, most disapproving tones.
    The whispers doubled. They were a current that carried the tidings of her arrival into the farthest reaches of the connected rooms, rippling away from her, uncontrollable.
    She instinctively started to twist her hands together in front of her, a defensive posture fit for a penitent instead of a conqueror. But she took a breath and touched the sapphire pendant at her neck instead. It was the bauble Captain Jacobs had promised her from Crescendo . It hadn’t convinced her that privateering was a safe endeavor, but she was rather fond of it.
    She was more daring than anyone in the room. Surely she could take another step.
    She didn’t know where she was going. But she couldn’t hide in the corner. Nor could she avert her eyes from those who examined her as though she was a hideous curiosity in the most macabre curio cabinet.
    Briarley contra mundum . She walked straight ahead, nodding politely at anyone who caught her gaze, proceeding as though she knew what she was doing. She