Free The Lady and the Duke by Olivia Kelly Page B

It was just the sort of thing to happen to her.
    There was a commotion at the entry to the ballroom and a man dressed in leathers, holding a bow, entered. Audrey felt a sharp slap of nerves as their gazes met across the room and she recognized Will's warm regard behind his plain mask of tanned leather. Audrey laughed quietly as he turned to greet their host and she saw the quiver on his back.
    He was a hunter, to her pheasant. How had he known?
    A lovely woman, slender and with hair the color of old Spanish gold, stepped up to Will's side and placed a proprietary hand on his sleeve. She looked around the room, chin held high, her deportment haughty and distant. Audrey stepped back in confusion, bumping into the pair of elderly ladies behind her.
    "Oh...I...I do apologize." She glanced back at Will and his companion, who was dressed in gauzy, draped white. Audrey took in the gloriously feathered mask and her stomach dropped to her slippers. The lady was a swan.
    Will hadn't dressed to match her , but the beautiful woman on his arm.
    "Oh, poor Miss Ellis. I wonder who she is?"
    She jolted as Beatrice stepped up next to her, slipping her arm through Audrey's, her smile catlike and sly.
    "Whoever she is, she's quite lovely, do you not agree?" Beatrice tapped her fan on Audrey's wrist. "You didn't truly think the duke would pick you , did you?"
    "I don't know what you mean."Audrey tugged discreetly on her arm, but the other girl merely tightened her grip.
    Beatrice laughter tinkled, a sweet joyous sound that echoed evilly in Audrey's ears.
    "Oh, you did . Come now, Miss Ellis. It's quite obvious that you are taken with the man." Audrey stared at her in horror. Was it obvious? Did everyone know? Beatrice leaned in, as if whispering a girlish confidence. "A peer so high never look lower than an earl's daughter, such as myself, for a wife. He might however make a baron's daughter his mistress, so you might be in luck after all."
    Audrey wrenched her arm away, heedless of the startled looks she received from the other guests close to them.
    Had Will been playing with her?
    Head spinning, she thought back to their conversation in the garden. The duke had never mentioned marriage; she had just assumed that it was his aim. But what if it wasn't? Audrey felt as though her heart was being crushed by an iron fist, and it was then she realized her exact predicament.
    She was such a fool. A fool in love with a man who represented nothing, and everything , of what she wanted.
    Beatrice still stood close, her expression cruelly amused. "Of course, if I marry him, I shall not share him with the likes of you, but perhaps someone of less exacting standards would."
    Fury hazed Audrey's vision. Two years of insults and snide rumors. Two years of being laughed at, gossiped about and looked down upon. For no reason at all, except that the high and mighty Beatrice Lettington had decided she didn't like her.
    Audrey wheeled on the other girl, her hands clenched in fists at her side, two years of bubbling wrath brewing inside her. "Shut your mouth, Beatrice Lettington, or I will shut it for you."
    Paling, Beatrice opened her mouth, then shut it. She must have realized that she had pushed too far this time and was in actual danger of having her lovely face rearranged, because she turned and quickly walked away without another word.
    Audrey's fierce flare of victory was too brief.
    She looked across the room at Will as he laughed, enjoying the company of the beautiful woman on his arm, and her chest felt sliced by a thousand tiny, lethally sharp daggers. The lady was exactly the sort one chose for a duchess, refined and delicate. Audrey wanted to flee, to disappear, to nurse her grief in private, but of course her mother chose that inopportune moment to appear with a gentleman who then begged a dance of her. Miserably, she agreed, biding her time as she plodded down the quadrille line, doing her best to keep her gaze from Will's corner of the room.
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