I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Fiancée

Lady Calanthe Aldervane had the footmen move Odalys's place card at dinner.

Odalys found it at the foot of the long table, past the chaplain and the Duke's steward, far down from the head, with her name written in a clerk's hand.

Not Lady Odalys.

Miss Marenne.

"I do hope you don't mind," Calanthe said, from the chair at Caelan's right hand. "I thought you'd be happier among the household. People who are paid."

Her voice was as sweet as spiced wine.

She wore a pale blue gown that made her hair look spun.

Around her throat lay a double string of pearls so white and so round that Odalys couldn't stop looking at them.

Caelan sat at the head with a glass of water in front of him and said nothing.

Odalys looked at him.

He looked at the candle in front of him.

"Not at all," she said, and sat. "I like to know where the exits are."

The Dowager's cane tapped once against her chair.

"She's refreshing," Calanthe told the table. "I've been telling Aunt Isaura, Caelan has such an appetite for novelty." She cut a pea in half. "Of course the family physician is very clear that marriage is the cure. Not these arrangements, however clever. A wife who is his equal, in his house, in the proper bed. After Midsummer he will not need to buy anyone at all."

The chaplain choked on his soup.

"I'm so glad to hear it," Odalys said. "I'd hate to think I'd been working so hard for nothing."

Somebody laughed and turned it into a cough.

Calanthe's smile did not move.

"You mustn't be tired, dear. I'll be so glad to take it off your hands."

Odalys set down her spoon.

"Excuse me. I'm paid until dawn, and I have an appointment with a cold night."

She stood, and the chair legs scraped, and Caelan said, "Odalys," in the low voice that went through her.

She didn't turn around.

The winter garden was a glass house on the river side of the palace, full of lemon trees in tubs and frozen black ferns.

She sat on a stone bench with her arms around herself and watched the moon go down behind the rooftops.

The cold came in through the glass and into her slippers.

Her mother's pearls had been on a string around her mother's neck for twenty years.

Her father had pawned them in the spring and told the family they'd been stolen.

Calanthe's pearls were not those pearls, but they looked so much like them that it hurt.

Odalys watched her breath go up in the dark, and hated every person at that table, and hated that she had wanted him to speak.

She stayed until two.

By then she couldn't feel her fingers.

She went up through the dark house and along the north corridor and pushed open his door.

It was black inside.

The only sound was his breathing, steady, from the window seat.

"You didn't come," she said.

"You told me not to follow."

"I didn't say it aloud."

"You said it with your back." There was a rustle as he stood. "It's two in the morning, Odalys. You've been in the cold for four hours."

"And you?"

"I've been here."

Four hours of moonset.

Four hours without a hand on him.

She thought of the black lines under her palm, climbing his throat.

"Did it burn?"

The quiet went on for a second too long.

"Rule three," he said.

"I know the rule. I'm asking. Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

She crossed the room in the dark and found his chest with both hands.

The skin was damp and hot, but he stood very still.

← Chapter 3 · All chapters · Chapter 5 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend