I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Gallery

The Dowager sent for Odalys at three in the afternoon, and she went because she had run out of reasons not to.

The old woman was waiting in the long gallery on the second floor, leaning on her cane in front of a portrait.

It showed a man of about thirty-five in a black coat, with Caelan's jaw and Caelan's grey eyes.

The eyes had been painted a little too wide.

"My brother," she said, without turning. "Caelan's uncle, and the Grand Duke before his father. Look at the hands."

Odalys looked.

They were gripping the arms of a chair, and the knuckles were white.

"He sat for this the winter he turned thirty-four. He bit through his tongue in the spring." She moved on, tapping. "That is my grandfather's brother. That one is the first duke's grandson. The painter has made them handsome, but you'll notice none of them is smiling."

"Why are you showing me?"

"Because I won't insult you with another purse." The cane stopped. "I buried my brother, girl. I held his head when it came on, from moonset to the grey, every night for four years. The women he paid sat on the stairs and wept."

"The physicians say any woman will do."

"The physicians say a great many things." She faced Odalys. "In this family we have another tale. It says the curse eats a man until the night he is wanted back as badly as he wants. Not paid for. Not obeyed. Wanted."

Odalys's mouth was dry.

"Has it ever happened?"

"Never. Drevoss men are cold and rude and rich, and the women who come to them come for the money. My nephew has looked for you for a year and a half. He spoke of you the morning after the Harvest Ball as if you'd cut him."

Odalys said nothing.

"Do you want him, Odalys Marenne?"

The portraits watched them.

"I want my price," Odalys said.

"The curse knows the difference."

"Then it will be disappointed, Your Grace."

The old woman's eyebrows rose.

"Good," she said at last. "Lie to me, if you must. Don't lie to him for long."

She went down the gallery, tapping, and Odalys stood in front of the white knuckles for a long time.

Her brother had died at thirty-four, and Caelan was thirty-one.

That was three years, by the calendar, and Odalys had never counted them.

That night she did not go to his chamber with anger in her hands.

She went with a length of blue silk cord that she had cut that afternoon from the curtain of her own bed.

He was waiting in the dark, sitting on the mattress.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I have a request."

"You don't ask. You tell."

"Then I'm telling you." She held out the cord. Her face was burning, and she was glad he couldn't see it. "Tie my wrists."

Silence.

"Why?"

"Because I want it to be you." She swallowed. "I mean, I want it to be the contract. If I can't move, then I didn't choose it. It's only the price."

She heard him stand.

His fingers closed over the cord and her hand together, and his thumb pressed the pulse at her wrist.

"You can refuse any night," he said. "It's in your clause."

"I'm not refusing."

"You can move whenever you like."

"Then don't make me want to," she said.

His breath went out of him on a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a groan.

"Come here."

He turned her, and drew both her wrists behind her back, and wound the silk around them twice, slowly, with his knuckles sliding over her skin at every turn.

He knotted it and tested the knot with a single tug.

Then he pulled her back against his chest.

She felt every inch of him through her nightgown, and she felt the hard length of his cock pressing into the small of her back.

"You'll tell me what you want," he said into her hair, "and I'll do it. All of it. Tonight you don't have to do anything but be told."

"That's not fair."

"No."

He walked her to the foot of the bed and bent her over the edge of the mattress with a palm between her shoulder blades.

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