I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Opera

Odalys wrote one line back to her father on the same sheet, under his, and sent it with the stable boy.

I will come home when I can pay for the door.

Four nights later the Duke of Drevoss took her to the opera.

"You'll sit in my box," he said, in the carriage. He sat opposite her with his gloved hands on his knees and did not look at her green gown. "You'll sit on my left, in the front, where the whole house can see you."

"Your aunt will like that."

"My aunt will faint."

"And Lady Calanthe?"

"Will sit on my right, because she is my guest, and be bored."

"You want them to see me."

"I want them to see that I'm not ashamed."

Odalys looked out of the window.

Her mother's pearls lay cool against her collarbone, and her hands were damp in their gloves.

The opera house was a gold horseshoe of tiers and chandeliers, and every opera glass in it swung to the ducal box the moment they came in.

She saw them turn.

Women lifted their fans, and men leaned to whisper.

Halcourt sat in a box across the horseshoe with his rings flashing.

Next to him, hunched in a coat that had been good ten years ago, sat her father.

He saw her and looked away.

Odalys took her seat on Caelan's left.

Calanthe took hers on his right, in white, with her chin high and her smile.

Behind them the Dowager lowered herself into a chair by the red curtain at the back of the box.

She set her cane across her knees and looked at nothing at all.

"I think," Calanthe said, "that everyone is looking at the girl who isn't his wife."

"They're looking at the soprano," Odalys said.

The orchestra started.

The first act was a long, slow lament in a language she only half understood.

During it, under the rim of the box where nobody could see, Caelan's gloved hand found hers on the velvet arm and closed over it.

Her heart did something stupid.

She didn't pull away.

In the second act his thumb began to move over the back of her wrist.

It went an inch at a time, up to the tender place at the edge of her glove.

She could not have told you a word the soprano sang.

By the middle of the third act, the whole box was dark except for the glow off the stage, and the heat from his shoulder had gone through her sleeve.

He leaned toward her ear.

"Moonset is twenty past eleven," he said, very low, so that only she could hear. "I can't wait that long."

"You'll have to."

"Look at me."

She turned her head.

His eyes were black in the stage-light, and the muscle in his jaw was jumping.

"Behind the curtain," he said.

"Your aunt is back there."

"My aunt is deaf in the left ear and going to sleep."

"Lady Calanthe is a foot away."

"Then be quiet."

Odalys looked at the Dowager.

Her eyes were closed, and her chin was down on the top of her cane.

She looked at the back of Calanthe's golden head, and the whole glittering house beyond it, and the thousand glasses.

She got up, very calmly, as if to fetch a handkerchief.

He followed.

There was a narrow space between the red curtain and the back wall of the box, hardly wider than a cupboard.

It held a velvet bench and a lamp that nobody had lit.

The aria swelled on the other side of the velvet, and the curtain stirred with the sound.

He pushed her against the wall with his body.

"If they hear," she whispered.

"They'll hear a soprano."

His hand went under her skirts, over her stocking, up her thigh, and found no drawers there.

She had left them off in the carriage.

She hadn't told herself why.

He froze.

"You planned this," he said, ragged.

"I planned to surprise you."

He made a sound against her neck, a dark half laugh, and shoved her skirts to her waist.

"Hold on to the bench," he said. "And don't make a sound."

The curtain swallowed the light and left them in a red dark that smelled of dust and velvet.

His body pinned her to the wall, and she could feel every inch of him through his coat and her silk.

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