Taken by the Duke Read Free

she reached for her. Portia’s warm arm wound around her in an attempt at comfort, but there was no relief for Ava.
    “Oh, dearest,” Portia soothed. “This will pass, I promise you.”
    Ava shook her head.
    “No,” she said with more conviction than perhaps she had ever expressed on any other subject in her life. “Oh no, it will not pass. What I saw in his eyes, it promises this will not pass. This feud, as vile as it has been over the generations, is not over. That man intends to finish it. To finish us. Once and for all.”
     
     
    Christian limped into his foyer. His butler, Sanders, stepped forward without a word and removed his topcoat, allowing Christian to switch his cane from one hand to the other for support as he did so.
    “May I bring you anything, Your Grace?” Sanders asked as he draped the coat across his arm and took the hat Christian held out to him.
    Christian did not answer, but waved the man off as he made his slow, painful way to the parlor. He had spoken far more than enough tonight, to the men who believed themselves to be his friends, even to a few reaching mamas who had slowly receded when he offered them no encouragement. He was tired of words at present.
    He shut the door behind himself and moved to the sidebar near the fireplace. Slowly, he poured himself a sherry and took a small sip before he moved to his most comfortable chair. When he was situated, he rested his cane within easy distance and stared at the leaping flames. In this room, the flames, like his hate, never seemed to die. Someone always stoked them.
    Tonight that hatred had been stoked when he came face to face with Lady Ava.
    Lady Ava. In truth, he had never thought much of the girl… woman …before. His emotions had always been directed toward her father, then, more intensely, at her brother. But now that neither of them was available, with the old earl long dead and the new one hiding like a coward in his London home, well, it seemed there was no one else in the House of Windbury to consider except the wallflower sister.
    But how was she a wallflower? When she was so, so… pretty ?
    He grunted in displeasure with himself that he would think something so positive about his enemy. Slowly, he began to remove his gloves, tugging one finger at a time. He shifted his weight, and pain burst through him with sudden viciousness.
    He shook his head to push those weaknesses away and refocused on Windbury’s sister. She was actually more than pretty, when it came down to it. When he had speared her with a gaze meant to terrify her, it had done its job. She had been afraid, that much was evident by her expression, if not by the fact that she had done the typically cowardly Windbury thing and run away to the terrace to escape him, then left the party almost immediately afterward. Lord, how the gossips had loved that.
    No, there was something else in her gaze that interested him. There was an awareness in her gray-blue eyes. An intelligence that one did not often see in the simpering misses of the ton . Lady Ava did not seem the type to simper.
    “Perhaps that is why she has not landed a husband,” he mused, surprised that he did so out loud. “She hasn’t been broken yet.”
    Yet.
    He stood, a heated slice of pain shooting from his hip to his ankle as he grasped his cane and leaned on it for a moment. When he had gathered his composure, he moved across the room to the large, lovely portrait of Matilda that he kept hanging in the sitting room on the wall across from the fire. In it, she was smiling slightly, and the artist had captured the teasing that had sometimes been in her bright eyes. As he stared, she seemed to look back at him. He could almost hear her voice when he looked too long.
    “Don’t do it, Christian,” she seemed to whisper tonight.
    He shook away the momentary lapse of reality. Great God, that was exactly what his sister would say if she were alive and knew of his plans. For a moment, he doubted them,