Gilt by Katherine Longshore Read Free Book Online

be there, ready to show me how it’s done.”
    “Well, I will have no such mentor,” she said. “So I have to get this right before I leave.”
    We were practicing her curtsey, just as we had every day since the duke’s visit. Cat’s skirts whispered against the rushes as she bent once more, her tiny frame curving over her knees, hair veiling her features.
    “It looks perfect, Cat.”
    “No, Kitty,” she said to her knees, and then stood up and repositioned herself near the door. “Watch this part. Pretend to be the king and tell me to rise when the time is right.”
    She walked with measured steps from the door to me, her head bent. No one looked the king in the eye until he spoke. No one turned away from him. All these things we had practiced into oblivion.
    When Cat came within three feet of me, she fell again into a curtsey and remained there, the picture of humility. I considered making her wait, but figured she would only want to practice it again.
    “You may rise, Mistress Howard.” I affected a booming tenor.
    Cat lifted her face first, a shy smile playing on her lips. She met my eyes briefly and then looked down again, her lashes brushing her cheeks. Subtly, she pulled her shoulders back, an action that caused her breasts to thrust forward, swelling just slightly out of her bodice.
    “Jesus, Cat,” I said. A little laugh escaped me.
    “What?” she stumbled to stand straight and came to me. “Is it too much? Too little? What?”
    “Isn’t that a little obvious?”
    “Obvious that I’m doing it on purpose?”
    “No,” I acquiesced. “Not so much. Maybe just to me.”
    “Well, it’s not you I’m trying to impress,” she said and turned away to recheck her box of clothes.
    “Well, any gentleman you encounter will be. Impressed, that is.”
    “But will the king?” she cried, exasperated. “I want him to look at me and to see that I’m different! That I’m not just another maid-in-waiting.”
    “What do you want from him, Cat?” I asked. “He’s already getting married.”
    “Whoever said I needed marriage?”
    “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that this whole act is so that you can be a mistress to the king? A fat, aging man with an ego the size of France and a temper the size of the Roman Empire?”
    “I don’t know!” she huffed. “Maybe I just want someone to notice me!”
    “Well,
that
will certainly get you noticed,” I gestured dismissively at her breasts.
    “Don’t you see, Kitty?” she said. “This is my chance. My ruin of a family has finally come through for me, and I don’t want to bungle it. I could get
anything
if I have the king’s attention. At court, that’s all that matters. Getting into his favor. And staying there.”
    Getting noticed was one thing. But what about the consequences? Manipulating the king of England could open a whole Pandora’s box of repercussions.
    “Besides,” Cat said with a wicked grin. “I’m just displaying my assets.”
    “No, Cat,” I said, blinking my eyes bemusedly like Joan, “I think your ass is something else entirely.”
    Cat threw her head back and laughed. Crisis averted.
    “At court, with the king’s favor, I could get anyone,” Cat declared. “A lord. A viscount.”
    “You could enamor an earl or bewitch a baron,” I added, though a cold shiver ran to my stomach, a fear that when she became a famous lady, she would forget me.
    “Bedevil a duke,” she said. “Shame Charles Brandon’s already taken.”
    “The Duke of Suffolk?” I asked. “But he’s over fifty years old!”
    “That didn’t stop him from marrying Catherine Willoughby,” Cat said.
    “Hasn’t he been married four times? And Catherine is younger than his children.”
    Cat smoothed the gowns at the top of her cedar chest. A bit ragged. Worn at the elbows. But presentable enough.
    “Rumor has it he’s great in bed,” she said.
    “He’d have to be.”
    “Imagine having a title of my own!” Cat crowed, slamming the lid