Married to the Marquess by Rebecca Connolly Read Free Book Online Page B

to see you,” Aurelia gushed, very nearly hauling her husband along to keep speed with them.
    “And you as well, Aurelia. May I say how lovely you are looking this morning?” He bit the inside of his cheek as he felt more than heard Kate groan next to him. He knew better than to say such things, but really, sometimes Aurelia said the most delightfully insipid things that it was worth asking just to hear it.
    “Oh, I daresay,” Aurelia replied, pretending to blush, and not very convincingly, “this is a mourning dress, Whitlock. Nobody looks lovely in a mourning dress, not even pretty Katherine. Look at how that black color simply washes her out! Ugh, I cannot even begin to imagine what it must feel like to look so pallid.”
    Kate stiffened next to him, but still said nothing, which was much to her credit. He didn’t even like his wife and he felt his ire rising.
    “The service was quite good, didn’t you think, Whitlock?” Nigel asked peering around his wife, which took some effort, given that he was so large that peering around anything took effort, and Aurelia was hardly small.
    “Oh, but it would have been so much better if I had been in charge of things,” Aurelia broke in. “Nigel told me there were no flowers, no music, and the minister who spoke? So drab and little and hardly worth looking at. I should have chosen that Mr. Emery who is the clergyman over where we live. He is quite attractive.”
    “Everything was just as Mother specified,” Katherine managed through her teeth. “Down to the minister.”
    “Yes, well, Mother would not have known if things had been different, would she?” Aurelia said without concern. “After all, we were the ones who had to attend, not she. No, I should have done the whole thing. It would have been quite a triumph.”
    “Right you are, my love,” Nigel said with an adoring look that was so gruesome that Derek actually winced.
    “I didn’t know that funerals were meant to be triumphs,” Derek murmured, mostly for Kate’s benefit, and, sure enough, one small corner of her mouth ticked, ever so slightly.
    “Oh, Whitlock,” Aurelia said on a rather annoying high-pitched giggle. “You are such a silly man. Now, if you do not mind, I should like to speak to my sister for a moment.”
    Derek shot a look at Kate, who looked back at him with almost panicked eyes. “Oh, but your father has decided to retire, and Katherine must as well,” he said quickly, wondering what was possessing him to take his wife’s side.
    “Oh, Father can wait a few more moments, and so can Katherine,” Aurelia said, taking her sister’s arm and separating both of them from their husbands. “Just a little sisterly chat for a moment. It will not take long, I promise. You and Nigel can talk while we do so, it has been so long since you have been here, I am sure there is much to catch up on.”
    With an odd sense of reluctance, he let Kate go, fearing very much for the state in which she would be returned to him. Then he turned to the man he was left to converse with, and he wondered who would be in a fouler mood when all this was over.

    “Aurelia, I really do not think that now is the time to…”
    “Katherine, I do not care what you think now is the time for,” Aurelia overrode in a tone so serious, and so very unlike her normal timbre, that Katherine actually did not think of interrupting. “There are more important things at stake at this moment than you can even bear to think of.”
    Knowing her sister’s tendency towards the dramatic, Katherine only offered a small, “Oh?” and waited for the rest to unfurl. When it became apparent that Aurelia expected to hear more of a response than that, she added, “What things?”
    “Your reputation, for one. And your husband’s for another.”
    A cold feeling swept through Katherine’s frame. She had spent the last five years very carefully managing each and every detail of her life, and quite a bit of Whitlock’s, so that there