Page 65 of A Duke Makes a Deal
“I’m not sure I understand,” Clara said after a moment.
Silas exhaled, hesitant to proceed.
“I have…had…particular tastes in my youth,” he said lowly, knowing full well that Clara would not understand. “There are times when pleasure and pain can be shared, to heighten certain feelings and reactions. I wasn’t particularly fond of the pain aspect, but the control was intoxicating.”
“Oh,” she said, color rising to her cheeks. “Like when you, um… That is, I mean, when you…”
“When I held you down?” He finished her sentence. She blushed wildly and Silas felt both depraved and drawn to her. Lord how he loathed himself. “Yes, like that. But it wasn’t enough. The pain I could manage to give wasn’t enough. She wanted more.”
“More?”
“Much more,” he continued. “And she didn’t care that I wasn’t interested in it. She wanted me to hurt too.” He glancedacross the room, feeling odd. He was reluctant to tell her everything they had done, but the more he spoke the more he felt relieved. “I was foolish. I asked her to marry me in a desperate attempt to try and keep her. She accepted and we were wed.”
“But not for long?”
“No,” he said, standing up. He placed the brandy bottle on a side table. “Not a week after we returned from our honeymoon, we began to fight. At first, I tried to appease her, but she didn’t like that. She didn’t want me to make her happy. She wanted to argue. To continue the games that tormented us. She thrived on it.”
Clara’s brows knit together.
“She didn’t want to be happy? But why?”
“As I said, the pain was her goal all along. It was why she enjoyed the arguments, the jealousy. That was what caused the disconnect between us. Once our game was played, I wanted peace, but she wanted torture. Constantly. And when I did not comply, she decided to do it on her own.”
Clara was quiet and he could see on her face that she was confused. Lord, he hated himself for telling her these things.
“She found comfort outside our marital bed, at first to get a rise out of me. I was constantly enraged, furious and threatened to murder any men who had touched her. She enjoyed how rough I could be when I was staking my claim, but it was more than that. She reveled in my agony. My pain was for her consumption and even then, I was happy to provide it to her.”
“Oh dear.”
“And it didn’t matter how many times she made a fool out of me. I was hopelessly in love with her. I would do anything for her. Except…”
Here it was.
“Except what?” Clara asked, her voice nearly a whisper.
Silas didn’t want to look at Clara, but something forced him to turn. She was watching him with the gentlest and most understanding eyes he had ever witnessed. They unnerved him. Taking a deep breath, he continued.
“She wanted me to share her,” he said lowly. “With one of her paramours.” Silas’s eyes shifted down, focusing on the edge of the bed, unwilling to see Clara’s pity. He huffed, humorlessly. “To show you how far gone I was, I actually considered it, even though it went against my entire being. Maybe I even could have gone through with it if it had been a simple fantasy—achieved once and then forgotten. I was willing to do anything for her, as I told you. But what she wanted was something that exceeded even my limits.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted… She needed a full relationship with someone else. There was some sort of pit, I believe that she was trying to fill. I’m not sure what it was, but she insisted that she needed another man, another relationship as well as ours and I could not abide it.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “When she told me this, I felt a break from her, from myself.”
“Our fights got uglier. I tried to make accommodations, truly, but it seemed every inch I gave her, she would demand a mile and then throw it back in my face,” he said lowly. “It was as if she were purposely trying to push me to the point where I’d shatter completely.”
Silas flexed his hands as his eyes landed on a small, dark walnut vanity table tucked in the corner of the room. The memory of that last conversation filtered through his mind.
“This isn’t working, Silas. You can’t make me happy,” Cynthia had said, sitting at the vanity in this very room. “This marriage was a mistake.”
Silas had felt a bizarre mix of rage and misery course through him at her words.
“I’ve done everything to make you happy,” he had hissed back at her. “I’ve been made a fool of, mocked openly, all to appease you and your insatiable need to hurt me and ruin my name.”
“You’re being dramatic,” she had said, standing up in a dismissive manner. “Why should I have to curb my tastes to appease you?”
“I don’t ask that you curb them, only that you consider me before you act like a trollop.”
“Consider you? Why must you always be at the forefront of my mind? Every action, every pleasure is sullied by the need of your approval.” She sneered, her expression full of bitterness. “Every single fiber of my being is supposed to seek your approval and I hate it!”
