Page 58 of Her Beast of a Duke
“Factual is not ludicrous,” Edmund insisted, eyes sparkling. “Before her, you’d have grunted a single, noncommittal word and been done. Now? We actually debate. You tolerate more, my friend… and, dare I say, you’re growing softer.”
“There is nothing soft about me,” Oscar was quick to say, his hand clenching his glass. “Do not conjure such notions merely because idleness drives you to spy upon my marriage.”
“Oh, I cannot deny that may be exactly what I wish to do, but it is not fueled by idleness. This excites me. Rather, it makes me happy to think you might be married to a woman who’s smoothing out your rough edges. They have grown ever so sharp since Cambridge.”
“Perhaps there werereasonsfor those sharp edges,” Oscar muttered drily.
“Indeed, but you are no longer there,” his friend reminded him. “Perhaps now, now that you are safe and you are settled, you can afford yourself a little softness. You are not in the war anymore, Oscar. You bear the scars of it, yes, but that is the past. Now you have a wife who might need your softness more than your weaponized temper.”
Oscar narrowed his eyes at Edmund over his glass. “I agreed to meet you to discuss business, not to be lectured.”
“Perhaps I merely miss how attentively you listened to me, even while pretending not to. Much like you once attended university lectures, scribbling away at every word. Has your wife glimpsed your studies yet? I imagine she is quite taken with the sheer number of useless papers you hoard.”
At the mention of Isabella in his study, Oscar’s thoughts returned—although they had never truly left—to the night he had pleasured her.
He swore that when he slept, his nightmares were being replaced by the taste of her on his tongue, by the skin that had pressed to his, soft and scented and intoxicating. In the days since that evening, he had woken with a hard ache between his legs, craving his wife again.
“Oscar… is it really so hard to believe she might be affecting you?” Edmund questioned when Oscar offered no confirmationor denial. “Is it so difficult to think that you mightwantto be affected? You think she is everything good, and she is, but why can’t you believe you can be, too?”
He paused, not sure how to answer it. Edmund knew plenty about him, but he didn’t always know how Oscar thought that he poisoned the good things he touched. That he himself felt riddled with so much darkness and beastly crimes that he was not worthy of ever thinking he could be good.
“As long as it is not reversed,” he muttered. “And that my darkness is not affecting her.”
“You do not have to live in darkness,” Edmund reminded him, sounding so like Isabella for a second that Oscar was prickling. “But the fact that you are grateful she is not affected by you already proves my point, I believe.”
Before he could say anything, Edmund went on. “Although if you are so worried about your influence, then why are you not changing?”
Oscar let himself lapse into silence, looking away from his friend coolly.
Because it is not so easy to change.
When he once hoped that he could remain in the light, he was only dragged deeper into darker shadows. He learned to stop hoping quickly after that.
One ray of sunshine coming into my life cannot suddenly bloom with such warmth everywhere.
Except he said nothing of the sort. Instead, he only drank deeply and finally answered, “Because I am content.”
“In yourself, or in your marriage?”
“Myself.”
“But not your marriage?”
“Edmund,” he hissed in warning. “Do not push.”
“We are friends.” He flashed Oscar a smirk. “There is no such thing as pushing. Do tell me your thoughts about your marriage. It was something you wanted so wholeheartedly once, and now you have it.”
“Do not hold me to the foolish whims of a student when I was too young to know anything,” Oscar muttered.
“Oscar, you have had dreams before,” Edmund laughed softly. “What is so terrible about letting yourself continue having them? I have seen the two of you at all events. You have a wife who smiles at your side when you do not notice. You have a wife who looks at you as though you areyou, more than the reputation that snakes after you throughout the ton. Does that not mean something greater than this… this mask you feel you must put on to survive? What are you surviving anymore?”
A war with myself,he thought.A war my wife should not have to witness. Not when that war consists of screams and nightmares that do not fade so easily.
In the end, he only stared down at his empty glass and said, “I do not know anymore.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Beautiful,” Oscar heard Isabella mutter under her breath.
