Page 91 of Her Beast of a Duke
Was that all she was destined for? Rejection after rejection.
Curling her legs up to her chest, she let herself cry. She had tried to fight tears in front of Oscar, but now there was nobody to witness her. So, Isabella cried. She cried, and she hit her pillow when the tears weren’t enough to relieve her of her pain.
“I do not want a gentleman,” she whispered to herself, thinking of Oscar’s words from the night before. “I want you, no matter what you think of yourself. You terrible, stubborn man.”
But how could she fight when all she did was hit a stone wall?
That was what Oscar was being. A man who would not move, a scared man spiraling into his shadows, but he was taking it out on Isabella. She hated the thought of his seeing her like this. Still, he would not come to her rooms anyway, so why should she bother hiding anymore?
Isabella was tired of pretending that certain things about her marriage didn’t hurt, so she let herself feel it all now. She had worn down all of her walls for him. Why could he not do the same? Her eyes flicked over her bedroom, her bedsheets, the places Oscar had pleasured her.
Everywhere was tainted with thoughts of her husband, and she didn’t know how to banish them. She didn’t want to look at the place where he had first fallen asleep in her company, the night they patched Morris up. She did not want to turn her nose into her pillow and think about his hair being splayed over it as she sat astride him, his length buried in her.
She didn’t want to think about the kisses he had pressed to the back of her neck in her washroom. No, Isabella did not want to think at all, so eventually she slipped off her bed. Still in her robe, she made her way downstairs to the library. On her way, she passed the study and couldn’t resist pressing her ear to thedoor. Her chest tightened as she heard the scratch of a pen on parchment.
Her thoughts went to the game of chess. The way he had comforted her through a storm, not making her admit her fear but knowing it was there, nonetheless.
Pressing a hand to the door, Isabella considered going in. She hadn’t wanted it before, but now she wanted him to see her hurt. She wanted him to see what his stubbornness was doing to her.
In the end, she slipped past to the library, but before she got there, she passed the music room. She went in and sat at the pianoforte.
She had played it the day Hermia visited, and they spoke of her upcoming wedding to the Duke of Rochdale. She had played it so viciously because she was lost in her own panic. Now, she played slowly, carefully, trying to find love in the instrument once more. It didn’t entirely work, and her gentle tempo became a blow. She melodically trilled her way down the instrument, imagining a scarred, traumatized war hero who did not want to admit he was anything but a fighter.
“If you are a fighter,” Isabella whispered harshly as she plunked the keys, “then fight forme.What good is your fighting instinct if you do not use it for your wife?”
She poured her anger into the song, hoping that Oscar could hear it from his study. Isabella let herself go over the keys, breathing heavily by the end of her furious song. Once again, shetried for a ballad, even a lament, but every tune turned angry once more.
Eventually, she slammed the pianoforte’s lid down, and in the ringing silence, she swore that footsteps scuffed in the hallway outside. Gasping, she stood to her feet, but by the time she ran to the hallway, whoever had been there was gone.
The scent of parchment and ink lingered, as it always did when Oscar wrote for long hours and retreated to one of their chambers. His fingers already smelled like his study, and Isabella had found it attractive, really. She had kissed his palm and every knuckle, imagining she could taste the words he wrote.
I do not always write ledgers and letters in my study,Oscar had once told her a couple of weeks ago.I write my thoughts, too. I once loved poetry, but my mother threatened it out of me. Still, sometimes words are all I have, and I write them in a very secret journal.
Isabella had asked to read it when he was ready, and Oscar had hesitated before admitting, perhaps one day. So, she had chased the invisible words she had never read over his hands and tried to know what her reclusive husband would write about. He had sliced his heart open with a pen, and she had wanted to know what bled out through the ink.
When she finally made it to the library, she found she could not settle on a book to read. Nothing seemed right or comforting, and she truly wished to be with Hermia. Hermia wouldunderstand. She had spent some time back at the townhouse during a bad time with Charles. Isabella wanted to collapse into her sister’s arms now and beg for answers.
“How do I staunch this terrible wound, sister?” Isabella asked the empty library, already back on her feet, to go to the nearby writing desk. She began writing to Hermia, who was at her countryside estate in Branmere.
When footsteps sounded outside, Isabella realized the sun was setting, and she had written a letter to each of her sisters. Hermia for assistance; Sibyl to tell her to keep chasing love, for nothing else was worth settling for; Alicia to say never to stop being an intelligent woman and never to let a man tear her down.
Perhaps she was projecting, but she had poured her heart out without ever mentioning the source of her heartbreak.
She turned to the sound of the footsteps, her heart stuttering at the sight of Oscar watching her. His expression was flat when he looked at her, as though not seeing her at all. Such an empty coldness made her more frightened than the violence ever had.
“You are in your robe,” he stated. Heavens, his voice was so devoid of anything. Isabella felt as though she had stumbled off a cliff without a tether to bring herself back to him.
“I did not see the need to make an effort,” she answered, forcing her voice to match his own tone even as it broke her to do so. “My husband does not want to see me, and I do not have theenergy for visitors who might keep me entertained, so here I am.”
“What are you writing?”
“That is none of your business.”
Isabella couldn’t even feel pride at shutting him out, but she saw a flicker of worry in his eyes as he glanced down at her ink-filled pages. Did he worry she was writing about him? Did he worry she was intent on speaking ill of him? She would never. She would speak her heart’s pain, but she did not have to be terrible.
What was worse was that she had admitted there was love in her marriage only the night before, and now that love looked at her as though she was nothing to him.
“I assume I will be dining alone in my room once again,” Isabella went on when he didn’t answer. She swept past him, her jaw trembling with the effort to hold back more tears. “I have missed it, truly, husband. That way, I will have peace, and I will not have to decipher everything you do not tell me.”
