“My father agreed? My father agreed because he’s an ailing old man! He wants me to be happy, and this isn’t happiness!” Anne protested. “How could you - after the time we’ve... had together?”
“This,” the lord announced coldly, “...is precisely everything you wanted - and you won’t have to deal with me at all. No men to control you - not even I can do that, with the terms I’ve written here. And I don’t want to cage you. I don’t expect that of you, or any woman. I’m not worth that. My father wasn’t worth that,” Lawrence scoffed dismissively.
“You’re not worth... I love you! What has your father had in determining whether you are worth my love, or any other woman’s? I love you, and I think that you love me, too,” Anne exclaimed angrily. The lord’s chauffeur sat at the head of the carriage, trying to mind his own business, but Lawrence could catch momentary glances from the skinny young man, and the duke felt an embarrassment knotting his gut. “Have you in your stubborn, stupid mind forgotten the things we said together? The feelings that we felt? Was it a lie? Did you seek me only to use me?”
“I...” Lawrence hesitated; he saw the pain he’d wrought, and began to reconsider... if only for a second. He realized that in his callousness, he had done precisely what he had hoped never to do - brought to Anne’s face that tear-stained gaze of wide-eyed anguish his father had forced upon his mother. He waited. He took a breath, his throat shaking. His expression vexed, brow furrowed, Lord Strauss turned away. He may have caused that pain in her face, but he would cause it a dozen more times, should he acknowledge his feelings. He did not deserve them. “I can’t do that,” he declared.
“All I am is a convenient excuse for you, then? A way to ease your guilty conscience?” Nadia asked accusingly. “Is that what matters to y
ou, more than my love? To ease the painful memory of your sister, estranged from you over this sordid mess of an estate? To ease the pain you feel about your past? An excuse for you to feel the touch of a woman so long denied you by your own emotional stupor? Your father - what did he do to you?”
“You are not an excuse,” Lawrence boomed, resenting at the accusations. “I’ve done this for you. For your own good. For everything you want. I’m not what you think I am; I’m not what you want,” he roared. “My father is not an excuse, but he is a lesson. A lesson learned the hard way, by women who shouldn’t have been forced into their role as playthings in his destructive game. It is not a story I wish to tell, suffice to say I have indeed learned its lesson, and I shall not unlearn it for anyone.”
“You’ve spent so much time convincing yourself of your failure, of your father’s failure, that even real love can’t break you from this cycle of hate!” Anne shouted, closing the gap between them. He could feel her, smell her, and he wanted so badly to touch her again; to feel her hair, to press his lips against hers. He could not. “I’ll not let it happen. This contract - here! I’ll not be a party to your self-loathing, or the foolishness that your father instilled in you, Lawrence,” her voice raised higher and hotter. She grasped the document and forced it into his face, before she threw it to the cobblestones and stomped it beneath her heeled slipper. “You used me! Was this your intention, since the night we met at that dinner?”
“I did not use you!” he retorted, turning to face her, his expression torn, shredded by hatred. She could see pain beneath, tears forming at the corners of his eyes.
“You took my virginity! Is that all I was meant to do for you? That’s all you needed, was it?” she sneered.
“That had nothing to do with... with any of this, though I... I regret taking you, in that manner,” he admitted painfully. “It was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened, and I shouldn’t have let it happen. I’ll never be good enough for—”
“For what? For me? I said I love you! Am I not the person to make the determination of who is good enough, and who is not?!” Anne retorted, stamping her slippered heel against the contract again, grinding it into the space between the cobblestones. “I can choose whomever I wish to be good enough for me! Or perhaps you’re just like the other men, thinking yourself above a woman? Thinking yourself better equipped to make her decisions for her?”
“And with every word you speak you only prove to me that I made the right decision with that contract - that I’ve failed you, just as my father failed my mother, just as I failed my sister, and the other women I’ve loved and lost - and just as I will always fail,” he rumbled.
“Why can you not see your own worth? Why? Have I not laid before you how much I treasure that worth, how much I treasure you?” Anne pleaded, tears flowing freely along her cheeks now. “You feel it inevitable that you will fail. That you will fall to whatever demons consumed your family. But you are not your family, Lawrence. You are you. You’ve dedicated yourself so completely to this lie that you’d break my heart for it,” she sobbed.
“It’s not my choice, Anne. It’s my destiny to fail the ones I love, and I can’t put you through that,” he lamented, seeing in her face the tears of his mother. “Please. Let me at least do some good, for you. Some small amount of good. Let me save your father’s heart; let me give to you what he wants for you.”
“My father wanted me to be happy. Did he not tell you that? The estate — all of it. He cared more for my heart, for love - than he did for title or peerage,” Anne exclaimed.
“He’s a good man... and he will understand me in making this decision,” the duke said, turning his shoulder to the woman as she cried.
“...That’s it, then?” she asked, quivering. “I loved you.”
“This is how it has to be, Anne. I’m deeply sorry,” Lawrence insisted, stepping back into his carriage. “Please... go back to your estate. Make your father happy. He’s a good man. He would like to spend what time he has left with you, I’m certain. We will resolve matters of title, and then you shan’t need to see me in your life ever again. You’ll be happier for it, Anne.”
“You’re mistaken,” she hissed. But he had already made up his mind. He glimpsed to her once more - and as he predicted, he had done to her just what father had done to mother. He closed his eyes as the carriage began to gallop away from the sobbing woman, and he felt his own heart breaking. Sometimes, he reasoned, we must endure great pain in this life.
It would be for the best.
Chapter Fifteen
That he could so utterly and completely dismiss her struck to her very core. As the moon began to rise over the moors Anne’s tears only worsened; the soft silvery glow, embellished by the burn of candles and lanterns along the roadway leading to the Roxborough estate, caressed the red and tear-stained face of Anne Hatley, who stared at the contract beneath her foot, its surface scored with mud and the violent marks of her foot having driven it against the stone. A teardrop fell from her jawline, splashing upon the inked pages, splotching against the crumpled line where he had inscribed his name. All she had left of him, splayed in fading black across that paper.
“Lawrence Strauss, Duke of Amhurst.”
She felt cold. She had stormed out of the mansion in her gown, and she had not even noticed the cool breeze along the hills; she hadn’t noticed the absence of the sun, for her heart burned too hot with rage and want for the duke that it had kept her warm and safe. Not only that, but hope - hope that he would embrace her, and the warmth she remembered of their time together in the manse, had kept her skin hot.
Now, without him, she felt only cold.
The wind howled through trees, their branches and leaves whistling and swaying overhead, the moon peering as it rose higher; she could see only the lightest tone of orange at the edge of an endless dark blue, stars beginning to glimmer and twinkle as night rose into view. Cold, lonely night; she had spent thousands of nights alone, laying upon her bed, and had never thought of how empty it would feel one night, when she had only the memory of a man she longed to spend every night left in her life with to entertain her. She dreaded that thought; she dreaded trudging up the stairs alone, with no one to hold her; with only her tears to warm her cheeks, and only memories of that afternoon to haunt her.
She took a deep breath and heard a rather disconcerting noise - horse hooves and creaking wagon wheels upon the cobblestone road leading to the manor’s entrance. Her heart skipped in hope, and she wanted it so dearly and so tragically to be him, coming back to her; instead she saw another carriage, one she only vaguely recognized, its colors ostentatious and its broad, strong horses even more so. Suspicion filled her eyes when the driver pulled the vehicle around so that its grandiose doors swung open to her, and its occupant triumphantly descended the stairs leading to the cabin - and with scorn in her gaze she beheld a sight unfortunately familiar, one she had not ever wanted to see again.
“Ah, m’lady! I’m so pleased to see you’re here, and not held up in some manner of monkeyshines,” the loud and boisterous and utterly intolerable Earl of Carteret, a slime of a man, exclaimed as he spread his arms broadly and approached her heedlessly. “Our meeting this afternoon did not sit right in my stomach, you see, m’lady. And I had hoped to meet with you, and your father, over dinner - to discuss matters of your estate. As I don’t see the Lord Strauss here,” he said with a smug smirk spreading on his lips, “I can presume you’ve properly disposed of that odious little wretch,” the earl laughed. “He’d be positively no good for you, that I can assure you. Your father and I had a lovely meeting days past, and it was quite clear he favored me, and I hope that I shall convince you to feel the same. It should be quite easy, after all, shouldn’t it?” he certainly enjoyed hearing himself speak, and he clearly assumed all others did as well, as he advanced upon Anne and quite shamelessly grasped at her wrist with his grasping fingers, pulling her close to his side. Anne felt cold - even colder, against him, in
his flamboyant baby-blue suit jacket, and with his showy and incorrigible demeanor. She tried to pull away from his side, but he growled in response.