Given to a Duke Far Too Old, She Wept for Her Dreams—But on Wedding Night His First Gift Amazed Her

Chapter 5

The storm came down from the moors on a night in the fourth week of her marriage, and it came like an accusation.

Thunder rolled over the hills. Rain struck the windows in sheets, restless as thought. Isolde, unable to sleep, walked to the library drawn by the glow of the fire, and found the Duke standing alone before the hearth, a glass of wine untouched in his hand, his back to her.

He did not hear her come in. For a moment she simply watched him — this tall, solitary man who had spent his life learning how to be unmoved — and saw, in the firelight, something she had never seen in him before.

Grief. Standing there like a second man.

“You freed me,” Isolde said softly.

He turned, startled, his composure cracking for the first time since she had known him.

“My chains were forged long before you,” he said quietly.

“Then let me share their weight.”

The words surprised them both. She saw it in the way his hands stilled, in the way the air between them seemed to thicken. They stood close now, firelight casting gold across their faces, no titles between them, no walls. Just two people standing at the edge of something neither of them had a name for yet.

“I never meant to trap you,” he confessed, his voice rough. “I accepted this marriage because I could spare you worse. I want you to know that. Whatever you have been told, whatever you believe about me — I did not take you to own you. I took you because I could not bear what would have happened to you otherwise.”

“What could be worse than this?” she asked. “Than being married to a stranger?”

He did not answer. Something moved behind his eyes — a door trying to open, and closing.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I cannot.”

“You gave me a key,” she said, “and told me I was free to open any door I chose. This is the door I am choosing. Tell me.”

The Duke opened his mouth, and the storm chose that exact moment to find its voice. Thunder cracked directly overhead, the whole library shuddering, and from somewhere in the depths of the hall came a sound that was not thunder at all — a sharp, insistent knocking at the front doors, out of season, out of all reason.

A servant appeared in the doorway, white-faced, holding a silver tray. On it lay a single letter, sealed with black wax.

“A messenger from town, Your Grace. He will not leave until you have read it. He says the contents will not keep.”

The Duke took the letter. He did not open it in front of her. But Isolde saw his face change — saw the warmth drain out of it, saw the man who had murmured to her about the stars replaced, in an instant, by something older and harder, a thing of stone and cold arithmetic.

“Who is it?” she asked.

He folded the letter and slid it into his pocket. “An old debt,” he said. “I had hoped it was settled. It is not.”

“Julian.” She used his name for the first time, and he flinched as though she had struck him. “Who is it?”

For a long moment he only looked at her, and she saw in his eyes something she had never expected to see there.

Fear.

Not of her. For her.

“Baron Silas Thorne,” he said. “A man who collects young wives the way other men collect horses. He has buried two of them already, and he has never forgiven me for what happened at your father’s settlement.”

The fire spat. The rain hammered the windows. And Isolde, standing in the middle of the library with her heart a wild, trapped bird in her chest, understood that the quiet courtship she had been living — the books and the tea and the slow, careful thaw — had been built on ground that was about to give way.

The Duke of Hollowmere had not married her out of pity for a debtor’s daughter.

He had married her to keep her out of Silas Thorne’s bed.

And Thorne, it seemed, had come to take her back.