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"It's 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," Lord Beckham scoffed dismissively.
"You're not worth... I love you!" Nadia exclaimed angrily. A quiet murmur sounded from the maidservants, who all watched with rapt eyes. "Have you in your stubborn, stupid mind forgotten the things we said together? The feelings that we felt? Was it a lie?"
"I..." Lord Beckham hesitated; he saw the pain he'd wrought, and began to reconsider... if only for a second. His expression vexed, brow furrowed, he turned away. "I can't do that."
"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 you, 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?"
"You are not an excuse," Lord Beckham began to grow angrily 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.
"You've spent so much time convincing yourself of that that even love can't break this disgusting self-loathing!" Nadia shouted, storming up the stairs towards him. "I'll not let it happen. This contract - here! I'll not be a party to your self-destruction, Marshall," her voice raised higher and hotter, and with all eyes on her she threw it at his feet. "You lied to me. You used me!"
"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?" The revelation sent a wave of shocked gasps through the assembled crowd of maidservants, their eyes wide. "Is that what you had searched for? And now that you've gotten it, you're quite content, aren't you? That's all you needed," 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?!" Nadia shouted, stamping her shoe's heel into the contract. "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 I failed before, and just as I will always fail," he rumbled.
"Why have you set yourself so stringently on this path, Marshall? Why?" Nadia pleaded, tears flowing freely along her cheeks now. "You feel it inevitable that you will fail. Any trouble that befalls you is evidence of that failure; any good fortune is simply luck, or happenstance. You've dedicated yourself so completely to this lie that you'd break my heart for it," she sobbed.
"It's not my choice, Nadia. It's my destiny to fail the ones I love, and I can't put you through that," he lamented. "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," Nadia exclaimed. Lord Beckham struggled, his hands shaking; tortuously close to that precipice or seeing reality, of seeing the heart breaking in Nadia's chest.
"He's a good man... and he will understand me in making this decision," Lord Beckham said, turning his shoulder to the woman as she cried.
"...That's it, then? Ms. Cauthfield... she had hope of saving you. I suppose I did, too. I had hoped, from that first night, that our hearts could find one another. It was only a glimmer of hope, a whisper of it, but I held on to it. The morning we rode together... I had never felt any sort of joy or excitement for so simple, so dull a task. But with you, I saw something. I saw the sun. And you've stifled it; choked the life from it. I loved you."
"This is how it has to be, Nadia. I'm deeply sorry," Lord Beckham insisted. "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 happy, Nadia. That I promise you."
"No, I won't," she spat bitterly as she stormed down the stair
s, giving him one last searing look. "You don't have to fail again, and again... but you will, because you insist upon it," she said, and with that she threw open the doors and left the estate, her heart heavy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The door to Lord Beckham's bedchamber flung open, he retreated to the only place he knew he could; the only refuge he had from the memories; from the pain. The only place no one could force him to face reality. From the window, he watched her leave the manor's front door; she stormed towards her family's carriage, and she tried so firmly to appear angry; but as she reached the vehicle he watched what lay beneath. He watched her fall to her knees and begin to weep; he could hear her sobs, even at his window, carrying cries of sorrow soaring over the moors. He looked away, swallowing hard, his expression canted towards the carpet; trying to drown out the pain with something, anything; any thoughts.
But everything in his mind came back to her.
He pulled the curtains shut; the sight had only reaffirmed precisely what he had gotten into his head. He would fail; he would always fail. Just as Anna had fled him, racing up the stairs with tears in her eyes. Good, he thought to himself; she had to learn eventually. Nadia would have found herself hating him; it was the only natural consequence, just as it had been before.
He closed his eyes. He felt his own chest welling with emotion; he, too, wished to weep, looking upon another failure. You'll never be the sort of man a woman will ever want. He heard her voice calling to him; from the rafters of his bedchamber, shrieking through his dreams, like a ghost he could never escape; a doom he could never hope to outrun. He closed his eyes, but even then, he saw her; now, he saw Nadia, too, her face crossed with tears, stained a blushing red, another ghoulish failure of his past. He heard her berate him, just as he had heard Anna. You only fail because you insist upon it!
He threw himself upon the chair to his writing desk, fighting back the tears and the rage; his hands balled into fists he grasped at his liquor shelf, squat with a door of glass, pulling it open. He thought it the only way of forgetting the dreams; the dreams of failure, dreams that soon would bear home to a new haunting memory, one of the beautiful woman he had taken to the cabin; the beautiful, free-spirited firebrand of a woman whose innocence he had claimed so shamelessly.
He swallowed hard; through flames of tears and rage swelling his eyes and blotting his sight Lord Beckham grasped a bottle of muddy-brown liquor, stoppered with a simple cork. He slammed it upon his desk and took in a deep breath, trying to still his shaking hands and cool the flow of emotion pouring from within him. He examined the glass; examined his hand. He closed his eyes, and she hadn't left him yet; he saw her nude, wriggling in the warmth of the fire, whispering to him just how much she wanted him.
If only she had known.
Trembling he grasped the bottle. He pulled the stopper from its mouth, overpowering and heady scent striking his nostrils. He lifted the foul decanter to his lips, taking a deep and unsteady breath.
Knock knock knock! A pounding upon the door shook him from his destruction and spite-filled reverie, and he gulped loudly as a brief, gleaming sunbeam of reality poured into his widened, melancholy-stricken eyes.
"I've no time for conversations," he replied in a muddied, weak tone. He waited, the haze drifting painfully through his mind. He heard no further protest, and turned his gaze once more to the bottle, the swill stinging his nostrils. He recoiled, before another loud knocking interrupted him.
