Page 10 of Duke of Storme (Braving the Elements #4)
Hours later, she made her way through the castle’s labyrinthine corridors toward – what she hoped – was the dining hall. The evening meal had been announced by a servant who’d appeared and disappeared so quickly Diana wondered if she’d imagined him.
The great hall, when she finally found it, was utterly magnificent in its overwhelming grandeur.
A massive table stretched down the center, set for what looked like twenty people, but intended, she realized with a sinking heart – for just one.
Her place setting looked lost and lonely at one end, like a child playing dress-up in adult spaces.
Diana took her set with as much dignity as she could muster.
She held her spine straight and folded her hands properly in her lap.
A parade of servants appeared with covered dishes – roasted fowl, buttered vegetables and delicate pastries that would have been delightful under different circumstances.
But eating alone in this cold, vast place, with her cutlery clinking too loudly against porcelain and the wind wailing like something tormented beyond the windows, made every bite taste of nothing, as though her circumstances had stolen even her ability to enjoy a simple meal.
The roast grew cold before she was halfway through it. The wine sat untouched in its crystal glass. Outside, rain lashed the windows with increasing fury, as though the Scottish weather was as unhappy about her presence as everyone else seemed to be.
When she could bear the silence no longer, Diana retreated to her chambers, her footsteps the only sound in halls that seemed designed to amplify loneliness. She curled up beneath too many blankets. Her body was finally warm then, but her spirit felt colder than it had ever been.
How strange, she thought, staring at the ceiling where firelight danced against stone, to be a wife with no husband, and a Duchess with no voice.
But even as the thought formed, something stirred in her chest – not despair, but defiance.
She was not going to be some delicate flower to wilt at the first sign of adversity.
She was Diana Brandon – Diana Hurriton now – and she had survived her parents’ indifference, society’s dismissal, and her sisters’ overprotectiveness. She would survive this too.
Rising from the bed, she moved to her traveling trunk and began the methodical process of unpacking.
Each familiar item felt like a small anchor to the person she had been mere weeks ago, who she still was beneath the title and the isolation.
Her books were carefully wrapped in tissue.
Her watercolor set was there too, though she wondered if there was anything of beauty in this forbidding castle worth capturing in paint.
The magnificent Highland landscape beyond the windows was undeniably magnificent, but she felt too isolated to venture out and explore it.
At the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in soft muslin, lay her most precious possession: her sketchbook.
Diana lifted it carefully, running her delicate fingers over the worn leather cover.
Inside, there were months’ worth of drawings – depictions of London street scenes, her sisters’ faces, flowers and architectural structures that had caught her fancy.
She carried it to the window, settling into the deep stone embrasure with the book open in her lap.
Outside, the rain continued its assault on the landscape, but from this height she could make out the dark outline of the castle grounds and the way the ancient walls curved around courtyards and gardens she had yet to explore.
Opening to a fresh page, Diana picked up her charcoal and began to draw.
But instead of sketching the castle as it was – cold, forbidding, unwelcoming – her hand seemed to move of its own accord.
She drew it as it might be. She drew it as she wished it were: warm light glowing in the windows, ivy softening the harsh stone walls, smoke lazily curling from chimneys that spoke of hearth fires and human comfort.
And there, in the tower window that must be part of the west wing, she drew the silhouette of a man.
But this was not the stern, practical figure who had lit her fire and left without ceremony, but someone else entirely.
Someone who stood at his window watching, waiting – for what or whom, she couldn’t say.
She didn’t know why she did it. The image seemed to flow from her mind, down her arm, and through the charcoal, before spilling onto the parchment without conscious thought, as though her heart was speaking directly through her fingers.
But when she finished, her hands smudged with coal dust and her eyes burning from squinting in the firelight, something loosened in her chest.
The ache was still there, but it felt bearable now. Manageable.
Diana closed the sketchbook and pressed it against her chest, feeling the solid weight of possibility it represented.
Tomorrow, she would begin to learn everything she could about this place.
She would meet the staff properly, explore the grounds, and discover what beauty might be uncovered from where it lay hidden beneath Storme Castle’s forbidding exterior.
And perhaps – though she hardly dared let the thought fully form – she would begin to understand the man who had brought her here and then withdrew so completely.
She wished to know the man who lit fires with his own two hands but apparently couldn’t write a simple letter to his bride.
The man who stood in tower windows – or at least in her imagination, waiting for something he couldn’t name.
“You don’t know me yet, Finn Hurriton,” she whispered into the rain-dark night beyond her window. “But I intend to know you.”
The fire crackled in response, and for the first time since she stepped foot inside Storme Castle, Diana felt something that might eventually become hope.