Page 112 of Her Beast of a Duke

“Yes!” their mother shouted. “For I amashamed. Do you all think this is funny? This ruins all of you, you silly girls!”

Hermia ignored how Isabella’s face paled at that threat. She rushed to her mother, trying to take hold of her arm and pry one of the scandal sheets from her vice-like grip.

“Let me?—”

“I want the truth, and I want itnow, Hermia,” her mother hissed. “Did you bare yourself for this Duke?”

“Did you pose for him?” her father demanded. “I did not think you would put me in a position to have to contain the embarrassment again?—”

“You already failed at securing a match?—”

“They are saying you are a scandalous spinster, and I fear I will lose many of my connections?—”

“Heavens, theshame!” It was all her mother kept repeating, over and over, even as her parents spoke over one another in a dizzying rush.

Hermia couldn’t focus on any of them for too long, her thoughts spiraling and turning wildly, trying to piece together what on earth had happened.

She had already been ruined by becoming a spinster, but this…

This forced her family to carry the blame.

The blame for something she had not done.

“Mama,” she tried again, “just let mesee?—”

“It can’t be as bad as all these hysterics,” Sibyl piped up, her voice the softest thing the parlor had heard all morning. “Surely there is a way to fix this.”

“Quiet, Sibyl,” their father muttered, as if exhausted.

“Hermia is already condemned to living out here, away from the ton. Alicia has yet to debut, and I have already carried the burden of Hermia’s failed Seasons,” Isabella sighed.

“You, be quiet as well,” their father snapped, frowning as he read the paper again before shaking his head.

Isabella’s mouth snapped shut with an angry click. In one motion, she was on her feet and had swept out of the room, but her footsteps did not go far enough to suggest that she had ventured away from the door.

A dramatic exit that drew Isabella’s attention without her losing sight of the gossip.

Hermia looked at her parents, at their angry, weathered faces. “We—we can deny this, certainly? I mean, does the painting resemble me enough that we cannot claim a likeness to me without me being the… the supposed model? I am certain I am not the only lady with the features painted in whatever way they have been.”

“And I suppose we may explain away the fact that His Grace somehow knows of the birthmark above your—your—” Her mother broke off, covering her mouth.

Hermia’s face burned. She did have a birthmark on the swell of her breast, just below her neckline.

How could the Duke have known about it? And why would he include such a thing in this preposterous painting? What had she ever done to him to deserve this?

“Mama, I have never met this man,” she insisted, trying to be the calm one, trying to be rational.

She had done nothing wrong. She had not draped herself in silk and let a stranger paint her.

“I have done everything you have ever asked?—”

“You have brought disgrace upon disgrace,” her mother all but snarled. “Nothing you say can undo the damage, Hermia.”

“The painting was revealed to hundreds of Society’s finest,” her father added quietly. “Nobody is forgetting it anytime soon.”

Hundreds.It did not matter that Hermia was sequestered in the countryside; she felt a little sick at the thought of being so exposed.

Just how severe was the level of nudity?