Free Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas

innkeeper.”
    “I see.”
    She was glad he had taken responsibility for it; she’d have found the occasion too humiliating. What did one say?
I am terribly sorry, but it appears that my husband has destroyed part of your property
?
    “I have also arranged to remove to an establishment twenty miles north where I will have more privacy.”
    He
would have more privacy. What of her?
    “I will be execrable company,” he continued, his gaze focused somewhere behind her. “I’m sure you will enjoy yourself better here.”
    One day married and already he couldn’t wait to be rid of her. “I will come with you.”
    “You don’t need to do such wifely things. We have an agreement in place.”
    “I am not doing anything wifely,” she said, finding that it required great effort to keep her voice low and even. “If I stay here, after my husband demolished his room and left, I dare say I will not enjoy the pity and idle curiosity from the inn’s owners and staff.”
    He looked at her a minute, his otherwise beautiful blue eyes entirely bloodshot. “Suit yourself, then. I leave in half an hour.”

     
    T he place twenty miles north was beautiful. They were halfway up a steep, densely wooded slope that overlooked a mirror-bright lake. The colors of the hills changed constantly, grey and misty in morning, a brilliant blue-green at noon, almost violet at sunset.
    But an
establishment
it was not. Millie had expected a country estate of some description. Or, failing that, a hunting lodge. What she found was a cottage little larger than a cabin and only two steps removed from primitiveness.
    The nearest village was six miles away. They had no carriages, no maids, and no cook. The earl expected them to survive on bread, butter, potted meat, and fruits that were delivered every three days. Or rather, he expected
her
to live on those. He himself needed only whisky, which came in crates.
    Nightly he retired with several bottles. Nightly he brutalized something in his room: plates on the wall, the washstand, the solid oak desk. She cowered in her bed during his bursts of violence. Even though he’d never said a harsh word to her—or even so much as looked at her—every crash shattered her.
    Sometimes she left her bed, put on her heaviest coat, and went outside, as far away as she dared in the pitch dark, to look at the stars. To remind herself that she was but a speck of dust mote in this vast universe—and her heartache just as insignificant. Then he would destroy something else, fracturing the silence of the night, and her entire universe would again shrink to a singular point of despair.
    He slept during the day. She walked for hours in thehills, not returning until she was exhausted. She missed her mother, her kind, wise, and unwaveringly loving mother. She missed the peace and tranquility of her old house, where no one drank himself into a stupor day after day. She even missed the relentless piano practices—she had nothing to do, no goals to achieve, no standard of excellence to which she could aspire.
    She rarely saw him. One day, after the washbasin in his room had departed for the rubbish bin in fragments, she came upon him bathing in the stream behind the cottage, stripped to the waist. He’d lost a shocking amount of weight, his entire torso but skin over skeleton.
    Another time, he hissed as she lit the oil lamp in the parlor. He was sprawled on the long sofa, his arm thrown over his face. She extinguished the lamp with an apology and left to her room. On the way she passed his: The wardrobe had been overturned, the chair was now firewood, and, over everything else, razor-sharp shards of God knew how many whisky bottles.
    She couldn’t breathe. His misery rose all about her, a dark tide full of undertows of rage. She hated him then: Nothing and no one had ever made her feel so
wrong
, as if her entire existence served only to tear apart soul mates and turn perfectly promising young men into destructive shadows of