Roses and Lords by Anthea Lawson

Author:Anthea Lawson [Lawson, Anthea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680131345
Publisher: Fiddlehead Prestt

As soon as Lord Jasper returned Isabelle to the others, she bade them all good night and fled to the safety of her cabin.

Once she gained that small sanctuary, she lit a single lamp, then sat on her bunk and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Her insides whirled with dread.

This was terrible. History was repeating itself.

“No,” she said, trying to impose order on the chaos of her thoughts. “I am not smitten with Lord Jasper. I refuse.”

The words were hollow, and she could not force herself to believe them. In the span of a few minutes, looking at the stars together, something inside her had cracked open, and she had no notion how to repair the armor around her heart.

She wrapped her arms about herself, as though she could somehow return to the safety of who she had been before the journey.

I should never have come. Trips to the Mediterranean were her undoing.

“Isabelle?” Mrs. Hodges stepped into the room and closed the door softly behind her. “What happened?”

“I looked at the stars with Lord Jasper.” Isabelle caught her breath on something very like a sob. “And it was lovely, and it was horrible, and now I’ve no notion of anything.”

“Oh, my dear.” There was more sympathy in Mrs. Hodges’s voice than Isabelle had heard there in a long while. “It’s painful to come out of the cocoon.”

“I feel . . . broken.”

Her companion nodded and settled beside her, giving her back a pat. “What do you think happens to the chrysalis when the butterfly emerges? It breaks. It is destroyed—but only in the process of becoming something new and better.”

Isabelle summoned up a crooked smile. “Are you saying I was a worm before?”

“Of course not.” A note of brusqueness crept back in Mrs. Hodges’s voice. “One can only take a metaphor so far. Just remember, transformation can be an awkward state.”

Isabelle felt beyond awkward. If she truly were turning into something else—the thought of which was rather terrifying—she could not see what she might become. She felt limp and useless, all her self-assurance gone.

Mrs. Hodges gave her back one last pat, then stood. “Nothing to do but move forward, eh? I’m for bed, myself.”

Sleep sounded better than anything else—a warm, dark place for Isabelle to escape to, with no sea, no sky, no stars. No self-possessed lords bewildering her at every turn. Just the comfort of the black.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.