Her Family Cast Her Out for Being Barren — A Widowed Duke with Five Heirs Chose Her.

Chapter 3

Ashworth House was colder than its reputation. Grand, yes, with marble floors that stretched like frozen lakes and a staircase that could have swallowed her childhood home whole. But quiet. Wrongly quiet. A house holding its breath, waiting for something that never came. No laughter echoing from the upper floors. No running footsteps. The silence had a texture to it, thick and heavy, like dust sheets draped over furniture no one used anymore.

The Duke received her in his study, standing by the window with his back half turned, as if he had not quite decided whether to face her. “Mrs. Grey.” He turned. He was younger than she had expected. Perhaps thirty-five. But there was nothing young left in his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had watched too much die. “Thank you for coming.”

“Your letter left me little choice, Your Grace.”

“Curiosity is a powerful thing.” The faintest curve touched his mouth. Not quite a smile. “Then let me satisfy it. I am asking you to marry me.”

Eleanora sat very still. The words did not fit together. They could not. “Forgive me. I think you misunderstand my circumstances. I am the woman London is currently amusing itself by destroying. I cannot give you an heir.”

“I have five children, Mrs. Grey. I require no more heirs.”

“Then what do you require?”

He did not answer right away. He moved to his desk, picked up a paperweight, turned it in his fingers like he needed something to hold. “A mother for my children. One who will not abandon them.”

“Surely half of London’s eligible women would offer that more willingly than a woman everyone already calls cursed.”

“They would offer it for my title. For Ashworth House. For the inheritance that comes attached to my name.” His eyes lifted to hers, and something raw moved behind them. “You have no reason to want any of that. You have already lost everything society can take. Which means you are the only woman in London who might actually stay for the right reason.”

“And what reason is that?”

“The children. Not me.”

Eleanora studied him. The tight set of his jaw. The way his hands would not quite stay still. The grief that sat on him like a coat he had not taken off in years. There was something he was not saying. She could feel the shape of it, even if she could not name it. “Why me specifically? You could have chosen anyone.”

“Because you understand what it is to be discarded for something you could not control.” His voice dropped, quieter now. “My children have been discarded too. Not by blood. By everyone who was supposed to stay.”

It was not romance. It was not even kindness, exactly. It was something closer to recognition. One broken thing reaching toward another.

“I will give you three days to consider it,” he said, turning back to the window. “After that, I will not ask again.”

Eleanora left Ashworth House with more questions than she had arrived with, and the strange, unsettling sense that the answers mattered more than her pride. She said yes on the third day. Not because she had any reason to trust him. But because three days was exactly long enough to realize she had nothing left to lose.