Her Family Cast Her Out for Being Barren — Three Months Later, a Widowed Duke with Five Heirs Chose Her as His Bride, but the Real Reason He Wanted Her in His Home Left Everyone Stunned.

PART 2

“Forgive me.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “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, Miss Hail. I require no more heirs.”

“Then what do you require?”

He didn’t answer right away. He moved to his desk instead, turned a paperweight over in his fingers like he needed something to hold.

“A mother for my children. One who will not abandon them. That is all.”

“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 Lockwood House. For the inheritance that comes attached to my name.” His eyes lifted to hers, and for a moment something raw moved behind them. “You have no reason to want any of that. You’ve already lost everything society can take, which means you’re the only woman in London who might actually stay for the right reason.”

“And what reason is that?”

“The children. Not me.”

Victoria studied him — the tight set of his jaw, the way his hands wouldn’t quite stay still, the grief that sat on him like a coat he hadn’t taken off in years. There was something he wasn’t saying. She could feel the shape of it even without a name for it.

“Why me specifically? You could have chosen anyone.”

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

It wasn’t romance. It wasn’t even kindness, exactly. It was something closer to recognition — one ruined thing reaching toward another.

“You don’t know me, your grace.”

“No. And you don’t know me.” He held very still. “But I watched what they did to you outside that wedding breakfast, Miss Hail. I watched, and I did nothing. And I have not stopped thinking about it since.”

So he had seen her in the rain. Invisible to everyone else in London — and he had seen her.

“I’ll give you three days to consider it,” he said, turning back to the window, already retreating behind whatever wall he lived behind. “After that, I won’t ask again.”

Victoria left Lockwood House with more questions than she’d arrived with, and the strange, unsettling sense that the answers mattered more than her pride.

She said yes on the third day, because three days was exactly long enough to realize she had nothing else.

The wedding was small, quiet, almost furtive — a special license, a near-empty chapel, no flowers, because Vincent said flowers felt like a lie. Victoria signed her name and became a duchess in under ten minutes, and felt less married than she had the first time, when at least there had been hope in the room.

Lockwood House didn’t celebrate her arrival. It closed around her like a fist.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Puitt, met her at the door with a curtsy so shallow it barely qualified as one.

“Your grace.” The title came out like an accusation.

And behind that door, Victoria understood, waited five children who had already buried two mothers — and had no intention of losing their hearts to a third.