Her Mother Told Her to “Just Endure” After She Was Sold to the Duke for £100,000 of Her Father’s Debts—But Behind the Locked Bedroom Door, His First Words Shattered Everything She Had Been Taught About Marriage

PART 2

He stood there, looking at me across the expanse of the room.

I sat rigid on the edge of the bed, my chin tucked to my chest, my eyes squeezed shut. I was waiting. Bracing. Preparing for the hands, the weight, the pain that my mother had promised.

Do not flinch. Do not speak. Endure.

But the footsteps did not come toward the bed.

Instead, I heard the soft clink of crystal.

I forced my eyes open just a fraction.

Jasper had walked over to a small side table near the fireplace. He picked up a crystal decanter and poured a small measure of amber liquid into a glass. He did not drink it. He just held it, staring into the flames of the hearth.

“My mother,” he said suddenly.

I jumped. His voice cracked through the silence like a whip.

“My mother,” he repeated, his tone conversational but edged with something bitter. “Told me once that a man’s wedding night is the only time he is permitted to act entirely without consequence. That the woman in his bed is his property, and he need not concern himself with her comfort.”

My blood turned to ice water.

Oh, God. He is telling me not to fight.

I gripped the sheets tighter.

He turned away from the fire. He looked across the room at me. His gaze traveled over my rigid posture, my trembling shoulders, the sheer terror that must have been screaming from my wide, glassy eyes.

He set the glass down hard.

“It seems our mothers attended the same horrific school of thought.”

I blinked. Confused.

He did not move toward me. He crossed his arms over his chest, keeping a very deliberate distance between us.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice was rough, stripped of its polished veneer. “You are sitting there like a prisoner waiting for the firing squad. You look as though you expect me to throw you down and ravage you.”

My breath hitched. “I—I know my duty, your grace.”

He let out a short, harsh breath that might have been a laugh, though there was no humor in it. “Your duty.”

He ran a hand through his dark hair, looking suddenly incredibly tired.

“Charlotte.” My name was not formal this time. It was an anchor. “I paid your father’s debts because I required a wife to satisfy my trustees. I required a respectable woman with a title to run this obscenely large house. I made a business arrangement.”

He took a single step forward.

I flinched.

He stopped immediately.

“But I did not buy a broodmare,” he said, his voice dropping. “I did not buy a victim to terrorize in the dark.”

I stared at him, my mind struggling to process the words. It went against everything I had been taught.

“I am aware of the rumors about men of my station,” he continued. “I am aware of what women tell each other about this night. But I refuse to be a monster in my own home. And I absolutely refuse to take a woman who is looking at me as if I am the devil himself.”

He walked over to the large armchair in the corner of the room — far from the bed. He grabbed a blanket, threw it over the upholstery, and sat down. He stretched his long legs out and looked back at me.

“Go to sleep, Charlotte.”

I was paralyzed. “I—I don’t understand.”

“It is not a complicated instruction,” he said, resting his head back. “You are exhausted. I am exhausted. The performance is over. You can breathe now.”

“But the marriage,” I stammered, the conditioning running too deep to simply switch off. “If it is not consummated — my father’s debts, the trustees — what happens to the arrangement?”

“Let them worry about that,” he said, and a dangerous, arrogant edge slipped into his tone. “I am the Duke of Kinsley. Whatever conditions my father’s lawyers wrote into that trust, I will deal with them myself, in my own time. It is not a burden I intend to place on you tonight.”

He looked at me, and his expression softened just a fraction.

“I will not touch you, Charlotte. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until you actually want me to. And if that day never comes, then we will live as polite roommates. But I will not be another transaction in your life.”

I stared at the man sitting in the shadows of the corner — the ruthless, terrifying Duke of Kinsley — and felt the invisible chains of my mother’s words begin to snap.

“Do you understand me?” he asked.

I let out a long, shuddering breath.

“Yes,” I whispered.