My fiancé didn’t break my heart. He appraised it, weighed it, and sold it to England’s most feared recluse—the so-called “Rotting Duke”—to settle his gambling debts, certain I would wither away inside that crumbling estate. But instead, I became a Duchess… and when the locked West Wing finally opened, it revealed the heartbreaking reason the Duke had chosen me long before I ever knew his name.

PART 5

Winter clamped down on Yorkshire with a suffocating grip. The moors turned iron-hard and white.

Inside Harwood Hall, life found a strange functional rhythm. We were not lovers. We were generals managing a besieged fortress. We ate breakfast together, reviewing the estate manager’s daily reports. We spent afternoons in the library — where a modest fire now burned daily — reading in companionable silence.

We were polite. We were efficient.

We were running out of time.

The reminder arrived in a thick cream-coloured envelope bearing the wax seal of Nathaniel’s London solicitors. It was delivered during dinner. Nathaniel broke the seal, read the brief contents, and laid the parchment face-down on the polished mahogany.

The muscle in his jaw jumped.

“Bad news?” I asked, slicing into a piece of roasted mutton.

“Mr. Finch wishes to remind me,” Nathaniel said, his voice stripped of the warmth we had slowly built over two months, “that the fifth anniversary of my father’s death approaches. The terms of the will require proof of an heir — or at least a confirmed pregnancy — by that date. That gives us eight months.”

The mutton suddenly tasted like ash. I set my knife and fork down carefully.

We had not spoken of it since my first night in the library. He slept in the east wing. I slept in the west-facing chamber at the end of the east corridor. We had built a bridge of ledgers and mud and shared exhaustion — but we had carefully avoided the vast, terrifying chasm of the marriage bed.

“I see,” I managed.

The silence in the dining room felt heavy enough to shatter the crystal.

“I will not force you, Cecilia.”

He stared at his plate, refusing to look at me.

“If you cannot bear the thought of — if you cannot do it, I will write to Finch. I will forfeit the estate.” A pause. “I have enough personal funds remaining to secure a small cottage for us on the coast. You will not be destitute.”

He was offering to throw away his ancestral home — the very thing he had bought me to save — to spare me the horror of touching him.

The sheer weight of his self-loathing hit me like a physical blow. He truly believed he was too grotesque to be loved, let alone desired.

“Do not be absurd.”

The sharpness of my tone made his head snap up.

“We have spent the last eight weeks fixing roofs, clearing ditches, and arguing over the price of winter wheat. I did not ruin my favourite boots in a freezing bog just to abandon this estate to your degenerate cousin.”

He stared at me, his eye wide.

“I will come to your rooms tonight,” I said, keeping my voice as clinical as possible to mask the sudden violent hammering of my heart.

I stood, tossing my napkin onto the table.

“Have a fire built.”

I did not wait for his answer. I left the room, walking steadily, until I reached the safety of my own chambers — where I finally allowed my hands to shake.

Hours later, the house was dead silent.

I stood before my vanity mirror in a plain white cotton nightgown, a heavy wool shawl wrapped tightly around my shoulders. I looked pale. I looked terrified. I was not a romantic fool. I knew the mechanics of the marital act.

But this was not about mechanics. This was about navigating the deep, jagged wounds of a man who hated his own skin.

I picked up a single candle and walked down the long dark corridor.

Nathaniel’s door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open. His bedchamber was stark — no tapestries, no heavy velvet curtains, just a massive four-poster bed, a washstand, and a roaring fire in the hearth.

Nathaniel stood by the window, staring out into the pitch-black night. He wore a simple linen shirt unbuttoned at the throat and dark trousers.

He did not turn around when I closed the door behind me.

“You do not have to do this,” he said to the glass. His voice was fractured. “You have proven your worth to this estate ten times over, Cecilia. You don’t have to pretend.”

I set the candle on a small table. I dropped my wool shawl. It pooled on the floorboards with a soft whisper.

“I am not pretending,” I said, walking toward him. “Turn around, Nathaniel.”

He remained rigid for a long moment. Then he turned.

The firelight threw harsh shadows across the left side of his face. He flinched under my gaze, instinctively tilting his head to present his unscarred profile.

I reached out and placed my hand flat against his chest.

His heart was hammering wildly beneath the thin linen, betraying the stoic mask he wore.

“Look at me,” I commanded softly.

He turned his head back. His one good eye was full of a desperate, guarded fear.

I lifted my other hand. I did not hesitate. I did not let my fingers tremble. I pressed my palm gently against the ruined, puckered skin of his left cheek.

It felt hot, slick, unnaturally smooth in some places, rigidly tight in others.

Nathaniel gasped — a sharp, broken sound. He closed his eyes, his entire massive frame shaking under the feather-light touch of my hand. No one had touched the left side of his face in five years. Not a doctor. Not a servant. Not a friend.

“It’s just skin, Nathaniel,” I whispered, sliding my fingers up into the hair at his temple. “It is the skin of a man who survived. It doesn’t frighten me.”

He reached up and his large, rough hand wrapped around my wrist. I thought he was going to pull my hand away.

Instead, he pressed my palm harder against his scarred cheek, leaning into my touch like a starving man finding bread.

A ragged sob tore from his throat. The walls he had built — the anger, the isolation, the monstrous persona of the rotting duke — crumbled into dust. He fell to his knees in front of me, wrapping his thick arms around my waist, burying his face in the folds of my cotton nightgown.

I stood in the quiet room, staring down at the broad, trembling shoulders of my husband. I ran my hands through his dark, thick hair.

We were two people who had been sold, burned, and cast aside by the world. But standing here in the heat of the fire, I realised with startling clarity that we were no longer broken.

We had simply been remade.

“Come,” I said gently, tugging at his shoulders until he stood. “We have a contract to fulfil.”

He looked down at me, the fear gone from his eye — replaced by something fierce, hungry, and entirely devoted.

He did not carry me to the bed with a theatrical flourish. He took my hand, his fingers lacing tightly through mine, and led me there.

There was no poetry in the dark. There was awkwardness, and the shifting of heavy blankets, and the sharp intake of breath — but there was also a profound grounding warmth. When he kissed me, his mouth was rough and desperate. When his hands moved over my skin, they were careful, reverent, treating me not as a commodity to be used but as something precious he was terrified to break.

I pulled him closer, mapping the expanse of his scarred back with my fingertips — anchoring him to the present. Anchoring him to me.