Page 49 of The Replacement Duchess

“Then I have no choice but to accept!”

Gretna Green was Jonathan’s safe haven, and the journey there could not have passed fast enough. One small trip later, he was married for the second time, not that his bride knew that. He had not told her a thing. Peggy was none the wiser about his daughters, or his late wife, or even his title. As far as she knew, he was John Winston, a man of moderate means and nothing more, and he adored that about her.

Their marriage was perfect until that changed.

He hadn’t meant to let it slip, but one day they were in their bedchambers, wrapped in each other’s embrace, and he had not fully awoken from his slumber when he spoke softly.

“I am so glad I left my life behind. I could never live the life of an earl again.”

“Again?”

“Again, yes.”

She pulled away from him, sitting up in their bed and staring at him with wide eyes. “You are… an earl?”

“In none of the ways that matter. It is a title and nothing more.”

“And you thought it unnecessary to tell me that in the last seven years?”

“Of course, I did. What difference would it make beyond making you see me differently?”

“Because you lied. You told me you were nothing more than a gentleman who had traveled from town to town.”

“That is all I was. It just so happened that instead of traveling from town to town, you just so happened to be in the first town that I came to.”

“Then tell me, John—if that is truly your name—why were you in Scotland? Why were you so far from home?”

“Because I could not do it anymore,” he sighed, exasperated. “I could no longer sit in that house and look at those girls and be reminded of my wife.”

“Oh, God, you have a wife there? You have daughters?”

“Yes. Well, no. My wife passed away. And my daughters, well, they are alive and well, as far as I know, but they were not sons. I have no heir, and so?—”

“And so you thought you would find a way to have one. Is that it? Well, I will not play some part in your plans to abandon your daughters as if they are nothing. Go back to them.”

“I will not abandon you.”

“You will go,” she thundered. “You know perfectly well what my father did to me as a girl. You will not do the same to them simply to fill out the list of demands that came with your title.”

“Peggy, dear, I?—”

“I shall give you until tonight to have your affairs in order, and then you will leave. You and I are not going to continue.”

“I am your husband.”

“You are a liar. You have left those girls, I suppose without so much as a goodbye, and you expect me to be happy about it. I am not. Your duty is to your daughters. Go to them. You have no home here.”

And just like that, he lost the only place that had ever truly felt like home. He should have gone home, and he knew that, but he could not bring himself to. He couldn’t look the girls in the eye, knowing that their existence had made him lose the only person he had ever truly loved. If he hadn’t hated them before, he certainly did then and there.

After a few more years of living in a stupor, he had nowhere else to go. That had been the only reason why he returned to the manor house, and it was there that he found a letter addressed to him. It was Peggy, and he prayed that it would say that she had changed her mind and that she wanted him to return to her. Instead, it was a letter telling him that she had found him through asking around and that she thought he was a terrible man, but that she was with child, and that as they were married, he was a legitimate heir.

I hope you are content at last, she signed it off, and in spite of what she had called him, he could not help but rejoice.

A son. He had an heir. An heir that was to come of age and take over his estate.

Things needed to change.

CHAPTER 14

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