My Father Sold Me To A Duke 22 Years Older — His Reaction On Our Wedding Night Left Me Trembling
Part 1
Rain battered the stained glass, casting bruised shadows across the damp stone altar.
I stood rigid in heavy white silk that smelled faintly of camphor and desperation.
Beside me stood a man twenty-two years my senior, his face a landscape of hard lines and old weather.
This wasn’t romance, it was a transaction.
A bankrupt father’s debt erased by a duke’s heavy purse.
I braced for a tyrant’s cruelty.
What I didn’t expect, what truly undid me, was his quiet, devastating kindness.
The church smelled of wet wool, melting beeswax, and the sharp metallic tang of my father’s nervous sweat.
If I blinked, the tears pooling at the edges of my vision might fall.
Richard’s fingers dug into my arm, a bruising grip masquerading as paternal support.
He had been shaking for three months, ever since his shipping venture collapsed and the creditors began circling our London townhouse like starved dogs.
Then came Craig, Duke of Harrington.
He didn’t arrive in a gilded carriage or send flowers.
He had simply walked into my father’s study wearing mud-splattered riding boots and a heavy wool coat and paid the debts.
In exchange, he required a wife.
I was twenty, Craig was forty-two, the math was a ledger entry, simple and cold.
Now standing at the altar, I finally looked at him.
He was a large man, broad-shouldered and thick-chested.
His jaw was covered in a rough shadow of stubble as if he hadn’t bothered to summon a barber for his own wedding day.
He stared at the vicar with an expression of mild, weary impatience.
“I do,” Craig said.
His voice was gravelly, low, and entirely devoid of inflection.
When it was my turn, my throat closed.
I felt my father’s fingernails bite into the thin silk covering my bicep.
“I do,” I rasped.
Craig reached for my hand to slide the ring onto my finger.
I flinched.
His thick fingers paused.
He looked down at my hand, small and trembling in his massive, calloused palm.
There was dirt beneath one of his fingernails.
He slid the heavy gold band over my knuckle.
It hung loose on my pale finger, cold and heavy.
He didn’t squeeze my hand.
He dropped it the moment the metal cleared my joint.
The reception was a suffocating affair held in the echoing, drafty hall of my father’s half-empty house.
I stood by a peeling radiator, nursing a glass of warm, flat champagne.
The corset beneath my dress was laced so tightly it pressed violently against my lower ribs.
“Bought a broodmare, really?” a voice murmured from behind a velvet curtain.
I swallowed the acidic champagne.
I wasn’t just miserable, I was furious.
I was fundamentally, bitterly angry at the towering man standing across the room drinking whiskey in silence.
Craig caught me staring.
Across the expanse of the room, his dark eyes locked onto mine.
I raised my chin, my jaw tight, projecting every ounce of my resentment into that single glare.
Craig stared back for a long moment, then slowly he set his glass down.
He didn’t look angry, he looked profoundly exhausted.
He crossed the room in long, heavy strides.
He stopped two feet from me, close enough that I could smell the starch in his collar.
“Go upstairs,” he said, his voice a low rumble meant only for me.
“Pack a small bag for the carriage, we leave in twenty minutes.”
“The guests haven’t eaten the cake, your grace,” I said, my voice dripping with thin, icy politeness.
“I don’t care about the cake,” Craig replied flatly.
“You look like you’re about to faint and I have an estate to run.”
He turned and walked away before I could formulate a response.
The carriage was dark, smelling of worn leather, horse hair, and the bitter cold of a November evening.
We had been driving north for three hours.
Every jolt sent a shock wave up my spine.
I sat pressed against the far corner of the tufted leather bench, my knees drawn tightly together.
Craig sat opposite me.
He hadn’t spoken a single word since we left the city limits.
He was leaning back, arms crossed over his broad chest, his eyes closed.
My head pounded.
The tight lacing of my corset combined with the sickening sway of the carriage and the utter lack of food in my stomach was creating a disastrous internal pressure.
The carriage hit a particularly deep pothole.
The vehicle violently tipped.
I gasped, throwing a hand over my mouth.
My stomach heaved violently.
Craig’s eyes snapped open.
He took one look at my pale, sweating face and slammed his fist against the wooden panel of the roof.
“Halt!” he roared.
Before the driver could even climb down, Craig threw the door open.
The biting winter wind rushed in.
I scrambled past him, practically falling out of the carriage.
I hit the muddy roadside, falling to my hands and knees.
I retched into the tall wet grass.
It was utterly humiliating.
On my wedding day, dressed in my silk and lace, I was on my hands and knees in the mud, vomiting violently into a ditch.
I hacked and coughed, shivering with the sheer force of it.
Tears of shame and physical exertion streamed down my cold cheeks.
I expected a sneer.
I expected him to express disgust at his new broken purchase.
Footsteps crunched in the gravel behind me.
He closed the distance between us in two heavy strides, his jaw tight, and reached out.
