My Ex Dumped Me For A Millionaire Heiress — Now I’m The Duchess Of Blackwood

Part 1

I stood very straight in the middle of my living room, refusing to let him see my hands shake.

The man across from me, Tyler Dawson, shifted his weight and stared intently at the worn pattern of the rug.

We had been engaged for two full years.

He had come to tell me, with every appearance of deep reluctance and not one genuine grain of it in his heart, that he could not marry me after all.

He told me Brenda Hayes’s father had a massive trust fund.

He actually used the word ‘obligations’ to describe his sudden, urgent interest in her millions.

My voice stayed perfectly level as I released him from our promise.

I would have bitten through my own tongue before I let him see the crushing cost of his betrayal.

I told him to give Brenda my very sincere congratulations.

He flushed a deep, uncomfortable red, but he certainly didn’t stay.

Within fifteen minutes, I was standing alone in a painfully quiet room with a returned ring sitting heavy and cold in my palm.

Two years of my life had been entirely, irrevocably wasted.

I was twenty-five, with no real fortune, stuck in a town where everyone knew everyone else’s business.

I had given the best years of my life waiting on his prospects and his timeline.

He had thrown me over the exact moment a much richer girl smiled in his direction.

Within a week, the whole county would be whispering about the poor, jilted Brooks girl.

I didn’t cry.

I came from stubborn, quiet stock, and I learned young that tears were a currency the world would gladly take from you and give you absolutely nothing in return.

I looked out the window at the gray, dying autumn garden.

I realized with a cold, frightening clarity that I simply could not stay in this town.

I would rather be a struggling governess in Scotland than be pitied at every dinner table for the rest of my natural life.

Aunt Linda arrived three days later with a great deal of heavy luggage and a startling proposition.

She was a brisk, worldly widow who lived in the north and actively disapproved of nearly everything.

She sat down in my living room and told me she had a specific use for me.

There was a gentleman in her neighborhood who urgently wanted a wife.

He was a widower, significantly older than me, known for being a difficult, silent, and forbidding sort of man.

He absolutely did not want romance.

He wanted a sensible, quiet woman to run his massive house and be a practical companion.

It was to be a marriage of mutual convenience and nothing more.

She warned me it wouldn’t be a love match, but I would be my own mistress in my own house, with more than enough money.

No one would ever pity me or look down on me again.

I asked for his name.

She said his name was David Reed, a fiercely private man who kept a quiet place called Blackwood up north.

She added that he had never in his entire life been known to say a single thing he did not mean.

After the oily lies of Tyler Dawson, a man who only said what he meant sounded like a genuine revelation.

I told her I would meet her Mr. Reed.

I met him a fortnight later in my aunt’s drawing room on a gray, biting November afternoon.

I had expected someone dusty, apologetic, and desperate for whatever plain woman would take pity on his loneliness.

The man who stood up when I entered the room was none of those things.

He was exceptionally tall, perhaps forty, with dark hair going sharp iron at the temples.

His face was hard and arrestingly handsome in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with softness.

He possessed a pair of piercing, pale silver eyes that didn’t flick over my figure or dismiss my plain face.

He looked at me steadily, as though I were a complex document he intended to read to the very end.

He was brutally, refreshingly direct.

He told me he was looking for a wife, but definitely not for affection.

He wanted a companion of good sense to preside over his household and share his table.

He offered an established home, his unwavering protection, and his absolute, unvarnished honesty.

I told him my entire story, about Tyler and the heiress and the crushing pity of my hometown.

I held his intense gaze and told him I would gladly take his brutal honesty.

We were married a month later in a small, incredibly quiet ceremony, exactly as he had promised.

I packed my single trunk, completely ready for a quiet, unremarkable life at a modest country estate.

But when our carriage finally crested the heavily wooded hill two days later, I didn’t see a modest stone house.

I saw a colossal, breathtaking palace of golden stone stretching for half a mile, the seat of immense, staggering power.

My new husband slowly set down his book, his jaw ticking, and finally confessed his true identity.

I turned to look at the man I had just married, the man who had promised me nothing but absolute honesty, and realized I didn’t know him at all.