My Bride Thought I Was Dying In 5 Years — I Had A Very Different Plan
Part 2
Michael’s voice shook with genuine horror as he repeated the timeline back to her.
She amended it to six years if I took the medicinal waters at Bath, her voice completely devoid of malice.
It was purely, terrifyingly practical.
She stated plainly that I would eventually succumb to my ruined lungs or my failing liver.
In the meantime, she promised to tolerate my pompous, brooding silences.
She swore she would endure whatever dismal, fumbling duties were required of her in the dark.
But she would absolutely secure my accounts.
She intended to take over the rigorous management of my southern estates.
She argued that a man who spent his life sulking in London clubs certainly didn’t look at his own crop yields.
She planned to squirrel away enough capital to buy back her family’s lands.
By the time she was a wealthy widow at twenty-six, her people would finally be free.
I felt the floor tilt violently beneath my heavy boots.
I had expected shallow gold digging.
I had expected vanity and perhaps even hatred.
I had never expected a clinical autopsy.
She wasn’t plotting to seduce me with false affection.
She was plotting my estate management after my premature death.
She had reduced me, one of the most powerful men in England, to a frail, fumbling, diseased stepping stone.
The insult was so absolute, so profoundly unvarnished, that I didn’t feel immediate rage.
I felt a sickening, overwhelming wave of vertigo.
For the first time in my adult life, someone was dissecting me without a single shred of reverence.
There was no awe for my title.
There was only the brutal arithmetic of sheer survival.
I looked down at my own hands gripping the rough firewood.
They were incredibly strong hands, currently smeared with dirt and dried blood from a nasty splinter.
They were certainly not the hands of a pale, consumptive aristocrat waiting to die.
Michael softly told her it was an incredibly grim way to look at her life.
She replied that poverty was far grimmer, and for the first time, the steel in her voice finally cracked.
A bone-deep exhaustion bled clearly through her syllables.
She admitted she had fired the last two housemaids that morning because they were completely out of coal.
She was wearing her mother’s mourning dress from six years ago because it was the only wool thick enough to keep out the draft.
She told him she did not have the luxury of romance or fragile hope.
She declared I was buying a broodmare, and she was simply selling me one.
It was a calculated trade, and she at least had the dignity of knowing exactly what she was doing.
The sting to my massive pride was immediately complicated by a sudden, jarring stab of profound respect.
It was ugly, it was ruthless, but God, it was honest.
I could have turned around, mounted my horse, and ridden away to let her estate collapse into absolute ruin.
Instead, I shifted my weight, kicked the heavy oak door open with a dull thud, and stepped over the threshold in my muddy boots to stare into the eyes of my terrifying future bride.
I had completely misjudged her, but how would she react when the rugged vagrant standing in her ashes returned tomorrow as the Duke she was actively plotting to outlive?
