The Duke’s Shotgun Wedding(14)

He pulled the locket from his pocket and held it up in the glow of the fire and moonlight, despising the relief he felt to have back what she’d gifted to him.

His father had died in a carriage accident several years past, and his mother, Margaret Abigail Jackson, the dowager Duchess of Calydon, had not even honored the appropriate mourning period before wedding her lifelong lover. She had not suffered the condemnation of society overly much, either.

Her eldest son, on the other hand, had long harbored a fathomless disdain for her because of her illicit affair and complete disregard for his father. A contempt so deep Sebastian had hardly deigned to speak with her. After he came into the title, he had wasted no time in banishing her to the dowager house and cutting off her allowance, ignoring her pleas, cold and indifferent to the perfidious female’s tears and machinations.

A few months back the family solicitor had hand-delivered her secret cache of diaries, written over the years of his childhood. His father had held them in his possession and left instruction for them to be handed to Sebastian at a certain time. He glanced at the packet of bound journals on his desk still awaiting him to read them fully. His parents had endured a cold marriage, never kissing or touching. He barely remembered any words or gestures of affection at all, only the perfunctory kiss his father normally placed on her forehead, unable to do more in the face of her revulsion for him. Sebastian had hated her after discovering her in the garden with her lover at the tender age of six, furious at realizing the cause of the constant arguments which had resulted in the nearly total absence of his father from his life.

All because she had a lover whom she could not relinquish.

Two things he learned from the couple of diaries he’d read thus far: his unfaithful bitch of a mother loved her paramour unashamedly and unreservedly, and she’d abhorred the touch of his father, who worshipped the ground she walked on. Sebastian had suspected what he would find, but had still found it difficult to read the words of a woman he had once loved. She had hardly found it fit to love him in return, too busy with her lover. The pain he felt reading her words had been too real, so he had yet to read the remainder.

Her journals also brought home another inescapable fact. That he needed an heir. His father had not been lying in the letters he left for him. When he wrote about Anthony not being his son, Sebastian had thought it bitter ranting. However, her diaries revealed Anthony and Constance to be the children of her lover. His father had proof of this as he had not been in her bed for years, and he also had one of her journal as irrevocable evidence. His father hated his wife’s perfidy so much that he had promised to use the journal to renounce Anthony and Constance, if Sebastian did not marry and obtain an heir for himself.

Sebastian had told Anthony, and let him read the damning letter his father left him. The pain that had flared in his brother’s eyes had punched Sebastian deep. He had seen right through the laughter and quip that Anthony now understood why their father had always been so cold with him.

Sebastian had promised to fight the provisions their father had implemented with the lawyer. But Anthony had refused, fearing how scandal would devastate their sister and mother. And it was possible that even now Anthony’s nemesis was hinting of his illegitimacy, and the rumors were being whispered, already tainting Constance, diminishing her chances of marrying well. Sebastian had seen the profound relief in his brother at being freed of the unwanted responsibility of their father’s titles. So he knew he had no choice in the matter.

He could not bear the idea of his titles and lands passing to strangers, or worse, reverting to the crown. The estates, the tenants, the responsibilities of nobility that he had learned at his father’s knee, the things that had bound them together in respect and a common purpose from the day he was born, were his to shoulder, and his alone.

Except—

Marriage had always left a sour taste in his mouth, and until the fateful day he had learned otherwise, he had always believed women served but one purpose.

But then, at thirty, he found himself suddenly resolved to the idea of a wife. He had duly composed a list of eligible females. The chore had left the most God-awful taste in his mouth. And just as he’d been about to resign himself to the worst fate imaginable, something miraculous had happened.

Jocelyn had crashed into his life pointing a gun right at his jaded heart.

Disbelief and fascination had held him immobile in his chair as she had pointed the laughable weapon at him. He could have easily relieved her of it anytime he wished, but he had been too riveted by the drama unfolding before his eyes.

He’d known in an instant he had to possess her.