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“Oh, my poor, sweet child!”

It was the Dowager Duchess—or Aunt Caroline, as the older woman had instructed Evie to call her after the wedding.

Could she still call her that now that Daniel intended to end their marriage?

The tears she had been holding back finally burst out of her when the older woman gathered her gently into her arms. She did not say anything, simply rubbing soothing circles on her back as Evie wailed.

“Aunt Caroline, h-he does not want me anymore…” She hiccupped miserably. “H-he wants to annul the marriage?—”

“Oh, Evie!” the older woman sighed sadly. “Daniel is a fool—most men are, unfortunately, even the good ones. But if you think he neither wants nor needs you, then you could not have been more mistaken, my dear child.”

“B-but he said so himself!”

“And like I said, most men are fools.”

Evie let out a bitter laugh. “My brother is, too. I don’t think I shall ever forgive him.”

“Do not worry about the Duke of Blackthorn for now.” Caroline smiled with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Your grandmama is currently downstairs, trying to make him see reason, although I would not object if she took a bludgeon to his head to do so!”

“Serves him right.”

She could always count on her grandmother to do what needed to be done. At the moment, Evie did not trust herself to not want to run her brother through with a rapier.

Or shoot him.

Fortunately, she was a poor shot who did not even know which end of a pistol to point.

“I know everything feels a little overwhelming right now,” the Dowager Duchess murmured, stroking her hair gently. It reminded her so much of how she had fallen asleep in Daniel’s arms last night, and Evie burst into a fresh round of tears.

“Daniel is a good man,” Caroline continued, the cadence of her voice a soothing balm to Evie’s terribly wounded heart. “Even after all that he had been through, all that he had suffered… Why, he would have been well justified if he had thrown me out of Ashton Hall!”

Evie gasped and drew back from the older woman. “Why would he do such an awful thing?”

Even more worrisome was whyshewould say such a thing.

The Dowager Duchess looked at her sadly and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear affectionately.

“Because, my dear, Daniel is not truly my nephew as we had the world believe—he is the illegitimate son of the late Duke of Ashton.”

Evie sucked in a harsh breath at the shocking revelation. It was so absurd, but in a strange way, it made a lot of sense.

Daniel never acted like all the other titled noblemen who had been born knowing their place in Society. No, there were times he most often acted like a ruffian, and she had simply chalked it up to just another aspect of his insufferable behavior towards her.

“I shall see who I need to blackmail to make sure we can get this marriage annulled.”

His words echoed hollowly in her head. She had initially thought that he simply meant to bribe or coerce his way into getting what he wanted. She did not think that he would actuallyblackmailsomeone into securing an annulment.

“Daniel might have been the son of a duke, but his childhood was far more miserable than you can imagine,” the Dowager Duchess told her in a sorrowful tone. “His mother was a maid in the estate that the former Duke took a fancy to, but like many of us in theton, our marriage had already been arranged by our parents. Before we were wed, his father sent his mother away with a pittance to ‘provide’ for her and the result of his dalliance.”

Provide? More like he meant to silence her with a meager amount!

Evie had never met the former Duke of Ashton before, but in her heart, she had already developed a keen dislike for the man who threw out a poor woman who was carrying his child.

“Many years into our marriage, we realized that I was barren,” the older woman sighed despondently. “I could not bear children, no matter how much we tried. We had consulted countless physicians, and I had to endure the endless tonics and herbs that were forced upon me in the hope that I might conceive a legitimate heir, but alas! It truly was not meant to be. It was then that his father recalled his dalliance with his maid and that she had already been with child when he had sent her away…”

“So, he sent the poor maid away, and when he was in need of an heir, he wanted them back?”

Evie was dumbfounded. She had heard all sorts of sordid tales, but she had never imagined that Daniel and his mother had actually been the victims of such a heartless man.