8

Anna Remington, daughter of his father’s old friend, Luke Remington, stood near the fireplace with her back to him, her hair flowing down her spine just as wild and glorious as it had been beside the lake the week before. Though this time there were less leaves in it.

Cedric waited, anticipation gathering tightly inside him. After Bonnie had informed him of the will bombshell, he’d spent an intense and very expensive couple of days with his legal team examining every inch of the document and its codicils, trying to find any loopholes. But there were none. His father had left nothing to chance.

The Haerton estate could only legally be owned by him if he married and had a son. Really, he should have expected more hoops to jump through, but he’d thought his father would have long since forgotten his existence, since Cedric had purposely forgotten his. A stupid thought, clearly. Or perhaps his father expected him to be grateful?

Regardless, he’d spent the past years of his life making sure the world and everyone in it knew that Cedric Blackwood was his own man and had nothing to do with his historic lineage. That he was vastly successful and a force to be reckoned with, in his own right. He’d built a billion-dollar high-risk venture- capital firm from nothing, using only his excellent brain and his business skills and, not only that, but was the scourge of the elite party circuit as well. He worked hard, played harder, and if his life was one of excess, it was an excess he’d earned.

And if he took a great amount of satisfaction that the name ‘Blackwood’ had become synonymous with a certain dissolute lifestyle, then what of it? Cedric didn’t care. His father certainly wouldn’t, because his father had never cared what he did.

But apparently his father had cared. In the last few years of his life he’d somehow remembered he had another son and that said son was going to inherit the title when he died, so naturally enough, in a last, spiteful gesture, old Magnus Blackwood had made sure that inheritance was as difficult for Cedric to get his hands on as possible. Because of course, in his father’s eyes, it wasn’t Cedric’s inheritance at all. It was his brother’s. Who’d died years ago.

Perhaps the old man was expecting Cedric to give up and let him have the last laugh. Cedric certainly didn’t need the money or the title, or the austere, gloomy house that went with it. He’d bought property in the country, and spent most of his time going from one country to another, following his business interests and the parties that went along with them, and certainly didn’t have any ties to his father or his title. He had no loyalty to the title, felt no need to settle down and continue the bloodline.

Domestic bliss was the last thing he wanted. And there was a comfortable, reassuring emptiness in his heart where sensations of an emotional nature should have been, and weren’t, that he was in no hurry to fill.

Honestly, now he didn't even know why he was doing this. He could walk away and let the dukedom go to his closest relatives. His Aunt Diana would be against it, but he could walk away if he wanted to and be done with this whole thing, but for some reason, here he was, about to get married just to claim the title he'd spent years of his life detesting.

Perhaps, he was doing it just to spite his father, even if Magnus was already dead. To prove that everything he'd done to prevent him from inheriting the title had been in vain. To make sure his father would not have the last laugh.

The house and the title were his and he would have both, and if his father thought that marriage and fatherhood would be enough to frustrate him, the old bastard was wrong.

Then after the codicil had been discovered, his lawyers had found something else amongst his father’s documents. Written down on a very old piece of paper and signed by both parties was an agreement that promised the Seventh Duke of Springbrook, to the oldest daughter of Dr Luke Remington. The agreement was dated long enough in the past that it was clear the Seventh Duke of Springbrook was, in fact, Cedric’s dead brother, Vincent, who’d died of meningitis when he was fifteen.

His brother who somehow in death was more alive than Cedric had ever been in life, at least to their father. Cedric was over the pain, but maybe the anger was still there.

So he’d got his legal team to look into the document and to research this Luke Remington, and, sure enough, they’d turned up a daughter. It appeared that the girl—or rather woman now—lived with her father and had remained unmarried.

Which had been all to the good. And then his team had handed him a photo of Miss Anna Remington, and it had felt as if he’d been struck by lightning. Because it turned out that the woman he’d met by the lake the week before was the same woman. Which made everything crystallize in his head.

That lovely, lovely woman would be his wife and together they would make the most beautiful child. He would have the inheritance his father had denied him, and she would make it a pleasure to do so. Vincent's intended bride would be his, the final repudiation of everything his father stood for. The old Duke had spent his life ignoring him, but he’d ended up giving Cedric a gift instead.

So he took it.

He’d pored over the information his team had provided for him, investigating every aspect of Anna Remington’s life. Which wasn’t much. She worked at the cafe in the village while caring for her father, who’d had a stroke nine years earlier. Her finances—because of course he investigated those—were in a terrible state, since she didn’t get paid much and obviously couldn’t get work elsewhere because of her father’s health. She was in dire straits and, as Cedric was a man who’d built his business empire by taking advantage of every opportunity that came his way, he would take advantage of this one too.