They Forced The Princess To Marry A Beggar… Then He Walked Back Into The Palace As Britain’s……

Chapter 3

“Any woman in Britain would be honored to become the Duchess of Ashbourne,” his steward had said before she arrived, as though he were delivering good news.

Sebastian had stared at the man for a long moment. “I know,” he said. “That is precisely the problem.”

He had inherited the title young, at twenty-four, when his father’s heart gave out during a morning ride. The old duke had been a hard man, fair but distant, and Sebastian had spent his youth watching women circle his father like moths around a flame — not for the man himself, but for the crest on his carriage door. He had vowed then that he would never marry a woman who could not see the man beneath the crown.

Nine women had tried. Nine women had failed.

Late that night, he rode to the capital and requested an audience with the king. King Edmund received him in the private study, a small room lined with books that no one ever read, where the fire crackled low and the shadows stretched long across the carpet.

“You want to do what?” the king asked, setting down his glass.

“Disappear,” Sebastian said. “I want to leave as a common traveler, without my name, without my title. I want to find a woman who would choose the man before the duke.”

The king studied him for a long time. He was an old man now, tired from thirty years of rule, and something in his eyes suggested he understood more than Sebastian had expected him to.

“You realize what you are risking,” the king said. “If you are recognized, if your identity is discovered before you are ready, the scandal will follow you for the rest of your life. And if you fail — if no woman chooses you as you are — you will return to a title that will feel like a cage.”

“I know.”

“Then go,” the king said, and his voice carried a weight that made Sebastian pause at the door. “But remember this, Sebastian. Truth often comes at a painful price. And the woman who chooses a beggar may not be the woman you think she is.”

Sebastian left before dawn, shedding his velvet coat for rough wool, his polished boots for cracked leather, his signet ring hidden deep in a traveling sack that smelled of horses and road dust. He walked out of Ashbourne Castle as a duke and reached the capital as a man no one would look at twice.

He arrived on the morning of the royal garland ceremony, drawn by curiosity rather than intention. The streets were crowded with travelers, merchants, and noble families pressing toward the palace gates. He let himself be carried along by the current, invisible among the silk and satin, a ghost in plain sight.

He had not planned to enter the gardens. He had not planned to stand among the noblemen who straightened their collars and adjusted their cuffs, hoping to catch the eye of the younger princess. He had simply been swept inside by the tide of bodies, and by the time he realized where he was, the gates had closed behind him.

The trumpets sounded. The princess stepped forward.

And Sebastian forgot, for one breathless moment, that he was supposed to be invisible.

She was not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. That was the first surprising thing he noticed about her. She was quieter than that, deeper than that. Her hair was the color of autumn honey, pinned back with silver combs that caught the light. Her gown was pale blue, simple compared to the elaborate constructions worn by the women around her. She moved like someone who had learned to take up very little space, even on a dais built for her.

But her eyes — her eyes were the color of a forest after rain, and when she lifted the garland, they held the entire weight of the ceremony without flinching.

Sebastian watched her from the back of the crowd, and something shifted in his chest. Something he had not felt during any of the nine introductions, any of the rehearsed conversations, any of the carefully arranged dinners. Something that felt, against all reason, like hope.

Then the garland flew, and the laughter came, and the garland landed around his neck, and he realized that the king’s warning had been truer than either of them knew.