Opposites in everything…

Except needing to marry!

For Adelia Worthington, only marrying railway magnate Simeon Morgan will secure her family’s home. In return, she’ll give Simeon a place in society. A marriage is the last thing either wants, especially when it’s clear this self-made man thinks she’s a pampered heiress! But what’s even more inconvenient than their marriage is that the sparks of fury that fly between them are igniting a simmering desire that won’t be ignored.

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor.

Also by Sophia James

Ruined by the Reckless Viscount

A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

Gentlemen of Honour miniseries

A Night of Secret Surrender

A Proposition for the Comte

The Cinderella Countess

Secrets of a Victorian Household collection

Miss Lottie’s Christmas Protector

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Their Marriage of Inconvenience

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90140-0

THEIR MARRIAGE OF INCONVENIENCE

© 2020 Sophia James

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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This book is dedicated to my father, Ron Kivell.

He, too, was an honourable man,

with a true moral compass, and I miss him every day.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

Extract

About the Publisher

Chapter One
London—July 1842

Miss Adelia Worthington knew how dangerous her plan was, but she couldn’t turn back now, for when one was desperate, desperate measures had a need of being taken.

The door knocker was in her hand and she banged it thrice against a polished silvered strike plate. The servant who answered the summons looked about the street as if to understand the truth of a woman being so very alone here at this time of the night.

‘I have come to see Mr Simeon Morgan.’

‘Is he expecting you, miss?’

‘He is not, but I know he is in residence and would appreciate a word.’

The clock in the hallway chimed out the hour of ten thirty, underlining the question in the servant’s face, and for a moment Adelia thought he might simply shut the door.

‘I am Lady Worthington.’ Perhaps if she used the status of her mother’s title he might allow her access.

The name meant something, she could see that it did, for he faltered and stepped back, a blast of wind from the street helping to make up his mind.

‘Very well, my lady. If you would follow me in, I will find you a seat and tell the master you require an audience.’

At that she almost smiled because he could not know that she required so very much more.

One moment later and perched on a chair of dark velvet studded in shiny brass buttons, Adelia looked around the room she was now in. The elaborate town house was exactly as she had expected it to be, full of pomp and richness, the furniture and curtains assaulting her senses. New money always screamed with a desperate need to be noticed and it was no different here, the colours of every expensive fabric, paper and wood surface clashing with the ones next to them.

If this was a tune, it would have been discordant and shrill. If this were a painting, there would have been no quiet subject peering out from within the frame. No, this excess was drawn in bold harsh strokes, the jarring and inharmonious risk of placing everything one owned on display for all to admire and marvel at. An unmeasured pretension that spoke of boasting and swagger and a certain self-importance.

She had expected it to be so, for Mr Simeon Morgan was one of the newcomers, his fortune made in clever investments in the freshly established railway lines destined to run the length and breadth of Britain. While many of his competitors were collapsing all around him with their over-optimistic speculations, he seemed to have forged ahead unscathed. By luck or acumen, she had no way of telling.

She longed for Athelridge Hall and its old-fashioned quiet colours even as her next thought overlaid that one. The Worthington estate could be gone from them completely and swiftly if this meeting did not go well.

A noise to one side had her looking up and a small girl stood there, her long dark hair plaited and one eye blackened.

Shock held Adelia immobile.

‘You are very pretty.’ The child’s voice carried an accent from the north and the cut of her nightwear was not in the style of any servant’s offspring. Mr Morgan’s daughter, perhaps? My goodness, had he been married? Was he still? She had not heard a word about any union and horror consumed her at the very thought.

A flurry behind had another woman appearing, one who clearly had no compunction about grabbing the girl roughly and pulling her away. Should she say something? Should she demand from the older woman some assurance as to the child’s welfare? Adelia stood to follow them just as the first servant returned with a calling card in his hands.

‘Mr Morgan said that I was to give you this, Lady Worthington, after which I had to make sure you were safely escorted out to your carriage and seen off the property.’

All thoughts of the recent contretemps fled.

‘He won’t see me?’

‘No.’

‘If I sat here and waited…’

‘He was most insistent, Lady Worthington.’

‘Were I to return in the morning, would he be available then?’

‘The master said that he would prefer any contact with your family to be conducted through his lawyers. Their direction is stated upon the card you hold.’

She heard frustration in his answer at her continued presence here, and with more force than she meant, she tore up the card and let it flutter in small ragged pieces to the expensive Aubusson carpet below.

‘Could you go back and tell your master that I have tried that avenue already and it has not been conducive to any meaningful dialogue. That is the very reason I am here. I should like to speak with him face to face so there can be no doubt as to what it is I wish to relate. It is a sensitive matter and not one for lawyers or third parties.’

‘I am sorry, but I cannot allow you to go up, Lady Worthington.’

As the words echoed around the room, Adelia simply took a chance.

‘Could you help me, please, for I am in great and desperate need? If you turned away for just one moment, our problem will be solved. That is all I ask. You do not need to do anything else but look away. I shall manage the rest.’

As he faltered, hope rose.

‘I urgently need an audience. I promise I shall tell Mr Morgan that I simply ran past you and up the stairs and that you had no way of stopping me, none whatsoever, even though you tried your very hardest. I will be off the premises in five minutes and after that I shall never bother anyone here again.’

‘I could lose my job…’

‘I would find you another.’ She smiled in that particular way that seemed to send every man in society to pieces and saw him glance at her dimples.

‘It is desperate, you say?’

‘Completely and utterly.’

‘Five minutes is all you require?’

‘Not a second more. Please?’

The silence lengthened until he spoke again, this time in the slightest of whispers.

‘Mr Morgan’s chamber is the second door on the left at the top of the stairs, Lady Worthington. But he will not be pleased to see you, I can promise you that.’

Adelia simply took her chance and ran.

Simeon sat in the wing chair to one side of the low-burning fire and stared into the flames.

He was sick to death of the cold that had consumed him for over a week now, sending him every few moments into hacking bouts of coughing. He was sure a rib on his right-hand side was broken with the force of the paroxysms, and the fever which had been intermittent was back again, evident in the shaking of his chattering teeth. Even the thick woollen blanket pulled from his bed seemed to make no difference. He was utterly freezing.

‘Damn,’ he swore softly and laid a hand across his aching eyes.

He’d been asleep most of the day, which meant that he would be up all night. If he listened, he knew he’d shortly be able to hear the bells of St James’s, Piccadilly, pealing out the third quarter. He wished it were dawn already even as he wondered why on earth Lionel Worthington’s wife would come to visit him at this time of night. Lady Worthington? Was she mad? Did she expect clemency, or worse, forgiveness, for her husband’s many sins? Harris, his butler, had said this visitor looked desperate and well she should. A man with the base morals her spouse had would distress any woman.

Leaning forward, he breathed out hard, trying to loosen the tightness in his chest. Well, his lawyers would soon see to her and send her on her way, that was what he paid them well to do. He tried to remember what Worthington’s wife looked like, but could not recall her face at all. A blonde, he thought, and thin, but failed to find a true image.

Harris had conveyed his misgivings about this late and unexpected visitor succinctly.

‘Lady Worthington looks a bit lost, sir. Like a stray cat.’

Well, the last thing he needed was yet another stray in his house, his thoughts going to Flora Rountree. The child had landed upon him out of the blue a week ago and he often heard her wails in his house at all hours of the night despite employing a well-turned-out and competent governess who came with glowing references.

‘Damn it all.’

First the death of her mother, Catherine Rountree, and now this. The whole year so far had been a disaster and it was only early July.

The click of the door opening had him glancing up and, instead of his expected servant, the most beautiful young woman he had ever laid his eyes upon appeared. With teeth worrying her bottom lip, she let herself in and locked the door behind her, standing straight and determined after turning the key.

‘Who the hell are you?’

His words made her frown, though the lines on her forehead took nothing away from her loveliness. Rather eyes the shade of emerald green only brightened and a mouth with full and sensual lips puckered with worry. He felt a tight clench of thrill in his stomach and shifted his position to dampen down the unwanted sentiment.

‘Mr Morgan, I know I should not have come, but I have something to say to you that I cannot in all honesty enunciate to your lawyers or indeed to anyone else.’

Simeon drew up his blanket, wishing like hell he was better clothed.

‘I am ill.’

He could not quite understand why he had said this, explaining away his lack of decent attire. After all, it was she who had crashed into his room uninvited and any account of his own actions was hardly an obligation.

She looked away, the candlelight catching her hair, strands of gold and wheat and pure-spun whiteness escaping from a hat of feathers angled across her head.

Had the fever made him delusional? Was she an angel descended from above and one who had landed fair and square in his bedchamber? Teasing him? Her next words dissipated that notion completely.

‘My name is Miss Adelia Worthington. Lord Worthington is my father.’

‘An unfavourable parentage then, though you look nothing at all like him.’ He could not keep surprise from his words.

She ignored his comment and carried on. ‘I have come to offer you a trade.’ There was a quiver in the last word.

‘A trade?’ The room swam as he shook his head and listened.

‘But first I need to know if you have a wife?’

‘I have not.’ The words slipped from him in disbelief. Where could this conversation be going?

‘Good. The thing is that Athelridge Hall, the estate you gained from my father near Barnet, is my family home and all the property we have left in the world. I do not wish to lose it and so, as a way of mitigating the effects of my father’s foolish investments, I have come to you with an offer of marriage.’ She slowed down a bit now and swallowed. ‘To myself, I mean. I am an innocent and I have had many proposals this Season for my hand. My success in the marketplace of high society has been well documented should you doubt what I am saying—an unequalled triumph, a victory of some worth according to all the sources that I hear it from.’

The words were running together now in a faster and faster way, no breath between the outpouring. He frowned.

‘You are telling me that you are a prize, then? The incomparable Miss Worthington?’

‘Indeed, many would say that I am.’

No false modesty deterred her from carrying on, although there was a new shake in her voice.

‘In exchange for what I offer you, I want you to gift me Athelridge Hall. As my husband it would still be yours to all effects and purposes and I understand that. But my home would be safe and I would still have the rights to it. So it is something barely noticeable for you, not even an inconvenience. I know how rich you are and that the estate represents an insignificant investment for you, but I should not expect a share in anything more than Athelridge Hall. Ever.’

‘My God, you cannot be serious, Miss Worthington?’

He saw her fingers close around a small gold cross that she wore on a chain around her neck as if to counteract his blasphemy as she continued.

‘But I am, Mr Morgan. I should allow you your full rights as a husband as well as your prerogative to choose a mistress. Any number of them. I should not stop you from…making your own personal choices. I would be compliant, dutiful and discreet. I would run the estate with diplomacy, refinement, grace and tact. Even if you stayed only one night a year at Athelridge Hall I should not complain and I would not expect you to bring me to London. Whatever you wanted I would attempt to give to you. Without complaint. In short, I would endeavour to be the perfect wife. Tolerant and accommodating. Barely there.’

‘A comprehensive promise?’ He could not believe the absolute inappropriateness of her making such a pledge to him.

‘And one you might favour?’

He laughed. ‘You know nothing about me, Miss Worthington. How old are you?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘A baby. Go home and thank the Lord for your lucky escape.’

When her eyes darkened and flashed fire it heartened him. Not quite a docile martyr, then? She certainly wasn’t doing as he had bid her either. The deep dimples in both cheeks as she bit at her lip unsettled him, for they were apparent even when she did not smile.

‘Every other unmarried man in society and many of the married ones hold a great desire for me. Why would you not?’

‘Because I have no wish whatsoever for a wife, even one as compliant and long-suffering as the model of the one you are promising me. I fare far better with more disposable lovers, mistresses and courtesans. I can change them whenever I am bored, which I often am. Without drama. Without question. Here today, gone tomorrow, so to speak. An impermanent liaison which requires no true commitment and has the added benefit of hurting nobody.’

He stood and crossed the room to pour himself a brandy, the warmth of it suppressing the shivers he could feel returning. ‘Given the indisputable fact of your glowing first Season, every other man of your acquaintance is probably better suited to your needs than I am. Go away, Miss Worthington, and pick one.’

‘No.’

That word was whispered, but he had already heard enough. She was like a small exotic bird who had strayed into a lion’s den. How did she not realise the danger she was in?

‘That is more than enough. Scurry back to your besotted society suitors, the ones who would fit into the lifestyle you are more than used to, the ones who would welcome such a broad and extraordinary promise and honour it as I would not.’

He could see the worry on her face, but he could also easily understand her effect on any man who came across her. She was the most exquisite female he had ever known. Unforgettable. Fragile. And beautiful beyond words. He could barely keep his gaze off her face and he hated himself for such shallowness.

‘That is impossible, Mr Morgan, for the home I had, Athelridge Hall, is now your own and I need it back.’

‘Did your father direct you to come here?’ God, Simeon could almost imagine it of the man. To sacrifice a daughter for the mistakes he had made and would keep on making. To muddy the pond with compromise and immorality and think nothing at all of it. To send another in his stead to accomplish his dirty work.

The blood fled from her face at his query and he thought for a second that she might simply fall to the floor, but her hand found the brass bedstead and then she didn’t.

‘I came of my own accord, sir.’

‘A risky business that, given the enormity of your proposition, the smallness of your person and the lateness of the hour.’

‘Sometimes safe and easy pathways are unable to be…found, and one has to forge a new way.’

‘With all your many stated and ardent proposals my advice to you would be to use such lofty options and make a choice. Find a lord of means who might appeal to you and marry him summarily as protection.’

Another flare of anger brightened her eyes. She had secrets, Simeon thought. He recognised them easily in others.

‘You are the only person who holds the titles of my family home in your pocket, sir.’

‘Then tell your papa to come up with the money and I will consider selling them back to him. Even a plan for repayment will do me fine.’

The beginning of tears surprised him.

‘That is impossible.’

She was so young, Simeon realised suddenly, and simply had had enough. Better to frighten her, then, and send her packing in shock. His past was hardly salubrious and the mystery surrounding him would help see her on her way.

‘I am not paying the high price you ask for the virginity you mention, Miss Worthington. However, if indeed you do feel the need to show me the goods I wouldn’t object in the slightest…’

He let the sentence slide, knowing the insult within them, but he needed her gone.

‘The goods?’ Her cheeks flamed red.

‘Tempt me with your breasts, your hips, your crinkum-crankum. All the parts of a woman that attract a man and make him sell his soul. Unbutton your bodice and surprise me.’

The grubby slang had her eyes widening just as he knew it would. ‘I do not think…’

‘Don’t think, Miss Worthington, just go.’

The fury in him was building because he understood what was at stake here and how carefully her father had orchestrated such a travesty. Lionel Frankton Worthington was a bastard and if his daughter had failed to realise it then she must be of the exact same mould. It behoved him to punish them both by exposing such a crude proposal, though he knew of course that she would run now, from his presence, from his house, from his life, and she would never come back. He waited for her footsteps, exhaustion vying with rage.

When shaking fingers came up to the buttons at her bodice, his heartbeat skipped. He saw then an undergarment of silk and lace across milk-white skin, rising flesh and pink-tinged nipples. When she moved again the curve of womanhood and a round abundance of softness was clearly visible above her fallen clothing.

Behind her the clock struck the hour of eleven. The hush grew and grew as his eyes feasted on her bounty, there for such an easy taking, there to reach out and seize. He could have Miss Adelia Worthington in a moment. She was her father’s daughter, after all, and payment was much more than overdue.

He scowled as his body hardened, cursing the betrayal even as he welcomed it. This was not going anything like he thought it would, yet he could not turn away. When he stood he let the blanket around him drop as he took the first step towards her. Damn the consequences, he thought savagely, he had never been a saint, after all, and if the beautiful daughter of his worst enemy had done her homework she would have at least known that.

He was a huge man and dark, the tight trousers he wore moulded around his body like silk, the white shirt above unbuttoned all the way down the front. In the shadows of the fire and the night he looked like Hades escaped from his Underworld, a dark soul-taker bent on her destruction. She should have run when he had allowed her the chance, but if this failed…

He stopped a foot away and reached out, one finger trailing across the underside of her right breast before settling on the nipple. The heat of him was as shocking as that in the room and she knew if he wanted to he could ravish her here and now and she would never be able to halt it. He was crude and coarse and his accent was a strange one, clipped in a careful way as though hiding all that he had been, once.

Yet she was caught in the glance of his golden eyes and rendered speechless by his sheer masculine presence. The digit moved, up and down, evoking a visceral response and, for the first time in her whole life, Adelia understood the meaning of lust. Her breath shallowed and her head tipped back, the place between her legs sliding into something between a throb and an ache. Formless. Unshapen. Lost.

Amorphous. Like a tide, the high swell of it tipping her over.

She held no touchstone, no way of stating the wrongness of all that was happening to her because in this moment it only felt right. She was held captive by forbidden delight and by a man whom she had never known the likes of.

Then his hand trailed up across her throat and on to her cheek before it traced the line of her upper lip with a precise and careful tenderness.

He made no move to come forward, though, even as she hoped he would, this stranger with his unshaven face, his darkness and his heat.

He had turned down marriage and offered her this, yet even with her breasts unbound and on show he did not simply take. She needed to say something, needed to make it matter, the ache of the sensual and the certainty of his want.

Swallowing, she tried to shape her words.

‘Marry me, Mr Morgan, and…you can have it all…this…everything… I promise and without argument.’

The nipple his hand had returned to was swollen as he dipped to take the hardness of it into his mouth, hot suction drawing out a moan before he broke the pressure. Utter desire snaked through every part of her—fire, hot and undeniable.

‘I could have you anyway and easily, Miss Worthington, for your body is telling me so.’

‘No.’ But she could not find any resistance within her as his tongue flicked back against her, a different movement now, a stab of pure passion assaulting her senses, her flesh moving in the rhythm he inspired, the wet warmth inside bursting through in waves and building, higher, deeper, longer.

The stubble on his cheek scratched her skin and the hand that held her anchored was tight on her flesh.

She was someone else, someone brighter and bolder, someone who would take the risk and use it, feel it, know it. The mystery and the danger and pure unadulterated need drove fear away and welcomed in a languid floating relief which brought tears to her eyes.

He caught her as she lost balance and held her close, his breath in her hair, rough and fast, as if he, too, had been surprised by this.

This?

What had happened?

Already the horror was building and the disbelief.

Her father had been a man who used women for pleasure again and again with no thought for a wife at home or a family who understood that their papa was not quite as others were. Was she of the same mould, a daughter who had come here with a ridiculous plan and expected this man to fall at her feet and agree to it?

An immoral woman. One who might trick others with her body and imagine no redress. A stupid, vain and foolish woman who had anticipated her beauty would be enough?

Already he had let her go and for that at least she was glad.

Adelia Worthington stood there, her mouth open and her emerald eyes glassy, the palpable beauty that had been so obvious before glittering now under another truth.

Wanton. Shameless. As good as any of the whores he had bedded with her quicksilver metamorphosis, nipples hard, lips swollen, breath shaky.

‘Dress yourself, Miss Worthington.’

He could not be kind. He felt used and tricked and sullied somehow. An evening meeting that had taken only moments to draw down into this. She had done it before, no doubt, the virgin ploy sending him off guard and her unmatched comeliness seeing to the rest.

He could smell her scent from here, all woman and eagerness.

‘God.’

The fever seemed to have risen and the heat in the room made him sweat. Her breasts stood firmly round and pale in the light, her fallen bodice still exposing everything. Beautiful beyond measure.

He saw the marks of redness on her skin, marks where he had sucked too hard in unparalleled ardour. The slender column of her throat lay unprotected, blue lines just beneath the skin. Fragile. Dangerous. Spellbinding. Menacing.

Was she here at the behest of her father to blackmail him in some way?

He half expected the Viscount to hammer down the door and demand retribution. If he had not been so sick he would have seen the trap of it in the very first seconds, but fever had softened his sense.

‘I am not the husband you are after. There is nothing I can offer you save, perhaps, pity.’

‘Pity?’

‘Your father? You must realise the loathing he inspires among all who have the misfortune to cross his path? Tell him I know exactly how Catherine Rountree died. Tell him that his mistress left me a letter explaining things. Tell him that all of London shall soon know what he has done and he shall be pilloried for it. Tell him he cannot sacrifice his daughter to escape retribution, even such a daughter as you.’

She swallowed and pulled up her clothing, the shaking worse now than it had been before, the gold cross at her neck glinting.

He had had enough of lies. His own lies. Catherine’s lies. Lionel Worthington’s lies. Death held some reckoning and the child fostered upon him demanded recompense. From them all.

‘I am sorry—’ she managed to say before he interrupted her.

‘Don’t be.’ He turned away as the words came out brokenly. He didn’t want excuses or vindication. He wanted her gone.

When he looked back again there was no one there, the only sign of her ever being in his room a lingering perfume of lemon and lavender.

He’d expected more complex scents. The simplicity of what was left felt jarring somehow and he wished like hell that she had never come. Laying his arms on the marble of the mantel, he dropped his head against the cold stone, hating the shaking that was back and the fear within him.

Chance was something that seldom happened without a strong reason and her intent had held little of the coincidental within it. No, Miss Adelia Worthington had come here with a fully formed purpose and one that he feared she would not simply abandon. He would hear more from her, he knew it, but next time he would be ready.

Another darker thought also struck him, now that the fog of desire had lifted. There had been bruises on her arms and on the back of her neck. Substantial bruises that gave the impression of great force. Who had hurt her and why? Secrets wound into conjecture and puzzlement came in on top of that. She was a mystery, this beautiful and young Miss Adelia Worthington, and one he did want to unravel, damn it.

Once outside Adelia thanked the Morgan servant for accompanying her to the waiting hackney, smiling at him in a false and desperate way that set her own teeth on edge.

‘Thank you for the chance to see Mr Morgan. I am sorry I was longer than five minutes.’

‘It was a pleasure, my lady. I hope you accomplished all you wished to.’

She did not answer, for she knew without doubt that she was now ruined.

Mr Simeon Morgan would tell everyone about her foolish and dreadful mistake and society would turn their backs upon her and give her the cut direct. She could not even begin to contemplate the consequences of such a public exposure.

It was over. Athelridge Hall was lost. Her family would be homeless.

She should have taken the other pathways open to her. She should have accepted the proposal of the first even slightly wealthy suitor who had offered for her. She had not hated any of them in the way she hated Simeon Morgan, the rich and amoral spawn of the devil. He had baited her, she knew that now, and she had risen to his words like the imprudent girl she’d thought she wasn’t. He was never going to consider her ridiculous offer, not even for a moment. Her arm ached and the marks on her breast stung in shame.

Yet below this another thought harboured and her nipples rose into nubs at the echo of it. She had wanted him to touch her. She had wanted what she had seen so briefly in his golden eyes as his mouth had come down roughly across her breast. Wanted the passion in him, the desire and the hunger.

He was a rake and a womaniser, exactly like her father, though at least he was honest in his admitting of it. He’d told her she was a baby and that he bedded only mistresses and courtesans. He’d said she should run before she got hurt and that he could offer her nothing save pity.

Yet pity was not the emotion she had seen on his face just before she had left. No, there was anger there and fury mixed with aggravation and stronger things. Fiercer sensations.

The world crashed down over complications even as the body of her father was becoming cold on the floor of slate in the front room of Athelridge Hall.

His servants would find him tomorrow, the old Cranstons, in the first morning light and he would be lain in state, three handfuls of salt sitting on his chest on an earthenware plate and a portrait of the Virgin Mary hung above giving spiritual guidance. These would be her mother’s instructions, her Scottish heritage fully formed in the art of death.

If it had been left to Adelia, she would have had no compunction in tossing him out to be buried in a beggar’s grave in some unknown churchyard. And she would never have visited it afterwards.

Chapter Two

Viscount Worthington was dead.

Simeon had heard the news today, six days after his daughter’s outrageous and unasked for late evening visit.

Dead from suicide.

Simeon wondered about his part in the whole conundrum given his lack of care in allowing the man’s offspring title to the small and insignificant Athelridge Hall estate. But still he could not be sorry. If the Viscount had killed himself over his foolish loss at his ill-played games of investment, then the world was better off for it. If he had killed himself in remorse for the accident with Mrs Catherine Rountree on the Northern Road, then at least he had died for something more honourable.

Privately, Simeon felt the motive of greed was more likely to be the reason for his death than that of principle, but he didn’t care enough to give the dead man any benefit of the doubt.

Beneath him, Theodora Wainwright was pliant and generous. Her long red hair streamed across the white of the pillow in fiery threads and her eyes, while not the startling green of Miss Adelia Worthington’s, were none the less alluring enough.

He liked the feel of her, he liked her smell. But most of all, he liked the way she demanded nothing of him.

Small and even white teeth nipped at his shoulder.

‘Your mind is far, far away, Simeon. Am I not enough of a distraction for you today? Would you like other…ministrations?’

She licked his ear as she said this, her fingers closing around his manhood. ‘I have two hours before I am needed anywhere else and I still harbour a lot of inclination for more of your body.’

Such thoughts began to work upon his libido and he felt a rising. Damn Worthington and his ill-timed demise, damn his comely daughter for her unsettling visit and damn his own mind for spending so much time ruminating upon them both.

Turning Teddy over, he brought his mouth down across one large breast. At thirty-five Theodora was a woman who knew her own body and she was rabid in her demand for satisfaction. An experienced female, proficient in the art of lovemaking, the two husbands she had lost young added to her allure. She would never marry again. She had told him this daily when he had first met her a year ago, though lately she had said it less and less. A small throb of warning halted him, but she was not having that, her fingers now in other places, clever and slick.

‘Take me, Simeon, and ride me high and long. Make me scream in bliss.’

The dirty talk was working and she was already wet with their endeavours from half an hour earlier. Without a word, he entered her and thrust on home, her face dissolving into relief and her nails clawing into his skin, drawing blood.

Pain and passion. An avid mix. He lifted her up and rode her as she had requested, her shouts of delight muted by his fingers hard banded across her lips.

Three hours later he was sitting at the back of a pub in Regent Street, the place filled to the brim with rowdy locals, the smell of smoke and strong drink in the air.

Tom Brady, one of his oldest friends, was waiting for him, two cold beers on the table. He was an inspector for the Metropolitan Police and a damn useful contact to have.

‘I got your note, Sim, and I looked into the fiasco of Worthington’s last few weeks on this earth.’

‘And?’

‘The Viscount actually died a few days before the family released the news, apparently. On the eighth of July.’

Simeon counted back the days. If this was true, then the Viscount was dead already when his daughter had come to see him and yet she had hardly looked grief stricken. Why not?

Tom Brady continued. ‘Lionel Worthington was rumoured to be all but bankrupt and his sole estate is not even in the family’s hands after he made a number of poor investments. There is also talk of his late mistress, Mrs Catherine Rountree, for some say the Viscount had a hand in her death a month ago. He drank a lot by all accounts and a few of the first people on the scene of the carriage accident in the north intimated that he looked demented. An angry drunk, they told the constables who finally arrived, though by that time Worthington was long gone. Skulked off into the shadows in his drunken fury, hiding until he could formulate more lies to make some sense of his disappearance and be exonerated.’

Fury railed in waves across Simeon’s body.

‘A letter, written by you, was found among the Rountree woman’s effects at her house in Camberwell, by the way, Simeon.’ Brady dug around in his pocket. ‘I thought you might like it back before anyone else could use it to point the finger at you, so to speak.’

Taking it, Simeon held the missive tight while he struggled to work out what to say.

In the end he stuck with the truth.

‘Did you read it?’

‘I did.’

‘Did anyone else?’

‘No. The property of the deceased Mrs Catherine Rountree was still to be sorted. A letter like this, where you threaten the Viscount, might be inflammatory for there were things about the Viscount’s death that did not make sense.’

‘Things?’

‘One of the Worthington servants, when questioned, said he heard raised voices and a fierce argument well into the evening. He thought perhaps there had been a visitor in the house, for around midnight he found the front door ajar, banging in the wind, and he was certain that it had been secured earlier on, as it always was.’

‘Who do you think it was?’

Tom shrugged. ‘Worthington had his enemies. It could have been any number of people, but our services are stretched and there are other more important cases that will take precedence. You didn’t see him into the next world, did you, Sim? Your missive held threats, after all.’

Lifting the beer to his lips Simeon drank deeply before replying. ‘Viscount Worthington wouldn’t be worth spending a long time in gaol for.’

‘From memory, you knew his mistress, Mrs Catherine Rountree, well, though, did you not? I recall you mentioning her over the years.’

‘She grew up in Angel Meadow, too, which is why I have taken full responsibility for her little child.’

‘Some say that Lionel Worthington was not kind to the girl, thinking her only a nuisance who took up far too much of Mrs Rountree’s time.’ When Brady spoke again there was hesitation in his words. ‘Did you see the Viscount in the days before his untimely demise, Sim?’

‘I did. I felt so strongly on the subject that I followed up my letter with an ultimatum in person the morning before he died. I reiterated that if he ever went near Flora Rountree again I would kill him. I was pleased to hear he went home and saved me the bother of seeing through such a threat.’

‘His older daughter found him.’

‘I had not heard that.’

‘It isn’t common knowledge. He is buried at Athelridge Hall apparently, in the small graveyard to one side of the chapel.’

‘Who is the heir to the title?’

‘A Mr Cartwright from York. Word has it he has a much bigger estate up north and Athelridge Hall was never part of the entailed property.’

‘So the Worthington family have returned home?’ Simeon thought of the deeds of ownership to Athelridge Hall sitting in his wall safe and the reality of an eternal resting place for a man he’d hated being right under his nose.

‘They left London in a rented hackney and the bills from their lengthy stay here have been left unpaid. Everyone is speaking of it so I doubt Miss Adelia Worthington will have any more suitors arriving on her doorstep now.’

‘You know of her?’

‘Miss Worthington?’ Tom hesitated, looking at him in a strange way. ‘What man with eyes and ears in London would not? Her beauty is heralded as unsurpassed and if her character has defects, then who would notice them?’

‘Defects?’

‘Apparently, she is haughty and strong minded and has turned down each and every desperate suitor with barely a reason. As a consequence, we at the Metropolitan Police have been foiling planned duels in her name ever since the end of January, when she arrived in the city.’

‘Like a modern-day Helen of Troy; a face that has launched a thousand proposals?’

Tom laughed, but all Simeon could think of was one proposal. Hers to him. ‘I will allow you anything.’ The very words made his loins ache, a further irritation in a difficult month. His fever had abated, but the heat of their remembered encounter had left him unfathomably and uncomfortably warm.

‘Could I ask you to settle the debt the Worthingtons have left behind them in London, Tom? Anonymously.’ He brought out a wad of notes and peeled them off. ‘This should cover it. Speculation and gossip about that family will only harm the small daughter of Mrs Rountree if anyone were to dig deeper. Any investigation into Worthington’s liaisons means the child may be questioned and I’d rather she wasn’t.’

Taking the money, Tom shoved it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘I’ll do that, though there is something else, too, that I need to speak to you about. Something much more…personal.’

His tone had Simeon looking up.

‘Is Lionel Worthington’s older daughter a particular friend of yours?’

‘No. I only met her once a week or so back under difficult circumstances, but I barely know her.’

‘Then you might be interested in the fact that Miss Adelia Worthington has told everyone you asked for her hand in marriage and that her father had given his blessing. His last rite as a parent, I think she said, and the first time in a long while that she had seen him happy. A final gift. Something to be treasured.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘She has the proof, too, for her matrimonial dowry was Athelridge Hall and she has made it known that you accepted the titles for it from the Viscount as surety of your intentions.’

‘I recovered the place after Worthington’s bad investments began to impinge on my own portfolio.’

Tom frowned. ‘Was it a public notice?’

Simeon did not answer.

‘Witnesses would have been useful, but still…’ Tom threw that thought away and began on another. ‘Her beauty must count somewhat in her favour.’

‘Favour?’

The way Tom had said that sentence was somewhat worrying.

‘She is a tease, so I’m told, and a woman who provokes gossip. If Miss Worthington’s first months in society were filled with offers from the smitten sons of society, her last one was not. She hit the Honourable Rodney Anstruther over the head with an umbrella in Hyde Park for no good reason whatsoever and he has made certain everyone knows of it.’

‘What does he say of her, then?’

‘That Miss Worthington has an icy heart and a cold manner and that she is not to be trusted.’

The day drew in on him.

‘And the others?’

‘Have withdrawn their own suits on the death of her father. It seems that the Worthington financial stability is not at all as the Viscount had intimated and society favours the wealthy. Perhaps Adelia Worthington has her own reasons for her interest in your substantial fortune, Sim. A solution, so to speak, to all her woes.’

Just like all of the others. Just like the newly brought-out debutantes and their desperate mothers. He’d been in society just twice over the past year and had hated it both times. It was why he had stuck with Theodora Wainwright and her ilk. While such women might wish for permanence in his life, they would never expect it.

There was no way in hell that Lionel Worthington and his daughter would have the last laugh. No. He would visit his lawyers tomorrow and find out just what could be done to escape these lies.

With a flourish, he finished his beer and called for another just as Tom began to speak again.

‘You’re twenty-seven now, Sim. Some wily female would have caught you sooner or later and you need heirs for that fortune you have accumulated.’

Simeon shook his head. ‘You are wrong about that. A fortune means nothing to me and one marriage in this lifetime was more than enough.’

Tom nodded. ‘Hell, I had almost forgotten about Susan Downing. What were you? Nineteen?’

‘Led by my lust and eminently stupid is what I was. I regretted marrying her the morning after we had walked up the aisle. With Miss Worthington there wouldn’t even be that twenty-four hours of hopefulness.’

‘You could leave England. Disappear for a while?’

‘I have a business to run. I’d be as bankrupt as Lionel Worthington if I did that.’

‘Then if there is no way to escape marriage, take her to Athelridge Hall and leave her there. There are many other men in London who never see their wives and life goes on as normal.’

‘Normal?’ Simeon could hardly get his head around the very idea. ‘A misguided deceitful harlot claiming my name and bearing any rightful heir. How could that ever be normal?’

The cold he was recovering from suddenly seemed to freshen and he spent the next few moments coughing, sick in mind and body and reeling from the betrayal of a girl who wasn’t even out of her teens. If he handled this crisis badly, he would be the laughingstock of London and his burgeoning investment business would bear the brunt of his ill-thought-out decisions.

Already his youth in the founding of a railway empire had counted against him and he did not need this sort of a mess in his personal life to add to any conjecture. This industry depended on steadfastness. It needed a cool head and a sound grasp of financial practice. A humiliating and contentious marriage would be the antithesis to all he had worked so hard for and there was no way he would let such a thing happen.

No. Miss Worthington might not yet realise that she had a tiger by the tail with his claws unsheathed, but she soon would.

A private battle it might have to become, but he could well deal with that. He swore that she would rue the day she had tricked him into this and the most beautiful visage in all the world would be no protection whatsoever against his unbridled fury.

Fifteen hours later Simeon swept through the gates of Athelridge Hall, outside Barnet, in his carriage with all the speed of a man with the devil on his heels. And in a sense an evil spirit was there in front of him, in the form of Miss Adelia Worthington, a tease, a liar and a hypocrite. He’d had his lawyers look over his alternatives and paying her off seemed like the easiest and least public option.

Even the thought of parting with some of his hard-earned fortune made him absolutely furious, especially in the face of such baldly executed lies, but marrying her and living a lifetime of deceptions and fabrications again looked a whole lot worse.

He had dressed in his most sombre suit of clothing, a dark wool that he’d paid too much for from Henry Poole in Brunswick Square. He was glad of the no-nonsense cut of the jacket even as he loosened his necktie a little. He would need all the certitude that he could muster, all the righteousness his career had honed and perfected. His best game without a doubt was called for and the utter disbelief and rage in the face of Miss Worthington’s deceit must be somehow bridled by sense and substance. And also by the cold hard cash of blackmail if it came down to that.

He could ill afford to show her exactly how incensed her falsehoods had left him feeling because it seemed that Miss Worthington held no compassion or empathy for anyone or anything.

His lawyers, too, had been most specific. Without witnesses to his acquisition of the family estate the daughter had a clear case of intent of purpose and, in all likelihood, the law would most probably side with a wronged and young female of good birth. Her beauty held some account, as well. It seemed she’d had suitors falling at her feet after only a few seconds in her company and any legal opposition would most probably succumb to such feminine persuasion. She would be absolutely lethal in court.

A doomed rebuttal. A closed case. Unless he was generous and clever.

The servant who came to the door was ancient, a wizened octogenarian of indeterminate hearing and sight.

‘I need to see Miss Adelia Worthington immediately.’

‘Pardon, sir. Speak up a little so that I might hear you better.’

At this the man took a step to his left and lifted up a piece of paper rolled into the shape of a cone and proceeded to apply the small end to his left ear.

‘Talk into this if you will, sir.’

‘Miss Adelia Worthington.’ Simeon shortened his sentence and waited.

‘You wish to see her?’

Instead of answering, he simply nodded and watched as the man shuffled off.

The place was tatty and worn, the wallpaper to the left of the door peeling away into long unfurling strands. No one had seen to it in years, he surmised, as he spotted small parts of the detritus all over the cracked tiled floor. In fact, nothing looked cared for or well-tended.

Wrath warred with disbelief, the two emotions producing a third feeling of sheer puzzlement until he felt as if he might well burst with the mix.

Fisting his fingers, he tried to pull himself together. He’d survived a childhood of sharp edges and was now a bulwark of sound English business practice. He’d become a man who was frequently held up as a shining example of wisdom and astuteness, yet within a moment of coming anywhere near to the person of Miss Adelia Worthington he seemed to have lost all good judgement and prudence.

She arrived as he took in a sharp breath, an old cloak wrapped around her body and a look on her face that held only horror. Simeon did not give her the chance to speak first.

‘I will not marry you, Miss Worthington, and if you have the temerity to think your mean-spirited trick might actually work and imagine that I should bow down to such treachery, then you do not know me at all.’

The old servant stood beside her, watching his lips as he spoke, a heavy frown forming on his lined face. Another elderly woman of the same ilk had come to observe them from the head of a dark passageway and she looked just as concerned.

Adelia Worthington remained speechless, the startling beauty of her face like a red rag to a particularly temperamental bull. Her hair was largely down and undone and she had smudges on both cheeks. Even dirty and unkempt she was an Incomparable and he thought she must know it for she had the gall to actually smile at him.

‘If you would step into the sitting room, we could continue our discussion there, Mr Morgan…’

‘Discussion?’ He heard the anger in the word as he responded.

‘Argument, then,’ she gave back with a quiet reserve, ‘and an argument I would prefer was for our ears only.’ She stated this as he simply stared.

Good Lord, he had seriously underestimated her. She was as proficient as a high court judge in trying to defuse a difficult situation. She was even now ordering a pot of tea to be brought in.

‘I think absinthe might be more my drink of choice, Miss Worthington. An elixir associated with social malaise and personal violence seems to be in order.’

She ignored that and added sweet biscuits to her list of wants, the old woman waiting by the door scurrying off to fetch them, the even older man at her heels.

Left alone, Simeon saw the utter ridiculousness in this whole situation. Why the hell did he not simply state his refusal to marry her and leave or, failing that, threaten her with the exposure of her unwise visit alone to his town house? It was the look in her eyes, he was to think later, an injured desperation that made him hesitate. The secrets were back, too, and the fear. He knew full well what people looked like when they had very little left to lose.

‘Please…’ She gestured, her arm visibly shaking, and because of this he followed her into a room, situated on one side of the entrance hall, that was small but tidy.

Shutting the door behind him, she leant against the portal, reminding him forcibly of their first encounter.

‘I am sorry, Mr Morgan.’

Her voice was soft, uncertain, and he suddenly fancied her on the edge of tears.

‘Sorry for all your lies and treachery?’ He waited until she nodded. ‘Take them back, then. Renounce your ridiculous inaccuracies and we shall both go our separate ways. We will never need to see each other again.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Athelridge Hall is my family home. We cannot be without it.’

‘I will gift it back to you, then. As soon as I return to town.’

‘No.’ This was said in a different tone. One far more strident. ‘It is permanence I want.’

He could not believe it. He could not even consider that she might stick to such a course given his obvious dislike of her.

‘You would force a marriage to take place between us that holds nothing save revulsion on my behalf? I do not wish for this union, Miss Worthington, in any form or any shape. I would pay handsomely to be rid of the hold you feel you have upon me and that will be the end of it. It is what I want. A complete and utter separation, a severance.’ He could not make it plainer. ‘I won’t marry you under any circumstance.’

‘But I think you may have to.’ Her voice was quiet, edged with a kind of unbelievable certainty.

Was she mad? Was she beautiful on the outside and utterly rotten within? God, it was getting worse by the moment.

‘There are rules by which all men must abide in our society, Mr Morgan, and you would lose much should you rail against them.’

‘Lose what?’

He could feel his heartbeat quicken. The remnants of his recent illness, he supposed. He had been sick for over a fortnight and her lies had offered no respite from stress.

‘Business relies on competence and honour. It is how the system functions.’ Her voice was silken. ‘Any divergence from that causes disturbance.’

‘You are threatening me?’

‘I do not wish to, but if I must…’

‘Are you serious?’ he whispered then, the incredulity in his question answered when she nodded.

‘I should not impede you, Mr Morgan, in anything you might want after our marriage. I should only be a help to you. I have told you of this and once again I reiterate how much I mean to stand by such a pledge.’

At this she turned, the cloak tight around her thinness, but the door had opened and the old man he had seen before stood there, a small gun in hand.

‘You need to leave. Now.’

His wrinkled hands were shaking and Simeon heard Adelia Worthington gasp even as the blaze of a bullet seared across the room, pain catching him in the side of his head.

Then he was falling. The last thing he remembered was her moving forward, her arms held out to him as if in infirmity she might finally claim him, all arguments sealed in the touch of her skin, a ragged nail raking down the top of his right hand and drawing blood.

Was he dead?

Had Cranston killed him? The old servant was speaking now, telling her something of Simeon Morgan being a threat to her and of how he was only trying to help and had not meant to touch the trigger at all. The gun lay on the floor, the smell of fresh-lit powder in the air, the seconds between horror and disbelief multiplying.

Her first finger pressed into the skin at his throat and she felt a pulse. Thready and fast.

Undoing his necktie, she laid him down, propping his feet on a pillow and loosening the buttons on his waistcoat. The wound on the top of his head was bleeding profusely and, using the cloth under the teapot to try to wipe it away, she was relieved when she saw the bullet had left only a shallow runnel in his scalp. It had not pierced in further and there was no sign of a deadlier reality. She pushed down harder on the graze.

‘He needs fresh air.’ She said this as much to herself as she did to Cranston. Simeon Morgan was still, the sweat moistening his pale face easily discernible. ‘Here, Cranston, you must hold this and press. The bleeding needs to stop.’

Reaching for the bell, she crossed to the window and threw open the glass, a strong northerly breeze rushing into the room. Mr Morgan would live—already his colour was returning a little and he was stirring.

Shooing her elderly servant away after finding whisky, Adelia poured a good slug of it into a crystal glass before swallowing a substantial amount herself straight from the mouth of the bottle.

She needed fortification.

If Simeon Morgan had died, that would have been the end of everything. Her father would have won.

She saw he was awake and watching her as she wiped the liquor from her mouth. Most unladylike. Barely civil. He was staring at her with such disgust she had to look away.

‘You are…a drunk…like…your…father?’

‘Hardly.’

His words were slurred, slightly disjointed, and the bruise on his forehead was swelling already with an alarming rapidity, dark clots of blood beneath the skin.

Then his hands were there, fending her off, trying to put a distance between them.

Adelia felt like crying. She felt like lying down beside him and simply giving up. But she could not. Instead, she slipped a plain gold ring off her own hand and placed it over his smallest finger because she could hear voices outside.

‘My troth stands,’ she said in the sternest voice she could manage and rose.

He was trying to sit up now, but was shaking badly. Then, having been fetched by Cranston, a groom and two Morgan men in livery filed in to give him a hand up. Simeon Morgan’s vulnerability was more attractive than his bravado and she nearly blurted out a further apology, but she held it in even as he was half-carried out.

A moment later there was silence save for the quiet footsteps of Mrs Cranston.

‘What will happen now, Miss Adelia?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I have no idea, though perhaps your husband might put his head down for the next few weeks and lie low if any strangers turn up here. If Mr Morgan wishes for retribution…’ She could not finish the sentence.

The trouble was she couldn’t even contemplate what to do next. Was Simeon Morgan more badly hurt than she had imagined? Would he be back with the law at his heels and revenge in his heart? Could they all be implicated in an attempted murder case? Disclosure and protections. They came in so many forms and in so many ways she was exhausted by the demands of them. Another fight? A further battle?

‘You are too alone.’ There was shock in Mrs Cranston’s eyes at all that had transpired. ‘You shoulder too much by yourself, Miss Adelia. It is not right.’

Adelia smiled, trying to reassure the woman as well as trying to steady her own racing heart.

‘I am fine.’

Her hands were fastened under her cloak and she hated how they shook. Her father would have chided her at such a weakness even as he shouted and hit her.

But Mr Simeon Morgan had not struck out even given such extreme provocation. He had already passed that test. Picking up the gun at her feet, she opened a small trapdoor built into the foot of the far wall and dropped it inside. Better to have no sign of the thing if Simeon Morgan returned to accuse them. That was at least one thing that she was sure of.

The quiet tears still falling down Mrs Cranston’s cheeks shocked her, too, for the old servant was a woman who seldom cried.

Outside, she could hear a team of horses begin to move off, the jangle of bits and stirrups, the turning of wheels on the stones. A large and well-appointed conveyance fit for a fast trip down to London. She prayed that the motion would not kill him and the bleeding would not begin again as she grasped her golden cross in hand.

Simeon leaned back and closed his eyes. The movement of the carriage made him feel ill, but so did the throb at the side of his head. Carefully, he felt around the area, deducing a swelling lump under his fingers, spongy and hot.

Was he going to be sick? His stomach heaved and sweat beaded on his upper lip. A small gold ring on his littlest finger glinted in the light.

‘Hell.’

He fought for calm and equanimity.

Nothing was as it should have been, he thought, for when Adelia Worthington had rushed to find the whisky her cloak had fallen back and he saw she had been wearing trousers. Filthy trousers, marked with dirt and clay, her feet bootless, too-large woollen socks darned in many places.

She wanted his money. No, she needed it. It was for his fortune she had picked him out and tied a proposal to her father’s near bankruptcy. His world turned.

She was like a spider setting her webs and reeling him in, stuck like prey to the strange workings of her mind. He’d seen her taking the whisky straight from the bottle when he had awoken, no small sips either, the overflow running down her chin and on to her clothes.

A drunk and crazy woman with a treacherous and dangerous beauty. A Catholic, too, for the picture of Jesus on the wall with his crown of thorns had been bedecked with a rosary.

Was there no end to her defects?

Outside he could see the traffic on the northern road building like it always did at this time of day. There were people walking, talking and laughing. A summer Wednesday, the weather warm, the sun peeping through the thinning clouds. A dog barking.

Inside, he felt frozen, motionless. He felt as though his blood had stopped running and his life had ground to a halt, incapable of thought, powerless to fashion his future in the way he wished it to go.

He shook his head and stopped. Even the slightest of movements made him dizzy and he cursed the old servant with his shaking fingers and fear. He was certain the man had not meant the thing to go off, but even knowing that was of little comfort. The house gave the impression it was only just standing and if everything was broken within it, then Miss Adelia Worthington was by far the most broken of them all.

He wished he was in bed with Teddy, the sun slanting in on their naked bodies, nothing save ecstasy and soft physical touches on the agenda. His mother’s desperate marriages sat in his mind as well, both ill-mannered and ill-tempered alliances that had brought with them only disappointment and violence.

The running threads of his past unravelled. He’d been so careful in the interim years to weave the pieces of bitterness and fear into a perfect and faultless whole. No one had ever been allowed a peek into all the things he had once been and that was why marriage and its accompanying intimacies had been such a mystery to him and something he himself had never desired to experience again.

He did not want to have someone so unremittingly close to him, close enough to see gaps in the persona he presented to everyone whom he did business with. Not just business, either. In his personal relationships a void had always existed, filled with the past.

A child of the streets and a boy who was thrust into the hands of men with no care for him. A vagabond, homeless and ill fed, all the disparate patches in his clothing duplicated inside his skin.

His head ached and the thin golden ring on his little finger seemed to draw in towards the bone, cutting off his circulation.

A day later Simeon received a letter that left him reeling. Lord Grey, an aristocrat who was interested in investing in the proposed railway outside Birmingham, had sent his congratulations on his forthcoming wedding.

Just when he’d imagined that the situation could not get any worse it had. He’d seriously thought about simply refusing Miss Worthington’s ridiculous blackmail and seeing what the consequences would be, but now when the said consequences were staring him so baldly in the face it was a different story.

Money was safety to him, pure and simple, the bolster between who he had been and who he had become with graft and sacrifice and sweat and blood.

He could leave England, he supposed, simply pick up and disappear. But what of Flora Rountree? He’d been bought up lost between adults who valued neither responsibility nor honour. If he departed for the Americas, he would be subjecting the little girl to the same uncertainties that he himself had known as an eight-year-old. No home. No safety. No mercy.

No, he just could not do it. He would have to marry her, Miss Adelia Worthington, with all her faults and peculiarities, with her drunkenness and her lies and threats. There was nothing else for it. He would set up a life that was as separate as the one she had promised him, a wife without tenure save for that in name only.

The very thought made him sick, because it was exactly what his mother had done all those years ago, married his father because of her pregnancy, and look at what had happened there. She’d been a girl from a good family who had made a decision that would affect the rest of her life, a woman who could read and write and who had once loved books. His mother and father had barely had a year of marriage together before they had broken up, and whereas other women in her position might simply have admitted their error and thrown themselves back on the good will of their family, she had not. No, she had pressed on with him beside her and married again and they had fallen further and further in grace, the academic lessons he had treasured for the first ten years of his life becoming less common and food and shelter less certain. She’d been eaten up with bitter regret and rampant unhappiness, finally dying at thirty-five from syphilis, a disease that took flesh and teeth until there was very little left of her save the longing for a taste of opium pills coated in varnish and mercury.

Then his mother’s uncle, James Morgan, a man of principle and learning, had found him and taken him from the streets to his own home in the north of Manchester, worlds away from the poverty and hopelessness of Angel Meadow. Without Uncle Jamie his life would have turned out so differently and Simeon had missed him terribly each and every day since his death six years ago.

God, what would have Jamie thought of him now, caught in this conundrum with Adelia Worthington and trying to make sense of it? He shook his head hard and made a decision.

There was nothing he could do save to sign the marriage contract, temper it with conditions and grin and bear it. With luck he could still live the life he was used to. He had to at least hope for that.

His first wife, Susan Downing, had been a poor choice, too. She had married him one day and he had known by the next one that their relationship was doomed. The melancholy she had hidden well was suddenly all he saw and any attempts at intimacy were met with a cloying sadness. She’d died from too much drink barely a year after they had married. At the time he’d felt only numbness, but later the guilt had settled in. A further fault in him. Another punishment.

He pulled his thoughts back to the now. The doctor had arrived yesterday afternoon and looked over the wound on his head, proclaiming both luck that he was not dead and disbelief that this whole thing had happened in the first place. Today the eye nearest the wound had darkened again, yellow and red bruises joining the blackness and swelling. He could barely see out of it.

Every person who had seen his wound had pressed him to notify the constabulary and demand redress, but the thought of the old deaf servant being thrown into prison simply for defending his mistress’s honour held little satisfaction and so he’d left it. Cranston had looked absolutely petrified of retribution and the old woman behind him, presumably his wife, had been sobbing loudly.

Hell and damnation. The squalor of his early life had been so long gone he’d thought never to see such need again and yet here it was returned in force, the headache he suffered today underlining the very guts of it all.

Crossing to the cabinet near the window, he removed a bottle and a glass and poured himself a generous drink. The doctor had said it was unwise to touch alcohol after shock, but right now he needed the sharpness taken off his pain and the aged Rémy Martin should do that nicely.

His stepbrother had died of a knife wound, caught between the anger of warring gangs. There one moment and gone the next, the lesson of impermanence and danger indelibly scored into his brain.

His mother had not even cried as she had handed him the news, instead reaching for her pills without a word and sliding into unconsciousness. It had been left to him to see Geordie blessed and buried—without any ready money, he’d needed to resort to other forms of payment.

Memories buried by necessity began to well up and he took another decent swallow of the cognac, smiling even as he did so. Perhaps he and his mother were more alike than he had thought after all, their vices different, but their methods of coping exactly the same.

Sorrow claimed him and shame followed. Like a pack of cards, his life seemed to be falling around his feet in pieces.

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