Page 2 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

At this rate he would leave nothing of worth behind, nothing proclaiming “Joseph Illingworth was here,” and suggesting the world was a better place for it.

He rounded the King’s Mews, where George kept his royal stables, and advanced up Princes Street with a grim stride. It was time for a change in his life. It was time for a change in him. The old ways had failed him, and a new man must be born. A man of vigor. A man of purpose. A man of unbendable steel.

He wheeled into the narrow channel of George Court that connected Princes and Rupert Street and nearly collided with the carter bearing a load of casks from the Blue Posts. Even horses found him of so little consequence that they would run him down in the street. All the more reason Joseph needed to become, somehow, a man of substance.

The snug little house he stopped at wasn’t even his, though he’d lived there for several years. In a further taunt, his own lodgings had latched the door against him, and as Joseph sorted through his fobs and various pockets, he realized with growing outrage that he had neglected to carry the key.

He was a man with nothing. No wife and family, which he thought he’d have by now. No position in the world where his work mattered and gained him comfortable remuneration. He didn’t even have a home he could call his own.

Amaranthe had located and arranged for the premises when they first moved to London seven years ago, after Joseph took his degree from Oxford. With no means to live on but the tiny income from the inheritance left them by their parents, Joseph had agreed that sharing accommodations was the most financially sound decision. He had done his part as the man of the household and gone out to earn an income, leaving Anth to oversee the household and make all the little decisions about furnishings and food, assuming she would apply to him when she had need.

He’d not noticed she never applied to him. He’d not noticed she’d been supporting their household—and him—on her work as a copyist, letting Joseph build his savings for the home and family he dreamed of supporting one day.

The year before, after a thorough and humiliating jilting by one Miss Susannah Pettigrew, Joseph had collected his savings and taken himself on that overdue Grand Tour, desperate to have somewhere to go while his sister vaunted up the social ladder and tucked herself into a duke’s bed and a palatial house in Hanover Square. After the customary rounds of carousing and culture absorbing, with a few interactions with women that could be called highly informative if not character building, Joseph had returned to London determined to establish himself.

And found every door shut in his face.

Including his own.

His ire fed itself to a towering wall as he pounded on the portal. He stood with a fist raised in the air, about to deliver another blow, when the door burst inward and a young woman appeared there like a thunderbolt dropped from Heaven.

His ire collapsed, as did his arm. A strange heat crawled up his insides, as it always did when she was near. She disrupted his internal organs the same way she up-tilted his life, making all the stable, known, and reliable surfaces slide away in new and alarming directions. While she stood in the center of the destruction like a deadly, beautiful pillar of fire, always burning, throwing a heat it would scald him to touch.

Inez had come back to him.

Again.