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CHAPTER ONE
HADTIMONEYGEORGEnot felt dead inside, she might almost have enjoyed this lavish dinner the night before her farce of a wedding.
Almost.
It was merry enough, as suited a pre-wedding gathering on Christmas Eve. The guests were well-heeled and far too well-bred to speak directly of the many unfortunate undercurrents flowing up from the old stones all around them. The groom was well-liked in this particular circle, having considered himself a scion thereof for many decades. Two of his previous wives had been great favorites here as each had been part and parcel of this same crowd, as likely to claim power in Whitehall and international stock exchanges as in the titles so many had inherited.
Everything tonight was the height of sophistication, in deference to both her uncle’s self-regard and his bottomless ambition. To say nothing of the groom’s.
Too bad about the tart of a bride, Timoney thought from her position at her uncle’s right, with a glimmer of her former wry humor.
But she locked it away. Because she didn’t feel things anymore. She’d already had her fill.
Timoney looked around the hall instead. Herchildhood home,entailed away to her uncle after her father’s death, was done up like a stately Christmas card.Aunt Hermione was renowned for her joylessness in all things, which Timoney suspected was directly related to her endless pursuit of the skeletal figure she liked to coldly tell her rather softer and rounder teen daughters was the height of elegance. True enough, as collarbones like hers essentially acted as clothes hangers for couture. And yet despite the iron self-control and what had to be a lifetime of gnawing hunger, the woman was possessed of an excellent eye for decoration.
If Timoney had been of a more poetic bent, she might have indulged herself with imagining that tricking out the old family hall was how Hermione expressed herself in ways otherwise unavailable to her as the thin-lipped, thinner-hipped, and much younger wife of Timoney’s loathsome uncle Oliver.
But poetry was far too emotional. Aunt Hermione was likely good at decorating because she was, herself, a decoration. And like all the other trophy wives here tonight, her true vocation was in making her husband happy—likely so he’d go off and be happy elsewhere and leave her to her poinsettias and evergreen boughs.
You would do well to learn a little something from Hermione,Timoney told herself, bracingly.After all, she was staring down a futureas a trophy herself.
Though a rather tarnished one, as her uncle never hesitated to remind her.
She slid her gaze toward her groom and was pleased to find that even tonight, one more sleepless nightbefore the wedding,she felt the same wealth of nothingshe’dfelt since her uncle had announced that Timoney’s choices were stark. Either marry his business associate,Julian Browning-Case,or be cut off from the family forever.
It wasn’t that Timoney liked her extended family all that much that the loss of them would be devastating in any way. But after losing her parents—and afterward, losing what was left of her heart so wholly and irrevocably—she didn’t have it in her to walk away from what she had left. She also knew that her parents would have hated it if she had. They had always told her that Oliver might have faults, but it was better to believe that he was doing the best he could.
Timoney had seen no evidence of that. Butreally, it was the least she could do after her scandalous behavior had, according to her uncle, blackened the family name forever.
Shewas well awarethather uncle’s real concern had nothing to do with the family’s reputation. It was her reputation, not the family’s, and why would anyone care what the orphaned daughter of the former heir got up to? The Georges had old money and unlike some, had held on to it. And every family with a drop of noble blood in England had at least one embarrassing member. Especially among the younger generations, who tended to perform for the pages ofTatler—especially if it horrified their parents. It was an excuse for her uncle to flex his power as the head of the family, that was all.
But none of that mattered any longer. Julian Browning-Case, while not what Timoney would describe asdotingin any way, was not openly vicious.He was three times her age, had not insulted her even when her uncle did, and was shaped like a man who could look forward to future heart trouble. To that end, the kindestadvice heraunt hadever given her—moments before entering the engagement party a month ago that Timoney had worked to pretend wasn’t happening as it did—was a pointed reminder that the Browning-Cases were not known for being particularly long-lived.
Hermione had seen Timoney balk, just outside the doors of the hall. And because Oliver had not, it had likely felt safe for her to lean in and offer a dollop of her own brand of wisdom.
For those of us who make practical instead of romantic marriages,Hermione had said with a curious expression on her face—as if, Timoney had reflected from the usual distance from which she observed anything these days, seeing her niece for the very first time.Perspective is everything. One must always weigh one’s—ah—expected future solitude against the manifold joys of one’s actual marriage while it exists in its current form. It is a delicate math.
That was the closest Hermione had ever come to any kind of surrogate maternal expression.That, too, was just as well.
Because Timoney did not wish to think too much about her parents—or her actual, horribly missed mother. It was too hard. Too painful,though it was nearly three years ago now.The two of them had been gone so quickly, so suddenly. And then everything had changed so rapidly. One terrible, irrevocable event after another so that Timoney rather thought that if she had the capacity to feel anything inside any longer, anything at all, a night like thismight havewreckedher.
For surely it ought to be painful to be back here in this house where she had once been so happy.When joy had been at the heart of everything, waiting around every corner, filling all of these ancient rooms.Some of her fondest memories were of running through these halls that had seemed far lighter then, lit upwith her parents’ love for each other. And their boundless delight in her.
She had been on the verge of her twentieth birthday whenshe’dgotten the callthat an icy road on a cold March evening had taken away the two peopledearest toher.Mere miles from this old manor house, hidden away in hedges and stone.
Uncle Oliver had wasted no time.As the new head of the family, hewas in charge ofthe Georgefortune—and Timoney’s trust—until her twenty-eighthbirthday. But he hadn’t wished to trouble himself with paying for her until then. He had yanked her out of her beloved finishing school in the French Alps two weeks after her parents’ funeral. Once she’d come back to the house he’d already claimed as his, he had informed her that for the next eight years she was to do as he bid herbecause, as far as he was concerned, she was a charity case. And it was too bad for Timoney that he was no fan of charity.
Even then, he had offered her choices, such as they were. She was to marry to suit him—because she would be a useless drain on him for nearly a decade aside from her ability to please his rich friends and access their wealth and favor—or she was welcome to make her own way in the world.
Timoney wet her lips with the wineon the tablebefore her, an easy way to check to make sure her mouth was in the polite near-smile shape that was expected of her. And she nodded along, pretending to listen as the swell of conversation went on all around her.
Something in her shifted, almost unpleasantly, as she thoughtof the girlshe’dbeen back then. Puffed up with outrage and grief.Filled with a deep loathing of her evil uncle and appalled at his demands.Did he really think he could treat her like achattel? She was newly twenty then, and modern—not a medieval twelve.
She’dtold him where he could go, she’dswanned off to London, and she’d taken the first job she could find. It turned out she was an excellent fit to do a bit of PR for a corporation she’d never heard of and didn’t care to learn much about. But that was the benefit of her brand of public relations. Timoney didn’t need to move the product—she threw the parties. She already had the kind of connections businessmen in suits were always gasping to exploit, so it mattered littlethat she knew nothing at all about the things they got up to in their endless meetings.All that mattered was that she was blonde and could get certain names to turn up, which guaranteed press.
And for a good eighteen months she’d had a lovely time.She’d shared a flat in Central London—it was more a house, really, but they all called it a flat because that felt more career-girls-in-the-Smoke—with a few girls she knew from school. All of themhad been in the same sort of purgatory, cast out into the world by the heads of their families with vague expectations that they should prove they weren’t entirely useless—even though everyone knewthat in five years or ten or so the trust funds would start kicking in and all the proof would be pointless.They’d all been playing the same sort of waiting game in those years, tradingthis party for that in all the trendiest corners of giddy London, all of them counting down the daysuntil they could stop pretending.
It would be better, Timoney had often thought back then, not to know that there was a future, fixed date upon which one would never have to worryabout paying a bill again.Especially when she couldn’t go beg Daddy to do it for her like her friends.
