historical romance — explicit, open door. `regency romance` returns · Culverton
A Marriage in Fact
The articles bought a wife. They did not buy a bedfellow — and Mr Wyard means to be asked.
Suffolk, Lady Day 1820. Arabella Felsham is six-and-twenty, pretty, portionless, and has just heard an attorney read her value aloud to the shilling: eleven hundred and fifty pounds of her brother's debts paid outright, eight hundred settled on her, forty a year in pin-money. She is married that same month to Daniel Wyard — four-and-forty, a bailiff's son, owner of a hundred and forty acres bought with eleven years of saved wages, and an entire stranger.
On the wedding night he tells her, without apology, that he will wait to be asked — and then he keeps to it. Four months of the same table, the same farm book, and two beds made up every morning by a housekeeper who says nothing — while every way Arabella can think of to say what she wants comes out sounding like payment for goods already bought.
Then a creditor sues to have her settlement set aside, and the suit turns on one question: was this a bargain, or a marriage in fact? To keep her eight hundred pounds she need only swear to what has not happened.
Explicit, open-door Regency romance. For readers of Georgette Heyer and Cecilia Grant — a marriage of convenience with the door left open.
Categories
Historical Romance / RegencyHistorical Romance / GeneralErotica
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