Best Stories

PART 1 The lace was strangling me. I stood at the back of St. George’s, the weight of my wedding gown pressing down on my ribs like a cage of silk and pearls. Three hundred faces watched me through the haze of candlelight. Three hundred predators dressed in their Sunday best, smelling blood. They knew…

PART 1 The first time Thomas, the Duke of Everly, saw the woman he had once refused to marry, she was standing in the rain on the steps of a house that did not belong to him, wearing a servant’s gown that had been mended at the hem, and holding a child against her hip….

PART 1  The air in the Danbury assembly rooms tasted of sour wine, wilting lilies, and desperate ambition. It was suffocating. Lydia stood flush against the pale green silk of the wall, nursing a lukewarm glass of lemonade. The crystal dug into her gloved palm. She was twenty-four, considered entirely past her prime, and perfectly…

PART 1 “Give me an heir and you’ll be free.” The Duke of Edshot said it the way another man might read out a bill of sale—without heat, without apology. His back half turned to the woman who stood on the far side of the great drawing room. The fire had burned low, and no…

PART 1 The Duke of Dunbear had not meant to see it. He had come round by the low gate, the way he always came when he didn’t want to be announced, and so it was that Rouse of Dunbear — thirty-eight years old, a widower twice over in the ways that mattered, a man…

PART 1 The news spread through England’s grandest drawing rooms faster than the morning papers. His grace, Duke Frederick Winthorp, guardian of one of the oldest ducal houses in the kingdom, was to marry Lady Josephine Hartwell, the only daughter of the immensely wealthy Earl of Hartwell. The announcement sent the aristocracy into a frenzy….

Chapter 1 He held the agency’s letter over the stove flame until the paper began to curl and blacken, then snatched it back — because a man who has buried a wife knows the difference between wanting a thing and being allowed to want it. Eleven minutes he stood like that, a kitchen going cold…

PART 1 Clara Sterling learned two things in the eight years after her father died: how to disappear inside a room full of people, and how to read a column of figures well enough to catch a lie hiding inside it. Her father had taught her the second skill without meaning to. Before his death…

PART 1 Love does not die in a fiery explosion of betrayal. Usually, it dies of exhaustion. For Christine Ashford, the exhaustion arrived on a damp Tuesday in November, at a crowded ball in the Duke of Devonshire’s London townhouse. The air was thick with hot beeswax and wilted freesia and the sour, close smell…

PART 1 The cruelest thing a person can do isn’t to strike you. It’s to stage a joke at your expense — arranged with such care that it strips away whatever scrap of dignity you still cling to. Rain beat against the flimsy glass of the hired hack, smearing the bright greens of the countryside…