Rejected Mail-Order Bride is Rescued by a Lonely Sheriff – She Has No Idea He’s a Shifter

Chapter 2

Boston, 1880. Five months before the moon.

Margaret Whitfield had been a woman of unremarkable certainties: she taught English at the Ladies’ Academy, she walked the same four streets to and from work, and she believed that good conduct, diligently practiced, would keep the world at a proper distance. Her father had believed it too. Professor Edward Whitfield of Cambridge had lectured his daughters and son on the arithmetic of reputation — every debt repaid, every word weighed, every scandal avoided.

The arithmetic failed him.

The investigation came first, then the newspapers, then the creditors. Margaret never fully understood what her father had done — something about investment papers, signatures, other men’s money — only that the word fraud was attached to his name in print, and that he died of an apoplectic fit three weeks before the trial that would have buried him. The Academy dismissed her the same week they removed his portrait from the common room. The moral taint of the family, the headmistress said, not unkindly, which made it worse. Eviction followed. The creditors took everything except her father’s pocket watch, which they overlooked in the confusion of a broken desk drawer.