CHAPTER ONE
1853“You will do just as I tell you. This man is a good match and you should thank Heaven on your knees for him.”
“Well, I don’t! I will not marry a man I have never met. If he is anything like his father, he will be repulsive. I will not marry him and that’s final.”
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that, my girl. I am your father and you owe me respect, so don’t forget it.”
“You are not my father, you’re my stepfather. Papa was a good kind man, who would never have tried to force me into marriage with a man merely because he was rich.”
In the drawing room of Gardner Manor a man and a young girl faced each other, both furiously angry.
John Gardner was in his fifties – blunt, red-faced and brutal. His stepdaughter, Lady Selina Napier, was just nineteen, elegant, sle
