Prologue
Secrets
June 1870
A Very Fine Oak Tree
Clarenmore Park
Eloise didn’t knowwhen she started finding secrets. Or maybe the secrets found their way to her. Either way, she had been collecting them for so long that she was beginning to forget the less important ones, like the fact that Lady Tremaine’s hair wasn’t really red or that Lord Reid didn’t wear an eyepatch due to any physical affliction, but because he was of the opinion that it made him appear dashing (she was curious, though, if he wore it in the privacy of his own home).
If thetonwas aware of how many of their little private confidences she had accumulated over the years, they’d most likely be horrified. And they’d undoubtedly accuse her of being an eavesdropper, or a snoop, or even worse. But what they would fail to understand was thattheywere the eavesdroppers.
She didn’t want their secrets.
They brought them toher.
Why, just last month she’d been minding her own business, browsing through a trinket shop, when a certain married earl and a woman who was very much not his wife sailed inside and proceeded to thrust their tongues at each other a mere five feet from where she was standing.
Oh, it was awful. She still shuddered to think of it. Dust everywhere, and thesoundsthey were making...like two cows stuck upside down in a ditch.
A few weeks prior, she was accidentally privy to Mr. Marston’s declaration of love…to Lord Belgrade. Before that, she was hiding in the garden during a ball when her eldest sister, Lenora, came out with her husband and told him that she was expecting their first child. And when her other sister, Bridget, dropped her spoon under the table during a dinner party, did shereallythink no one would notice when her hand ended up in Lord Croft’s lap?
It was absurd, how little due diligence people performed to ensure no one was within hearing distance before they blurted out their private affairs. Almost as if they wanted to be overheard, and perhaps some of them did. But that didn’t mean she wanted the responsibility of being the one who overheard them.
Pinching her lips together, Eloise adjusted her grip on the wide, rough tree limb she was balancing on. The ground loomed fifteen feet below, and with it an endless list of things to do and rules to follow as her family’s annual house party drew near. But up here, amidst the leafy, concealing branches of her favorite oak, she was free from all of the pesky obligations that came from being an unwilling member of the peerage. She was free from the judgmental stares of her sisters. Free from having to attendanotherboring lesson on proper table etiquette (a lesson that Bridget had obviously skipped). Free from everything, really.
Except for secrets.
Because even though she was alone for once, there was one secret that Eloise couldn’t escape, no matter how high she climbed. A secret that had haunted her longer than all the others. A secret that was embedded in the middle of her heart, because it washersecret. And it was the worst, darkest, most terrible secret of all.
She, Lady Eloise Catherine Arabella Rosewood…was a murderer.
1
Down With the Patriarchy
Three Weeks Ago
London
Adam St. Clair had residedin England for two weeks, four days, and thirteen hours. During that time, he had used his ruthless bargaining skills and incredibly deep pockets to purchase a townhouse in Mayfair, an estate in Sussex, and a hunting lodge in the highlands.
What had once been inaccessible to those born outside the British blue bloodlines could now be bought for a price, and even without a title or inheritance, Adam was the new sole owner of three of the most coveted homes in all of Great Britain. For a man born into poverty, it was an incredible series of acquisitions…but did little to quell the restless demand inside of him. He wanted more, and he’d get it. With iron control and callous intent, he had no intention of stopping until he had every single thing that his father had denied him when the Earl of Denbigh had impregnated a scullery maid and then cast her aside as if she were a piece of filthy linen.
That maid was Adam’s mother, and after fleeing to distant family in America, she had raised him as best she could before succumbing to consumption before his fifth birthday. Shuffled from home to home, he had grown up hungry, desperate, and half-feral. If not for an elderly doctor who had taken pity on him, he would have most likely perished in the cruel, unforgiving streets of Boston. Lost to a street gang, or starvation, or any number of ills that awaited an orphan. Except he wasneverreally an orphan, because he had a father who was living. A wealthy father across the pond who could have easily taken him in, as he’d done the three children who had come prior to Adam. Who could have saved his mother the worry and the anxiousness and the guilt that had driven her to an early grave. Who could have done–whoshouldhave done–more than wash his hands of the girl he’d taken by force along with the babe growing in her belly.
If not for a letter hidden amidst his mother’s possessions, Adam might never have come to learn the identity of the man whose seed had given him life. Certainly his mother hadn’t ever spoken of him and even if she had, he would have been too young to remember.
Too young for memories…but not too young for the hot, festering lick of vengeance that had been burning like a hot coal in his belly for as long as he could remember.
Dr. Evans had done everything in his power to extinguish the coal. He’d recognized that despite Adam’s illiteracy and temper, he was a boy of remarkable drive and intelligence. With no family of his own, he had taken Adam in and used the resources at his disposal as a medical professional to see him fed, clothed, and educated. More than that, he had provided a restless, resentful hooligan on the brink of self-destruction with an example of a good anddecentman. The kind of man that Adam himself could become if he took to his studies, stayed off the streets, and found a job with a decent paying wage.
He started off hammering the soles onto shoes for a penny an hour. At night he’d head to the docks and wait for whatever work was thrown his way. Unloading cargo, hauling crates, turning a blind eye when a body was tossed into the river…the means didn’t matter as much as the money did, and money was all that Adam cared about.
Every cent that crossed his palm went into investments. He taught himself about the stock market. How to buy and trade tiny pieces of a company until you had control over the whole of it. How to spy a deal before anyone else, and how to sell off shares right before they bottomed out.
In the beginning, he diversified his holdings. A little bit here. A dash there. A pinch in the middle. But a tip–at the docks, of all places, where he continued to grind his muscles into his bones–led to him throwing all he had into a burgeoning railway business owned by one Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, an entrepreneur who had built his fortune in steamships.
