Claiming His Forgotten Wife (A Few Good Bucks #2)

Prologue

When Ann Wake, born Ann Cardmaker, entered his household for the first time, she carried in her hands a poorly printed family Bible, upon which sat a doll.

Edmund, Lord Montfort, initially couldn’t speak. He was too disturbed by the doll’s ragged attire and beaded black eyes. It was not the plaything of a silly young woman but the cherished friend of a child.

And this posed a problem. Edmund Wake had just that morning married a slip of a girl snatched from the schoolroom. A girl of only sixteen who escorted her doll into the house where she would reign as mistress.

Despite the importance of the day, she wore a threadbare work dress and had pulled her thin hair of an indeterminate color, likely somewhat red, into sad pigtails.

Edmund, in truth, had not orchestrated the dubious union — he being double Ann’s age and many times her consequence.

The whole affair was a tragedy: Edmund’s feckless brother, Crispin, had seduced the neighboring girl.

Crispin had then mysteriously fallen from his horse after a night of drinking and carousing at a local public house, And this left the small matter of the girl.

When her father visited him and suggested she might be pregnant with Crispin’s child, Edmund quickly resolved it. He would marry the chit.

But he would not touch her, would not even gaze upon her, on account of her age.

He kept that promise to himself for fourteen years. Until he discovered her in bed, in his own house, with her lover.