On the day of Charlotte and Charles’s wedding.

Just before the ceremony, Charlotte receives a shocking confession from her friend Fiona.

“I’m pregnant — with Charles’s child!”

Those words alone were enough to bring Charlotte’s world crashing down.

***

Fleeing as though running for her life, Charlotte left everything behind and sought refuge with her relatives, the Spencers. For a long time she shut herself away in their manor, rarely venturing out — until the day she found herself marching straight to the door of Raymond Bayen, a man of legendary wealth, in a desperate bid to sort out a mishap her relatives had caused.

But this man is strange.

“I said I would purchase an hour of your time for fifty gold.”

He uses her relatives’ mishap as leverage to make her the most peculiar proposals.

“There is no shortage of truly despicable people in this world — they’re practically underfoot everywhere you turn. So why, my lady, do you trust others so easily? If something genuinely dangerous were to happen to you—!”

He frets over Charlotte as though she were a child left to wander near the water’s edge.

“I have every right to give gifts as I please.”

And he is absolutely beside himself when he cannot press yet another gift into her hands.

What on earth is wrong with this man?

We only just met today, didn’t we?

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