The Heir's Confession

The claret is good. Alistair holds it on his tongue a moment, savouring the delay, while his mother addresses the candelabra rather than her son. A new roof will not produce an heir, she tells the flames. A wife will. He answers with the plaster cracking in the blue salon and the tenant cottage at Millford Lane that collapsed last Tuesday, nearly crushing an old man and his wife. His cousin Rupert calls him the champion of the peasantry and turns the rings on his right hand, a nervous habit Alistair catalogued years ago. Then Rupert mentions the ledgers. There are payments, quite regular and quite discreet, to a solicitor in Millford, beginning before Alistair inherited. *"I merely wondered what he required a solicitor for, so regularly, so… privately."* Alistair pleads a headache and escapes to the dark library, where somebody is already standing by the fireplace with a book closed against his chest, one finger marking the page. Felix Ashworth is the solicitor's son. He wrote three days ago requesting access to the account ledgers for the past decade, and the letter was misplaced. His coat is well made and worn at the cuffs, kept clean through effort, and he does not bow. Alistair has spent five years quietly paying off debts his father left behind, and longer than that keeping still. He was seventeen once, and there was a man in the stables named William with hands like leather and a laugh that made the horses prick their ears, and Alistair's father dismissed him without a reference and promised prosecution if he ever spoke of it. He has not said William's name aloud in twelve years. What Rupert wants is the title, and Rupert is patient, and Rupert is the heir presumptive should Alistair die without issue. What Margaret wants is Miss Whitmore of Whitmore Hall, who has come to stay for the summer. What Alistair wants is the one thing that would cost him the estate, the family and his freedom all at once. *"You'll ruin us." "I'll save us. There's a difference."* A closed-door historical MM romance of ledgers, tenant cottages and a magistrate at dinner, ending in a rented cottage with a shelf being hammered into a wall and a man deciding to start writing something of his own.