Ruin and Reparation

In 1816, Elias Wren asked a woman to marry him in a garden at nineteen. She said no. That winter, he refused to lend her brother the money that would have kept the Ashby estate from being sold. He has spent eleven years getting richer than anyone in the north of England, and poorer in every way that matters. Perpetua Ashby has spent the same eleven years turning her ruined family home into a school for orphaned girls, mortgaged to a bank whose true owner she has only just discovered. When she walks into his Manchester counting house to demand an explanation, he does not offer her the loan. He offers her a year on the school's board, in exchange for the mortgage forgiven, so he can learn what his money has been doing in her hands. What follows is a year of ledgers, bad harvests, and a scandal sheet, and two people who have spent eleven years not saying the same word. A steamy Regency second chance novel with a heroine who keeps her own books and a hero who finally writes the letter.