Chapter 1
It was the rain that ruined Henry Mortimer’s life.
Or possibly a cherry stem. The cherry stem had come first and therefore was chronologically more likely to have been the agent of his downfall.
He’d been twenty-one. Margo and Matilda had just made their debuts, and only as a favor to his best friend, Spencer, had he gone to the drawing room the morning after the eighteen-year- old twins’ presentation at court. As far as he’d been concerned, the twins were Spencer’s baby siblings, one more part of Spencer’s earldom that he—a mere solicitor—would, for better or worse, never have to worry about.
He’d met the twins years prior when he’d followed Spencer home from Cambridge, and he remembered them mostly as skinny, freckled redheads who’d climbed in Spencer’s window in the middle of the night and tied him to the bedposts.
So he was not expecting to fall in love with Margo Halifax.
If he’d anticipated the cherry stem, he would never have called at Number Twelve Mayfair. Had he been able to predict the future, he would have moved to bloody France.
When he and Spencer strolled into the drawing room—Spencer carrying two enormous bouquets of irises that Henry had acquired on his behalf—the small, square chamber was already filled with gentlemen. Henry spotted Matilda first. It was difficult to miss her. She was sitting atop the pianoforte, swinging her legs in time to a lively Scottish reel being banged out by one of Spencer’s idiot Harrow friends. She had an unlit cigar clenched between two fingers, and she waved it at them as they entered.
Henry blinked.
He had not called on many young ladies—none, in point of fact—but he was fairly certain this was not typical behavior. Spencer, at his side, heaved a long-suffering sigh.
He looked over the small room. He was already feeling dazed, and then his eyes landed on Margo, and Henry Mortimer was instantly, irrevocably, transcendently poleaxed.
They looked similar, Margo and Matilda, but Henry didn’t know how anyone could have confused them. Margo was more freckled, a constellation of gold stars trailing from her cheekbone down to the side of her mouth. Her front teeth were a little crooked.
While Matilda looked imperiously out over the callers clustered in the drawing room, Margo caught his eye, winked, and grinned.
“Do it, then,” said one of the blockheads encircling her. “No more boasting, Lady Margaret, or I’ll begin to doubt your honor.”
She held a cherry between her fingers, Henry noticed, a deep winey red, and at the blockhead’s words, she gave it a slow, sensuous roll. “Doubt not,” she said, and then she tugged the stem off with her teeth and sucked it into her mouth.
Just like the rest of the blockheads, Henry was fucking mesmerized. As he watched, Margo’s brow furrowed in concentration. Her jaw worked, then set, and he saw a flash of pink tongue, peeking out from her overlapping front teeth. Her lips puckered and pursed, and in his twenty-one years of life, he had never seen anything quite so erotically charged.
She reached up, stuck her thumb and forefinger into her mouth, and pulled them out with a wet pop.
Henry began to fear that he would unman himself.
“Ha!” she said triumphantly. “I did it!” Between her fingers, Margo held the cherry stem, tied in a knot.
“Christ,” said Spencer, “that’s revolting.”
And Henry was never the same again.
But it wasn’t, he reflected now, entirely the fault of the cherry stem. He’d spent the subsequent seven years watching Margo and Matilda flout convention at every turn, drinking brandy out of flasks at the opera, emerging from closed carriages with gentlemen right on Rotten Row. He’d seen Matilda lay out one overeager young buck with her silk-gloved fist, and beheld with his own two eyes the infamous costume party at which Margo turned up dressed like Lady Godiva, a barely there silk dress the same shade as her skin skimming dangerously along her breasts and hips.
He’d watched, and he’d listened to Spencer despair over their antics, and he’d even dined and danced and ridden with Margo, without once betraying the fact that he was, like the smarter half of the beau monde, completely in her thrall.
As far as he was concerned, he’d been getting along fine enough. Until the bloody rain came and wrecked everything.
If it hadn’t been for the rain, he might not have been home when Margo knocked on his door. Or—even if he had been, he could have sent her away.
I’m sorry, he could have said, this isn’t a good time. I have company.
Or maybe, Let’s talk again when Spencer’s back from Wales, or even, No, Margo, there’s no one here but me, and I need you to back away slowly before I drag you into my apartment and peel you out of that dress. With my teeth.
But it was raining, and it was October and colder than a witch’s tit. Her cloak was plastered to her head, and water was dripping in rivulets over her cheek—do not think about licking that water off, for fuck’s sake—and he wasn’t about to send her back out into the weather.
So when Margo said, “Henry? Can I come in?” he opened his door wider and answered, “Of course.”
Chapter 2
Oh thank bloody Christ, Margo thought as Henry let her in.
Henry was here. Henry—dear, quiet, sturdy, inimitable Henry—was going to make everything all right.
“Come on,” he said, tucking one hand beneath her elbow and guiding her through the narrow hallway. “You’re soaked. Let’s get you in front of the fire.”
His hands were gentle as he positioned her in his small sitting room, then unfastened the frogs of her cloak. It was that—Henry’s sweet, undeserved gentleness—that pushed Margo over the edge. She shrugged out of her cloak, the heavy wool garment slopping at her feet, and then burst into tears.
She threw herself at Henry’s chest, soaking his waistcoat with her sopping hair and her tears, and the fact that she was making his life worse simply by existing in his vicinity made her cry even harder.
He hesitated for a long moment, and then one hand spread warmly between her shoulder blades. “Margo? What’s wrong?”
She was a disaster. She had ruined everything.
But she couldn’t say that. Not even to Henry.
“Matilda’s gone,” she said instead. She pulled back from his chest—which was startlingly solid, a fact she tended to forget about her brother’s grave best friend—and looked up into his dark eyes. “Oh God, Henry. It’s all my fault.”
“Come,” he said again, and pulled her toward a pair of armchairs in front of the fire.
She’d never been to Henry’s apartments before, though she had his direction from one of his calling cards, which she’d inexplicably tucked in her escritoire years ago. When she’d discovered that Matilda was missing, their brother out of town, she’d gone first to Henry’s office. It had been closed and locked, and she’d had to hire a hack to take her to Bloomsbury, where his small suite was located. Everything was faintly shabby, but well kept, a polished shine on each piece of furniture.
She settled into the armchair he pulled back for her, and then winced as her hair dripped audibly onto the navy upholstery.
“What do you mean, Matilda’s gone? Where did she go?”
She took a shuddering breath. “Oh, Henry, everything is such a bloody tangle. Matilda—well, you know Matilda. She’s so damned certain she knows what’s best. She’s been—I don’t know if courted by is the right phrase, but she’s gotten tangled up with the Marquess of Ashford—”
“Ashford? You’re joking.”
“That’s what I said!” She looked at Henry, at his dear, serious face. Perhaps there had been a time when she had not found him handsome, but she could not remember it. His hair and eyes looked almost black here in the dim room, his mouth the same familiar firm slash. “She said she’d finally found someone who saw her for who she truly is. And I—” God, she couldn’t say it.
“I did something awful,” Margo said instead. “Something terrible. And I drove her away.”
“What did you—”
She tried to laugh, but it came out choked, almost a sob. “Don’t ask me that, Henry. Please don’t ask me that.”
He looked doubtful, but he nodded. To her surprise, he reached out and brushed her upper arm with his thumb, one firm, delicate stroke. Unaccountably, she shivered.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re cold. Let me stoke the coals.”
“No.” She tried to cover his fingers with her own, but he pulled his hand away. Tears stung her eyes again, but she forced herself to keep talking. “Matilda left me a note. She and Ashford have eloped, Henry. They’ve gone to Gretna Green.”
“What?” It was impossible to believe. Ashford was nearly the age their father would have been, a cold-blooded aristocrat who, rumors said, had driven his first wife to madness alone in the moorlands of Devon. The very idea of the pale-eyed marquess with her sister—brilliant, vibrant, mocking Matilda . . .
Margo simply could not countenance it.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I started this whole thing. But I’m going to fix it, Henry. I’m not going to let Matilda destroy herself.”
“Margo,” he said cautiously, “if they’ve gone already to Gretna Green, Matilda might be better off if she goes through with the elopement. Her reputation will—”
Margo startled herself with the crack of laughter that burst from her lips. “Don’t be absurd. You know as well as anyone—better than most—that Matilda and I have no reputation to speak of. If we weren’t the wealthiest unmarried heiresses in London and cousins to a royal duke, we wouldn’t be received anywhere in Christendom.”
They’d made a game of it—seeing how far they could go and still benefit from the privilege of their circumstances. It seemed stupid, somehow, now. What had they been trying to prove?
That they were free? That they were more than birds, fluttering their wings against the bars of a pretty cage?
In the end, they were still caged. They’d only pretended to fly.
“All right,” Henry said slowly. “What do you mean to do?”
She licked her lips and met his eyes. “I want to beat her to Gretna Green. And I want you to come with me.”
Henry appeared to stop breathing. Every muscle in his body went abruptly, unnaturally still.
Had she killed him? Surely it was not so shocking a proposal. For heaven’s sake, Henry had been there when she’d gotten slowly and deliberately drunk on Christmas punch and attempted to use a Sèvres platter as a sled.
Then she divined the reason behind what was, for Henry, a startling display of alarm.
“I don’t mean that I want to elope with you,” she said quickly, feeling oddly stung. “I want to track her down on the route or—failing that—be there when she arrives. I think I can bring enough coin to pay off the whole bloody village. If no one will witness the ceremony, she will have to think twice.”
Henry was still frozen. She began to worry that he’d ceased to hear her.
“It’s only—well— ” She hesitated, disturbed by Henry’s utter lack of response. “I cannot go alone. I need you to come with me, Henry. Please.”
At that last, life appeared to return to her brother’s best friend. He started to blink rapidly, and by God, the man had remarkably long eyelashes. Margo thought she might feel a breeze.
“No. No. Absolutely not.”
Her mouth fell open, and she snapped it closed. “No? Did you not hear me, Henry? I only need you to come along—I don’t need you to do anything—”
“You only need me to take you to Scotland—” “It won’t be so much trouble! I promise, Henry, I’ll— I’ll be good.”
His body seemed to shudder, and Margo felt horror flood her before she realized he was laughing. “Margo, you couldn’t be good if your life depended upon it. You are a walking hurricane. Chaos scents you and hurls itself in your direction.”
Well. That wasn’t not true.
“Please,” she said, “please, Henry.”
“Can you not ask your brother?”
She scrubbed her face with her hand, then tangled her fingers in her wet coiffure. “He’s in Wales.”
“Bloody hell,” said Henry, and Margo felt her brows shoot up in surprise. She could not recall ever having heard Henry curse before. She and Matilda had gone through something of a blue period after they’d ordered a cant dictionary from a catalogue, and even at their worst, Henry had barely seemed impressed.
“I knew that,” Henry continued. “When does he return?”
“Not for another week at least. I have to go now, Henry. Tonight, if I’ve any hope of finding Matilda before it’s too late. She’s already had nearly a day’s head start.”
“What if you don’t make it in time?”
She stared down at the puddle of water at her feet. “I can’t think that way. I have to make it. Please, Henry.” She was begging now, and she couldn’t bring herself to care. “I need you.”
“Damn it, Margo!” Henry leaped to his feet and started to pace, and Margo was frankly boggled. “I have—I can’t—” He choked off his words and tried again. “I am a solicitor. I have responsibilities. I cannot just leave for a two-week trip up the Great North Road and back.”
Margo felt cold self-loathing settle in the pit of her stomach.
God. What had she been thinking? Of course he could not simply bend to her every whim. He worked for a living—she had always respected that about him, just as Spencer did. He worked. He had responsibilities, and people who depended upon him, and she was just a small, redheaded disaster who needed other people to clean up the messes she’d made herself.
On stiff legs, she rose. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was hoarse, but her eyes, at least, were dry. “Of course. I should have realized that sooner, I—”
She was not going to cry. She was not.
Henry had risen with her, and his dark eyes were on her face. She blinked hard and looked down, addressing her puddle. “I should not have importuned you so. I’m sorry, Henry.”
She tried to escape with some dignity, but his voice trailed her, and she turned back toward him. “Margo—what do you mean to do?”
Shoulders back, chin up. Don’t let on if you feel an utter fool.
“I’m not certain. But I will think of something.” She tried to meet his gaze and smile. “Don’t worry, Henry. Surely after all this time, you know I’m never at a loss for ideas.”
“Yes,” he said, “I bloody know.”
And then he let her go.
Copyright © 2026 by Alexandra Vasti