by Courtney Milan


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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781532819179
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date: 04/19/2016
Series: Courtney Milan's Turner Series , #1
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 474,966

About the Author


You can learn more about Courtney at http://www.courtneymilan.com.

Read an Excerpt

Somerset, August 1837

So this was how it felt to be a conquering hero.





The man who'd stolen a dukedom.



Nobody, that was, except his little brother.











And therein lay Ash's problem. He wanted to make up for every last bit of his brothers' childhood deprivation. He wanted to repay every skipped meal with twelve-course dinners, gift a thousand pairs of gloves in exchange for every shoeless winter. He'd risked his life building a fortune to ensure their happiness. Yet both his brothers declared themselves satisfied with a few prosaic simplicities.

Simplicities wouldn't make up for Ash's failure. So maybe he had overindulged when Mark finally asked him for a favor.

"Shepton Mallet would have been quiet," Mark said, almost wistfully.

"Shepton Mallet is halfway to dead." Ash clucked to his horse. As he did so, the wind stopped. What he'd intended as a faint sound of encouragement sounded overloud. The horse started down the road towards the manor.

Mark kicked his mare into a trot and followed.

"You've never thought it through," Ash tossed over his shoulder. "With Richard and Edmund Dalrymple no longer able to inherit, you're fourth in line for the dukedom. There are a great many advantages to that. Opportunities will arise."

"Is that how you're describing your actions, this past year? 'No longer able to inherit?'"

Ash ignored this sally. "You're young. You're handsome. I'm sure there are some lovely milkmaids in Somerset who would be delighted to make the acquaintance of a man who stands an arm's length from a dukedom."


"Say it," Mark said. "Say what you did to the Dal-rymples. You've spouted one euphemism after another ever since this started. If you can't even bring yourself to speak the words, you should never have done it."

"Christ. You're acting as if I killed them."

But Mark was looking at him, his blue eyes intense. In this mood, with the sun glancing off all that blond hair, Ash wouldn't have been surprised if his brother had pulled a flaming sword from his saddlebag and proclaimed him barred from Eden forever. "Say it," Mark repeated.


"Very well." He met his brother's eyes. "I brought the evidence of the Duke of Parford's first marriage before the ecclesiastical courts, and thus had his second marriage declared void for bigamy. The children resulting from that union were declared illegitimate and unable to inherit. Which left the duke's long-hated fifth cousin, twice removed, as the presumptive heir. That would be me." Ash started his horse again. "I didn't do anything to the Dalrymples. I just told the truth of what their own father had done all those years ago."

And he wasn't about to apologize for it, either.

Mark snorted and started his horse again. "And you didn't have to do that."


When he'd found out about Parford, he'd known with a blazing certainty: If I become Parford, I can finally break my brothers free of the prison they've built for themselves.

With that burden weighing down one side of the scale, no moral considerations could balance the other to equipoise. The disinherited Dalrymples meant nothing. Besides, after what Richard and Edmund had done to his brothers? Really. He shed no tears for their loss.

The servants had finished gathering, and as Ash trotted up the drive, they held themselves at stiff attention. They were too well trained to gawk, too polite to let more than a little rigidity infect their manner. Likely, they were too accustomed to their wages to do more than grouse about the upstart heir the courts had forced upon them.

They'd like him soon enough. Everyone always did.

"Who knows?" he said quietly. "Maybe one of these serving girls will catch your eye. You can have any one you'd like."

Mark favored him with an amused look. "Satan," he said, shaking his head, "get thee behind me."

Ash's steed came to a stop and he dismounted slowly. The manor looked smaller than Ash remembered, the stone of its facade honey-gold, not bleak and imposing. It had shrunk from the unassailable fortress that had loomed in Ash's head all these years. Now it was just a house. A big house, yes, but not the dark, menacing edifice he'd brooded over in his memory.



I'm going to do better than that old bastard.

A vow, that, and one he meant every bit as much as the last promise he'd sworn, looking up at this building.


He'd never seen the woman before in his life. He couldn't have; he would have remembered the feel of her, the sheer rightness of it. She was pretty, even with that dark hair pulled into a severe knot and pinioned beneath a white lace cap. But it wasn't her looks that caught his attention. Ash had seen enough beautiful women in his time. Maybe it was her eyes, narrowed and steely, fixed on him as if he were the source of all that was wrong in the world. Maybe it was the set of her chin, so unyielding, so fiercely determined, when every face around hers mirrored uncertainty. Whatever it was, something about her resonated deep within him.



"One thing," he whispered to his brother. "The woman in the last row—on the far right? She's mine."


"Mr.—I mean, my—" The man paused, uncertain how to address Ash. With the duke still alive, Ash, a mere distant cousin, held no title. And yet he had come here as heir to the dukedom, on the strictest orders from Chancery. Ash could guess at the careful calculation in the majordomo's eyes: should he risk offending the man who might well be his next master? Or ought he adhere to the strict formalities required by etiquette?

Ash tossed his reins to the groom who crept forwards. "Plain Mr. Turner will do. There's no need to worry about how you address me. I scarcely know what to call myself."

The man nodded and the taut muscles in his face relaxed. "Mr. Turner, shall I arrange a tour, or would you and your brother care to take some refreshment first?"


"Good luck," Mark muttered. "I don't believe she likes you all that much."

That much Ash had gleaned from the set of her jaw.

"No refreshment," Ash said aloud. "No rest. I want to know everything, and the sooner, the better. I'll need to speak with Parford, as well. I'd best start as I mean to go on." He glanced at the woman one last time, and then met his brother's eyes. "After all, I do enjoy a challenge."

From her high perch on the cold stone steps, Anna Margaret Dalrymple could make out little in the features of the two gentlemen who approached on horseback. But what she could see did not bode well for her future.

Ash Turner was both taller and younger than she had expected. Margaret had imagined him arriving in a jewel-encrusted carriage, pulled by a team of eight horses—something both ridiculously feminine and outrageously ostentatious, to match his reputation as a wealthy nabob. The man who had taken everything from her should have been some hunched creature, prematurely bald, capable of no expression except an insolent sneer.



As Mr. Turner cantered up, the servants—it was difficult to think of them as fellow servants, when she was used to thinking of them as hers—tensed, breath held. And no wonder. This man had supplanted her brother, the rightful heir, through ruthless legal machinations. If Richard failed in his bid to have the Duke of Parford's children legitimized by act of Parliament, Mr. Turner would be the new master. And when her father died, Margaret would find herself a homeless bastard.

He dismounted from his steed with ease and tossed the reins to the stable boy who dashed out to greet him. While he exchanged a few words with the majordomo, she could sense the unease about her, multiplying itself through the shuffling of feet and the uncertain rubbing of hands against sides. What sort of a man was he?

His gaze swept over them, harsh and severe. For one brief second, his eyes came to rest on Margaret. It was an illusion, of course—a wealthy merchant, come to investigate his patrimony, would care nothing for a servant clad in a shapeless gray frock, her hair secured under a severe mobcap. But it seemed as if he were looking directly inside her, as if he could see every day of these past painful months. It was as if he could see the empty echo of the lady she had been. Her heart thumped once, heavily.

She'd counted on being invisible to him in this guise.

Then, as if she'd been but a brief snag in the fluid silk of his life, he looked away, finishing his survey of the massed knot of servants. Beside her, the upstairs maids held their breath. Margaret wished he would just get it over with and say something dastardly, so they could all hate him.

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