The Heir's Secret, livre ebook

Julian Ashworth has read the letter three times, each pass a fresh humiliation. *Your father's notes fall due on the first of May. I trust the Ashworth honour will prove more durable than the Ashworth credit.*
He touches the corner to the candle flame and holds it until the heat kisses his thumb, then drops it into the grate with the rest of the morning's correspondence: three bills, one threatening, one polite, one already six months old.
The clock strikes nine. He straightens his waistcoat, tucks his cravat higher, checks his reflection in the dark window glass, and looks just long enough to be certain the mask is holding.
The ballroom has not been used for dancing since his mother died. The chandeliers are still wrapped in Holland cloth. Somebody has set an easel in the middle of the parquet, and a stool with a faded red cushion, and there is no painter beside them, because the appointment was for eight.
Owen Dalrymple arrives at a quarter past nine with a satchel in one hand, a canvas under paper in the other, hair the colour of new rust escaping its tie, a smear of green along his jaw, and no apology whatsoever.
*"Would you like a portrait that looks like you, or a portrait painted at the appointed hour?"*
Julian sits, because arguing would make him petty, and lifts his chin to the angle he practised in the mirror. Owen draws something else entirely, and will not paint the man in the mirror, and says so.
The portrait is not vanity. It is for Lady Margaret Denby's mother to approve his suit, because Julian has one month to find a wife, and the Denby fortune is the only thing standing between Ashworth Hall and a moneylender on Lombard Street whose card reads *Discretion assured.*
Philip Ashworth arrives precisely on time, the way he always does when he wants something, with a smile fixed on his round face like a mask painted onto wood, and lists for Julian exactly how hollow the title is and exactly what happens when he fails.
Then letters that Julian burned turn out not to have been burned, and somebody knows what is in them.
A historical romance between two men across one London Season: an heir keeping a house upright with posture and a properly tied cravat, a painter who works when the light is right and not before, an engagement supper that nobody at the table means, and a choice between a marriage that solves everything and a life that does not. The romance is closed-door.