Free Catch a Falling Heiress: An American Heiress in London by Laura Lee Guhrke

me.”
    “Once the two of you are married, love will follow. No reason to think otherwise.”
    “I can give you a very important reason.” She pulled her hand out of her father’s grip. “He’s already in love with Cicely Morton.”
    Her father shrugged as if that were of no consequence. “You turn your charms on him for a while, and he’ll forget the Morton girl ever existed.”
    “I doubt that. He’s been in love with Cicely since we were all playing in sandboxes. He’s always intended to marry her. And from the letters Cicely’s sent me and the way they looked together earlier this evening, their feelings for each other haven’t changed in the year I’ve been away.”
    Her father’s expression hardened into implacable lines. “Davis,” Ephraim said, “will do as he’s told.”
    Her stomach twisted with dread and something deeper, something she’d never felt near her father before, something a lot like fear. “Told?” she echoed, her voice just above a whisper. “Told by whom, Daddy?”
    The ruthlessness faded, then vanished, leaving the face of the benevolent father she recognized, but to Linnet, it was too late. The affection in his expression seemed unreal to her now, like a mask. Her mind flashed back over the past year, to all the ways he’d helped her evade her mother’s plans, particularly during her recent London season, to all the times he’d professed to understand that of course she wanted a husband who loved her and wasn’t after her money, and she realized all his support and assistance had not been for the sake of her happiness but to further some secret ambition of his own. She’d always known her father was ruthless—he couldn’t have turned their respectable family fortune into a vast empire of almost obscene wealth if he didn’t possess that quality—but in her entire life, Linnet had never seen his ruthless ambitions directed at her.
    He smiled. “I meant that Davis will appreciate the advantages of an alliance between our families, once his father and I have discussed it with him.”
    “Once you’ve bullied him, you mean,” she corrected with asperity, in no mind to sacrifice her happiness—or Davis’s either—for the sake of alliance. “Does Mother know this?” she demanded, remembering again Helen’s complacent reaction to her earlier threat to take matters to her father. “Does she know Davis MacKay is whom you want me to marry?”
    “Of course she knows.”
    “But she doesn’t agree with your choice.” Even as she spoke, Linnet felt as if she were grasping at straws.
    Her father bristled. “It doesn’t matter whether she agrees or not. We had a deal.”
    “A deal?” Linnet echoed, her voice rising, her dismay giving way to a renewed sense of outrage. “What sort of deal?”
    “Your mother wanted the trip to Europe and she wanted to wind things up in London so you could do their season. I don’t understand why, but even after that snake Conrath, she thinks a British husband would be better for your future, so I agreed to let you have a season there. The deal was that if you met some British lord and fell in love with him, I’d pay over the dowry and not kick up a fuss.”
    “While you did everything you could to discourage the possibility. Pretending to be on my side, but all the while, making your own plans for me to come home and marry Davis, without any consideration of his feelings or mine. Oh, Daddy.” Her voice cracked on the last two words, and if she wasn’t already spitting mad at the realization she’d been played between her parents like a pawn, she might have burst into tears.
    Her father shifted his weight, looking for the first time a little guilty, but he brushed it off with a shrug of his shoulders. “Don’t make me out to be some sort of domestic tyrant. Ever since the Conrath business, you’ve said you didn’t want a British lord. You said you wanted to marry an American and keep living here in America.”
    “Which