The door to my office opened and Priscilla walked in. She didn’t wait for me to say anything before she sat on the other side of my desk and nailed me with her direct stare. The last thing I wanted was for her to lecture me yet again. Why couldn’t she understand that I had made my decision? I didn’t say anything and just waited her out. There was no use trying to cut her off or avoid the conversation. If we were to remain friends when the dust settled then I needed to let her have her say. I only hoped she would return the favour and actually listen to what I had to say.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t do this again,” she said. “I kept telling myself that you knew what you were doing, that you were a smart woman who was entitled to make her own decisions.”

“So what changed?” I asked, not able to keep quiet. “Why are you here Priscilla? We have gone over this several times now and I haven’t changed my mind on the matter.”

“I don’t believe that’s true at all,” she said. “I know you changed your mind. I know you called off the betrothal, but now for some reason it’s back on again? Explain that to me because for the life of me I can’t understand why an intelligent woman like yourself is being so stupid.”

I ground my teeth together and didn’t answer. I was hurt by her bluntness, although that was what had attracted me to her in the first place. I liked knowing where I stood with my best friend… well, I used to like it. It didn’t feel so great right at the moment.

“I know about the money. Dom told me everything. I know that Lord Cameron is broke and that your trust fund and dowry combined are all he would ever need to keep his estate solvent and continue to keep him in the lifestyle that he is accustomed to. You should have been the one to tell me, not Dom. I shouldn’t have had to hear the details from a third party, Jeanette. You should have come to me, you should have let me help you.”

“What, like you let me help you?”

“That’s exactly what I am talking about. Didn’t you sit in my office and say the very same thing to me not too long ago? Why are the rules different for you? Why do you get to hide things from me when you got so upset that I hadn’t confided in you?”

“We’ve already hashed this out,” I said, stroppy with her for making me feel so ashamed about my behaviour. “You know why I didn’t come to you. It was too close to the bone and your first reaction would have been to tell me not to marry him.”

“Not just my first reaction,” she said, heatedly. “My every reaction is to tell you not to marry him and it has got nothing to do with him being broke. I wouldn’t care a whit that he was broke if you were truly in love with him. But you’re not and he is not in love with you either. This is all about the money and I know all about what greed makes people do.”

“But this is a completely different situation!” I said exasperated that she was bringing that up again. “What happened to you was wrong and so incredibly evil that I can’t even comprehend it. But this is not the same.”

“Really?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “You may not have been sold like I was, but if you boil it down to the bare bones, you will see that the situation really isn’t much different. You are being traded. You are being forced to give away money that is rightfully yours in exchange for a title.”

“No one is forcing me—”

“Rubbish,” she snapped, “Of course you’re being forced. Emotional manipulation is a kind of abuse. Your mother has undermined your very core and she has been doing it since you were born. She has hurt you in ways that may not be physically evident on the outside but that run deep within your psyche. Tell me, when you look in the mirror, what do you see?”

I swallowed the words I was going to say. She knew. Priscilla knew that when I looked in the mirror I saw what my mother saw.

“You think you are making this decision of your own free will? Don’t lie to yourself. This is another pathetic attempt to win affection from a woman who wouldn’t know how to love anyone other than herself. You know that she only wants you to marry him for her own selfish reasons. And you also know that once you have given in and done what she wants, she will come up with another set of demands. You will never make that woman happy and until you realise that, you will never be happy.”

Priscilla stood as I sat there trying to swallow the ugly truth she had just lobbed at me.

“I love you Jeanette. I love you probably more than I love my own sister. It kills me to see you doing this. It’s killing all of us. I had to practically tie Dom to a chair to stop him from hunting down Lord Cameron and murdering him in his sleep.” She sighed and shook her head, closing her eyes as if it hurt to say the next few words. “I know you have to make this decision on your own and I know me coming here and trying to force you into seeing things my way is no better than what your mother is doing to you. All your life you’ve done what was expected of you and now you have two different support networks wanting two different things from you. The difference is, my concern - our concern,” she said spreading her arms to encompass the whole palace, “is coming from a place of love, not selfishness. We want what’s best for you, not so that we can get anything out of it, just because we love you for who you are. We don’t want to change you, we don’t want you to do things our way in order to gain our approval. We want you happy for your own sake and none of us see that happiness coming with you married to that little weasel of a man.”

I rode my bike hard. Priscilla’s words had stripped me bare and now I had to face the truth of what I was doing. She was right, of course. I had been too determined to hold on to my own pride to see it. For the first time in my life I had felt like I was making my own decisions and controlling my own life, but I wasn’t. I was being manipulated as I had been all my life. The question now was, what was I going to do about it?

I pulled my bike to a stop in front of the barn at Ferny Grove. I hadn’t planned on coming here, but I wanted to talk to Martin. I wanted to know what the truth was about my father. Had he really wanted me to marry a title? Or was that just another thing Mother was using to manipulate me? I also wanted to know what turning down Lord Cameron’s offer would mean for him.

Martin walked out of the barn and his eyebrows climbed into his hair when he saw me standing there. I looked down at myself in my leathers and the bike that stood cooling beside me. Huh. I didn’t really think that through did I?

“Jeanette?”

“Yeah,” I said sheepishly and shrugging. “I bought a bike.”

“I see,” he said and I could tell he was holding back the words that he wanted to say. I appreciated his self-restraint, something I noticed that was changing about him. He hadn’t been so up-in-my-business lately and had instead been casting himself in the role of supporter.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you.”

He smiled and walked over to hug me. I burrowed into his chest. It felt good to be enveloped in his arms, it was just a pity that I wished it was someone else’s arms I was wrapped in. He pulled back and looked down at me.

“Come inside and we’ll talk.”

I followed meekly behind him, not sure exactly what I was going to say. There was definitely something different about my brother, something more accepting. I didn’t get the feeling he would get angry with me or judge me for the answers I sought which gave me a little boost of confidence. Maybe I could, for once in my life, actually be completely honest with him without feeling like he would cast me out and disown me.

“Sit,” he said, indicating the small cluster of couches in the corner of his office. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea, please,” I said and sat waiting for him to bring over the drinks.

I was nervous, but not cripplingly so, which was a good sign. I blew out a breath as he turned and carried the two mugs over to where I sat. He handed me a mug and then sat, his eyes watching me curiously as he blew on the hot contents of his cup.

“Talk to me,” he eventually said when I didn’t start the conversation.

I took a deep breath and put my mug down on the small occasional table so that my shaking hands wouldn’t spill it.

“I don’t know what to do about Lord Cameron,” I said.

“I see,” he replied, sipping his coffee.

I tried again, telling myself that he wanted to listen to me, he wanted to hear my concerns.

“My whole life I have tried to do the right thing. I wanted to please Daddy and Mother. I wanted them to love me. I wanted you and Joshua to love me. I thought that the only way to get that love was to be the good girl.”

“Oh, Jeanette,” he said, his eyes sad.

I held up a hand. “No, don’t say anything. I need to get this out.” I took another breath. “I knew that I wasn’t the great beauty that Mother wanted for a daughter. I knew that I let her down just by being me and so I tried really hard to stuff down who I was inside and conform to the type of woman she wanted me to be. It’s no secret that I am a disappointment to her and I thought if I was good enough, if I did everything she wanted me to, then eventually she would love me like I always wanted. Coming to Merveille and meeting Alyssa and Priscilla and all the others has shown me that that is not how families work. And meeting Drew has shown me something completely new too. He has shown me that all those things that I believed to be true about myself were wrong.”

“God Jeanette,” Martin said, leaning forward and taking my hands in his. “I didn’t know that’s how you felt. I feel like the worst brother in the world for letting you go through life feeling like you had to be something different.”

Tears filled my eyes and tumbled down my cheeks as the raw guilt and remorse filled Martin’s eyes. I blew out a breath and tried to calm my racing heart enough to continue.

“Marrying Lord Cameron was the next step in my plan to please Mother. She has always wanted me to have a title and here was the perfect opportunity to bring that dream true for her. She told me that it was what Daddy had always wanted for me and that that was the reason he set the dowry so high.”

“Bollocks,” Martin spat. “Dad didn’t set the dowry, she did.”

“What?”

Martin leaned back and scrubbed his hands down his face. “Mother set the dowry. After Dad died she used some of the money from the estate to bump up the dowry and then she set about finding a man to marry you. She found Lord Cameron. She knew about the state of his finances and enticed him here with the promise of getting him out of debt.”

“It wasn’t Daddy’s idea?” I asked, my heart freezing in my chest at the realisation of just how deep my mother’s manipulations went.

“No.” Martin shook his head and closed his eyes, a look of pain crossing his face. “I have been such a fool.”

“This isn’t your fault, Martin.”

“Yes, it is. I let her manipulate me. Dad asked me to look out for you, to protect you. I didn’t realise until right now that he wanted me to protect you from her.”

“I remember Daddy looking at me sometimes with such a sad look on his face. Was that because he couldn’t give me a title?”

“God, no,” Martin said with another shake of his head. “He hated the way she treated you. He told me we had to be sure to always say extra nice things to you to counteract the mean things she said. I didn’t really see it at the time and then after he died I was too busy with the estate to heed his words. He loved you so much and if he ever looked at you like that then it was because he felt bad about the way Mother treated you. He didn’t care about a title, he just wanted you to be happy.”

A weight that I didn’t even know had been on my shoulders, lifted and I suddenly felt light and free in a way I had never experienced before. Not even riding Filly or my Ducati gave me this sense of freedom.

“And if I decide not to accept Lord Cameron’s offer? What does that mean for you? For the estate and your business?”

“It would be a weight off my shoulders,” Martin said. “I never liked the guy and didn’t want you to marry him. Mother has been telling me for months that you were in communication with him and that marrying him was what you wanted. I hated the idea of it. It made me physically sick to see the way he treated you, but what could I do? If this was what you wanted, then who was I to intervene?”

“I told you I didn’t want to marry him,” I said.

“And then you turned around and starting seeing him again. Mother assured me it was just cold feet.”

I took a breath, my mind clear for the first time in what seemed forever.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I lied. I needed to sort a few things out in my mind first before I committed to an action.

“You know that he is going to propose to you tonight at the dinner Mother has organised.”

“I know,” I replied, “And he’ll get my answer then.”

I stood, feeling stronger and more confident. I felt unshackled and the woman who had been trying to break free inside me finally stretched her wings and took a deep breath.