The Innocent: Hawthorne

Lord Michael Hawthorne comes home to find his estranged wife, Lily, sitting in his drawing room. After years of humiliating him and flaunting her many lovers, she begs to be taken back. He's suspicious, but allows it only to find that she's pregnant and needs him to accept the baby as his own. At first incensed at her suggestion, he comes to accept the idea. He wants an heir and conscience will not allow him to abandon a child to his selfish wife. It's too late, however. He walks in on the horrific scene of Lily aborting the child. Once recovered, she runs off again, and he makes a bitter resolution to never involve himself with another woman. After a drunken argument with her latest lover, Lily is killed. He feels nothing but the lingering hardness in his heart, and goes off for a day of fishing to try to flush the taste out of his mouth. Finally finding a measure of peace, he nods off and is awakened by a boisterous sea sprite with red-gold hair and green eyes. Carolyn Wentworth dreads her first London season. Stealing off to her beloved, forbidden stream for a day of swimming, she meets Hawthorne, mistaking him for a lowly soldier who her father would never accept as a suitor. Instantly infatuated, her daydreams are filled with the handsome vagrant and is utterly surprised when, on the night of her ball, he stands before her asking for a dance. Hawthorne's reservations crumble little by little until he realizes that he loves her, but a cruel plot with its roots buried deep in both of their pasts threatens to destroy them both.