Falling for the Thorned Rose

The Lowell and Lloyd families sit on two sides of a balance that neither has managed to tip. Lillian Lowell was thrown out by her own people, and on the night it happened she set fire to her grandmother's yard herself. Shane Lloyd, the Lloyd heir, came through the flames with blood on him and took her home with him. He had a use in mind for the thorny rose he had picked up, which was to break the standoff between the two houses through her. She kept turning his arrangements back on him, and at some point he fell for her. After that he supplied the openings and she took them, and the two of them went after the people who had put them where they were. They covered for each other while they did it.