Taming My Lord Husband

A woman who marries into a duke's household as its principal wife takes on the running of the inner house, and with it whatever her husband has left there. Zara, raised in a noble family on the strictest etiquette, marries into one as its new mistress. Only after the wedding does she learn that her husband already keeps a concubine whose family is hard to move against, and that there is something unclear between him and his widowed elder sister-in-law, who still lives in the house. He finds women of Zara's upbringing stiff and dull and says so. The concubine picks fights with her in the open, and behind that the widow keeps things stirred up, and the household waits for the new mistress to embarrass herself. Zara treats the mess as part of the job she married into. She lays down house rules and goes through the accounts line by line. Once her position is secure and she has a child, the person she means to deal with next is the duke himself, and she tells him as much: "When the seat is steady and there is an heir to carry the line, the one I settle with next is you." Before that there is the rest of the inner house to put in order, the concubine and the sister-in-law included.