Love Me, but Hurt Me?

A fire in childhood killed Sophie Sutton's mother and the youngest daughter of the Morton family. The two households never recovered from it, and Sophie and Henry Morton, who had been close before the fire, grew up hating each other across that loss. Sophie spent years abroad. On the night she came home her father Philip got her drunk and had her put into Henry's bed, and neither of them understood until later that it had been arranged. Her brother had gone missing by then, and when Sophie pressed her father for help finding him, the condition he set was that she marry Henry. She agreed without arguing about it. The marriage put two people who blamed each other for a death into the same house, and they quarrelled in the open while wanting each other in private. Around them the families were fighting over property, and the terms Philip kept adding suggested he had a reason for wanting this particular match that had nothing to do with the missing son. Sophie began pulling at the fire, the inheritance, and her father's arrangements at the same time, aware that whatever she found would decide whether what she felt for Henry was allowed to be anything.