Fake Heiress, Real Baby

Yori Taylor is in the Hollis house, and the Hollis elders want her and Zach Hollis registered as married immediately, all the more since learning she has already borne a child for the family. She was raised as a stand-in for the Taylor family's real daughter. The day the real daughter was found, her adoptive parents arranged to marry her off to a man with a limp. At the meeting with him the Hollis matriarch turned up, claimed her as her grandson's wife and took her back to the Hollis house, and the elders put Zach under oath to take responsibility for her. Zach had gone twenty-eight years without touching a woman and had a reputation for coldness and religion. He and Yori had spent one night together a little over a year before. Zach begins behaving in ways that do not fit the reputation. She stops eating, so he sits and shells a crab for her by hand, mess and all, which is not something a man with his horror of mess does. She takes work outside the house and he lets her. Then she has dinner with a male friend, and Zach arrives with people behind him and carries on like a man whose wife has been taken.