My Dear Doctor, Please Be Gentle with Me

Her stepsister set it up: a night with a cold, wealthy doctor she had never met, arranged to get her out of the way. The girl was desperate enough that she went along with it, and afterward the two of them were tied together by something neither had chosen. Her stepsister kept working at her, and the family kept squeezing, and every conversation between the doctor and the girl started from a wrong assumption one of them had been fed. He was rich and he was silent about it, which made him easy to read badly. Pressure came at him from his own side too, in the form of a marriage he was expected to accept. He turned it down and let the refusal cost him. Charges followed and he went into custody rather than sign what was put in front of him. She heard about it and came to the courthouse in her wedding dress, stood up and spoke for him in front of the room, and worked through the case against him point by point. The schemes that had separated them came apart under questioning. When it was over she married him anyway, with the stepsister and the rest of the family watching from the back.