Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking, #1)

by Emma R. Alban

Gwen finds their height difference rather charming. Beth fits against her nicely.

She thinks Beth’s likely to be a more amiable partner, and far nicer to look at.

Shouldn’t she be swooning? He’s swoon-worthy, she can tell. But there’s no swoon in her.

Father wasn’t mad. He wasn’t disgusted. He wasn’t judgmental. But he saw it. Sees it. Sees what she’s been telling herself she doesn’t feel for weeks—feelings she shouldn’t have.

But how is she to settle that in her head, when she feels nothing for Lord Montson and everything everything everything for Gwen?

“Do you regret it?” Mrs. Gilpe asks, the question loud against the quiet room. “No,” Gwen says, the answer immediate and firm. She wouldn’t give up last night for anything. To know that joy—even if this is the heartache she feels forever as a result—it’s worth having known it even once.

In this room that isn’t hers, this house that isn’t hers, she sits with a life ahead that won’t be hers either, devoid of all happiness and desire. No love, no hope, no Gwen. There’s no way out but forward. Like mother, like daughter.

“My husband was a lout who spouted the same abhorrent drivel and used to backhand me for every slight. If I could have taken him to court and gotten half of his estate, I would have, and I would tell Beth to do the same should your son ever, ever,” Mother says, turning a hard look on Lord Montson, “raise a hand to her. And I would support her use of the new law immediately.”

She won’t be beaten. She won’t be yelled at. She will not repeat what her mother endured.

“If those are your conditions, Lord Ashmond, that my daughter submit to anything your son wants, without question, be it verbal or physical, or simply his abhorrent taste in unseasoned food, then we will have a problem.”

“It would be in name only. They’d live in one, we’d live in the other, and make appearances when necessary. The perfect disguise.”