From Their Reject To His Queen

Synopsis

I grew up with Charles Sterling, Andrew Sheldon, and Lucas Shepherd. We were childhood friends, inseparable from the start. So when my father announced a jousting tournament to find me a husband, the three of them were more than eager to take part. But when the time came for me to toss down my handkerchief, it never touched the ground. Instead, they snatched it from one another, batting it back and forth until it landed in a gutter, stained and ruined. My jousting day became the laughingstock of Kingston. Afterward, they came to find me. "You had that coming. At the last ball, you made quite a spectacle of yourself. Grace was so humiliated. She cried for days." "If you apologize to Grace, we'll consider forgiving you." "We were never going to marry you anyway. But we'll find you someone suitable, maybe not quite our equal, but close enough. Consider it a kindness. We did grow up together, after all." I didn't bother to answer. What they didn't know was that someone else had fished that handkerchief from the gutter. He washed it clean and brought it back to me, pressed and folded. I was going to marry that man instead. And I would never again be their pawn, used to entertain Grace Lynn.