Gabriel despised the archaic rules of society that measured a woman’s worth based on purity and the size of her dowry. He’d made it clear to Lady Darby that the sizable amount received from marrying her daughter would be placed in a special account. Only Celia would have access to the funds and she could spend the money as she saw fit. Gabriel had no need of her dowry. Not with his own personal fortune and the new influx of riches from his father’s estates.

He scrubbed a hand over his face as the coach rattled along a rutted portion of the road leading to Wiltshire. This portion of his journey was necessary, although he faced it with much dread. The main residence for the marquessate was Rosenthorne Park, and he wondered how much of his father’s presence would exist within its halls.

Gabriel’s jaw tightened. By God, he would make the manor his home. His and Celia’s. Together they would fill it with laughter and light. Children. Happiness.

And he would take his rightful place in society. A place denied him for almost twenty-eight years.

He’d discovered the idea of marriage, once an abhorrent undertaking, had quickly become his greatest desire. He was eager to wed Celia. To claim her as his own. She would serve as a valuable asset while he navigated this new phase of his life. Her grasp of society’s rules would guide his path among the ton.

Indeed, his acceptance would be molded by her delicate hands.

It would not matter that his father wed his mother in secret before casting her aside for fear of social stigma. Noblemen just did not marry actresses or opera singers. It was acceptable to install one as a mistress, but marriage? It was an abomination in the ton’s narrow view. Gabriel supposed it was to his father’s credit he never annulled the marriage before his birth. Perhaps his parents might have even worked through the difficulties caused by their different stations had his mother not died. Surely, they must have loved one another at some point.

But if love was the reason a marquess could marry an actress, what explained Rosenthorne’s treatment of his newborn son? Gabriel was shuttered away like a dirty secret just as his mother had been. He was ignored and isolated for years, and on his sixteenth birthday, his father unwisely attempted reconciliation.

Gabriel would not accept nor listen to any explanations put forth by the marquess for his heartless actions. They’d argued to the point of violence. That surly insolence of Gabriel’s earned him the distinctive scar bisecting his eyebrow. The bloody wound caused by Rosenthorne’s walking cane brought the brief altercation to an abrupt end.

Gabriel fled the boarding school where his father paid a dear tuition every year. He was quickly absorbed into France’s underground world. A place where survival depended on the development of instincts never tapped into. And somehow, he survived on the fringes until the fateful day Sebastian Cain saved his life in a whorehouse alleyway.