She rather liked her brother’s family, particularly Rawley, whose easy humor, incisive intelligence, and unswerving loyalty to her brother had won her over. Bronwyn had been so tempted to call herself Bronnie just to aggravate her mother, but the punishments were never worth the overstep. The last time Bronwyn had gone toe-to-toe with the marchioness had been by betraying her, as her mother called it. When Bronwyn provided the documents of birth for her half brother’s claim to her grandfather’s dukedom, the marchioness had cut the family’s season short and taken everyone back to the country in a fit of pique.

Bronwyn and her younger sister, Florence, had been confined in seclusion for weeks. Florence had blamed her, of course, but Bronwyn would not have changed a thing. She’d done what was right. Courtland Chase had been the rightful heir, regardless of her mother’s unlawful machinations to make her own son duke. Bronwyn loved Stinson, but her full-blooded brother had always been their mother’s puppet. He had a thing or two to learn from their half brother, Courtland, who was a decent and honorable man.

She had a feeling that Courtland would not endorse her actions now, however.

Heiress turned international spy was a scandal in itself.

While they had been in Kettering, the marchioness had relented, driven by a desire to see her daughter marvelously wed. They had attended a few country house parties, including a daring masquerade, whereupon Bronwyn had discovered her latest purpose.

Always a magnet for trouble with a curious eye, she’d seen one of her old finishing-school mates, Miss Sesily Pleasant, with her mask askew and arguing with a well-heeled gentleman in an alcove off the retiring room. Sesily was a Black heiress from San Francisco whose business-owning and very wealthy mother had sent her only daughter to England with an immense dowry.

Like most of the American “dollar princesses” who came to England to marry into the nobility, Sesily had been sent for the same reason. However, unlike many of the other young ladies of their acquaintance, she had been kind and sweet, and one of the few girls Bronwyn had counted a friend at school. Sesily’s entrepreneur mother had also been an empowering influence on Bronwyn—that a free Black woman could amass such a fortune on her own was a testament to women everywhere.

A bored Bronwyn had shamelessly eavesdropped on the conversation.

“He won’t listen to me, Wentworth!”