Inherited Malice: A Dark Secret Society Romance

“Good,” he said, pulling back from me. “Because I want to give you everything. Starting with this.”

I frowned in confusion, but then he pulled something out of his pocket. Something with diamonds and gemstones that glinted in the Georgian summer sun.

It was a necklace with a huge pendant.

I gasped. I couldn't help it.

“The Order might not have given you all the money you wanted, but you’ll be a Radcliffe one day, and as such, here is just a token of all that will be yours.”

I froze as he lifted my hair and clasped the heavy pendant around my neck.

“Beau, what are you doing?” I whispered, my fingers fluttering as I lifted them to touch the pendant, stopping at the last second. I couldn’t imagine getting even a single smudge from my fingers on the exquisite setting.

“Marking you as mine, naturally.” He grinned wickedly as he stepped back from me. The pendant hung heavy around my neck. “And giving you your due reward for passing the Trials with flying colors. That pendant is worth a million dollars. So now you can feel that at least you’re on a little bit more of an equal playing field when it comes to our son. I know that was important to you, and I want that for you.”

I threw my arms around him and kissed him hard as the sunshine twinkled down on us through the swaying oak trees. Beau holding me so tight, loving me, our baby between us growing in my tummy.

A lifetime of dreams come true.

Epilogue

Bellamy Carmichael

I sat with my mother waiting for the wedding that the entire Darlington County social calendar had been aflutter about.

Montgomery Kingston was getting married. He was the first of the counties’ most eligible young bachelors to tie the knot, and everybody who was anybody was here.

“Can you believe the scandal?” my mother leaned over and whispered in my ear. “You know she’s one of the belles from that silly secret society of theirs.”

I nodded, rolling my eyes. “You’ve only told me about fifteen times,” I whispered back.

“Well, just look at them. It’s happening to all of them. Six of the most eligible bachelors in this county and four of them are with trash from the wrong side of the tracks because of that mess. That’s not the way it was done back in my day. They dallied with the whores, but then they married from respectable stock.”

“Jesus, Mom.” I glared at her, but she just glared right back.

“Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain with me. I raised you to be a lady.”

I tried not to snort at that. A lady. What was this, the eighteen hundreds? But it was true. My mother had done her best to raise a Southern belle. I’d even gone to cotillion for Christ’s sake. The groom himself, Montgomery Kingston, had been my cotillion partner.

My mother had naturally cooed about how perfect we were for one another and had schemed about us getting married one day.

I was fourteen. Montgomery was fifteen. He’d been bored out of his mind by the whole thing and barely looked at me. Understandable, but even then, it messed with my head, my mom constantly talking about my marriage prospects like I was in a Jane Austen novel.

I’d grown up with the boys at Darlington Prep and occasionally gone out with one or another of them. But I’d been brought up to be such a proper lady that whenever they wanted to go make out under the bleachers, I always demurred, saying I couldn’t possibly. Not shockingly, I was regularly broken up with after a few months.

Because another thing about proper ladyhood? It meant I didn’t know how to talk to guys. I knew people thought I was a stuck-up snob. That was the reputation I’d gained around Darlington Prep anyway. Really, I was just shy.

But if being from one of the oldest and most respected families in Darlington plus being shy inevitably was interpreted as snobbishness, fine. I eventually just leaned into it. It meant I didn’t have to try to attempt awkward conversations. I could be aloof and shy, and people just let me do it without question. So what if behind my back they called me a snobbish bitch?

Eventually, I stopped trying the awkward relationships with the boys around me. Which earned me the title Ice Princess. Apparently, I thought I was too good for the boys of Darlington. Or I was secretly dating college boys. Rumors abounded, as rumors tended to do.

The truth?

Mom and Dad’s marriage was falling apart. The family money was all gone. All we had left was a name, which Mom clung to as if it was life itself. She still paraded around town in designer wear that was a decade out of style as our bills piled up.