The Accidental Elopment

During a long English summer, a foundling home lad and an earl's headstrong niece form an unlikely alliance to protect themselves against a young bully. Twenty years later, that same bully threatens to tear them apart.When Katherine and Jack are unexpectedly reunited many years after their childhood friendship was formed, love blossoms.But Jack is about to depart for the West Indies and, at barely eighteen, each accepts that the future will take them in different directions.Katherine is full of hope she will find love and happiness during the London season, while Jack intends to amass a fortune and return to England on a footing equal to the aristocratic bully who once tormented him.Seven years later, Jack has fulfilled his ambitions, bought a fine estate in Wiltshire, and is returning home. Although betrothed to a beautiful, ambitious heiress, he can't wait to see his old friend and, once back on English soil, immediately seeks out Katherine.However, Katherine is very different from the hopeful girl he left behind.Notorious for the scandal she's courted since she eloped the day of Jack's departure, the newly widowed Katherine keeps Jack at a distance.But Jack knows Katherine better than she knows herself. There must be some hidden reason she's insistent that her Cousin George, the boy who bullied Jack as a child, will be her next husband.Can Jack and Katherine, pledged to others, break through the lies and secrets of the past seven years to discover the shining hopefulness that characterised their childhood alliance, and allow it to blossom into fully-grown love?