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Still, never would she have expected to feel so excited about working with money again. After thirty grueling years in the business, working for banks, an insurance agency, an accounting firm, a hedge fund, and even the Lord High Treasurer himself, she’d thought that she had lost all taste for this sort of thing. And this job wasn’t even supposed to be like any of those. She had only been supposed to help the young lord manage his assets and hopefully grow them.

What a curious world it was, that all of this would fall into her lap now, seven years after her supposed retirement.

No doubt, if things went even remotely as she expected them to, her family would come knocking on her door in the very near future. There may have been no love lost between her and them, but money? They weren’t ones to abide losses like that.

She planned to have insulation in place for the young lord by then, though. Hell, she would be insulation, if he needed her to. There was absolutely no way that she was going to sit by and let them sink their claws into him.

Ah, but she was getting ahead of herself. The present problems were still far from dealt with, she knew, and her hand stopped in the middle of signing a document as she realized that she’d allowed her mind to wander so much that she’d hardly even bothered to read the damn thing first.

True, it was just a simple shipment order for white Lysten marble, but still, it was a bad habit to get into--and one that had cost her dearly in the past.

“Anything you put your name to, you read,” her mentor had once told her. “If you don’t have time to read it, you shouldn’t be signing it. You should be hiring someone else to read it, sign it, and take the blame if it goes badly, instead.”

A shrewd bastard--that had been Henry Vollier in a nutshell, though she certainly knew that there had been more to him than what most people ever got to see. Even to this day, she had never met anyone who could be so heartless in one breath and yet so generous in the next.

Her affair with him may have been what caused so much strife between the Carthraces and the Volliers, but she’d long since stopped regretting it. He may have been almost thirty years older than her, but she’d loved him more deeply and truly than anyone else in her life, and he deserved better than that bitter shell-of-a-woman he’d been forced to marry. That callous witch hadn’t even been there on his deathbed.

For a while after that, she truly would not have minded if both of their families had ended up in ruins. If not for some of those wonderful nieces and nephews, the brightness and hope of the future, she might never have returned from that place of resentment in her heart.