The Love Match (Entangled Scandalous) by Lily Maxton

Chapter One
    Hampshire, England, 1818
    Olivia Middleton was the only daughter left.
    Olivia didn’t begrudge her two sisters marrying, but she did begrudge their freedom. As soon as they were out of the house, their mother, Lady Middleton, had turned a matchmaking eye to her youngest daughter with all the fierceness of a hawk seeking its prey, and Olivia, like the scurrying field mouse, was rightfully terrified.
    When news came to them of Elizabeth’s hasty marriage to a bookseller, Mother had fainted on the chaise longue—rather strategically—and had to be revived with smelling salts. She’d been triumphant when Anne, the second oldest, had married the Earl of Thornhill—who had actually proposed to Elizabeth first, and coincidentally was the cousin and heir to Elizabeth’s deceased first husband, making Lizzie the dowager Countess of Thornhill and Anne the new Countess of Thornhill.
    The titles were really a bit of a tangle.
    But they both seemed happy in their new lives.
    And Olivia was happy for them. Truly, she was. But now, she’d been left alone with her parents, who wanted to get her married off quickly and be done with the business of raising daughters. Mother was becoming increasingly unbearable.
    Lady Middleton liked to tell Olivia she’d never catch an earl like her sainted middle sister, whom her mother didn’t even like that much—Elizabeth had always been her favorite. And she treated Olivia, who was insufferably shy around men and preferred reading—the most vulgar of pastimes for a lady—to being out in society, as more of a nuisance than a daughter.
    If Olivia were bolder, she might have pointed out that Anne hadn’t caught an earl by being a perfect lady—far from it, in fact.
    But Olivia wasn’t bold.
    And whenever she uttered something her mother didn’t like, a vein throbbed in Lady Middleton’s forehead, so she usually kept her mouth shut. She might not enjoy her mother’s company, but she didn’t want to give her an apoplexy, either.
    What Olivia liked to do most of all was curl up in an armchair by a window—open, if the weather allowed—and read, unhindered by her mother’s frequent diatribes.
    I gazed upon the Spectre with horror too great to be described. My blood was frozen in my veins… The Apparition rose from her seat, and approached the side of the bed. She grasped with her icy fingers my hand which hung lifeless upon the Coverture, and pressing her cold lips to mine, again repeated,
    “Raymond! Raymond! Thou art mine!”
    Olivia heard the slightest creak first, as if someone were stepping softly. And then a weight landed on her head, obscuring her field of vision. Darkness descended.
    “ Ahh! ” she shrieked, lashing out with her hand and striking something fleshy.
    “Good Lord, Olivia!” her mother snapped.
    She lifted the sinister thing from her head, which turned out to be a bonnet with pink ribbons. Not very fear-inducing, unless one disliked pink.
    “What are you doing with this?” she asked when her heart began to slow again.
    “We’ve been invited to a house party,” her mother said as merrily as though they’d just been asked to dine with the king and queen. “Your father will go pheasant hunting, and we will hunt barons!”
    She was alarmed by the glittering of her mother’s gray eyes, so like her own. “I fervently hope that is a metaphor.”
    Lady Middleton yanked the bonnet away and adjusted one of the ribbons before placing it back on Olivia’s head with an equally glittering and alarming smile. “We must decide what you’ll wear, my dear. Baron hunting is a very serious business.”
    …
    Lord Ashworth’s ancestral home, Eastwold Abbey, looked like something from one of her gothic novels.
    To reach the abbey, the carriage had to travel through a path cleared in the dense wood that surrounded it, under the dappled shadow of leaves that were just starting to change colors.
    Once the horses clopped nearer and Olivia could see through the