The Bride He Delayed Married Someone Better

My childhood sweetheart, Lorenzo Marchetti, the man to whom I was promised by blood and word, asked to postpone the joining of our bloodlines one month before it was to be sealed.

He said he needed to bind himself to another woman first, in the eyes of the law.

Not because he loved her, but because she urgently needed a legal husband to secure her child's name and its claim to what little inheritance remained.

The girl had stood at his side through the years he'd spent building his crew. Now both her parents were dead, she was pregnant, and the baby's father had abandoned her.