Ruby — Helen Ashfield

Powerful Passions, Mild Manners, Impossible Intrigues -- And A Heroine Bold Enough For All!

DASTARDLY DOINGS IN THE SHADOW OF WATERFIELDS

The beautiful, raven-tressed Ruby Travers is only nineteen when he life is forever changed by calamity: the deaths of her mother, housekeeper of Waterfields, and Sir Askwith, the kindly lord of the manor.

Suddenly, she is the surprised inheritor of the ancestral home, and the object of the dark ministrations of villainous Lionel Whitcombe, who will go to any means to secure Waterfields as his own. And even as Ruby wrestles with her dilemma, she and the dashing Sebastian, Earl of Stratton, are falling desperately in love -- only to have their love thwarted by a vow that bounds Sebastian to another. But, while the reprehensible Lionel Whitcombe and Ruby's rival, the Lady Annora, plot against the innocent pair, a long-buried secret of Ruby's past is rising to save her chances at happiness.