At the tender age of fifteen, before she’d ever met Noah Thacker, or dreamed fitfully of becoming a Browncoat and owning her own boat, Jezebel Youngblood did what her family considered the ultimate sin – she fell in love. And worse still (if there can be a worse after the ultimate sin) she became pregnant.

Her father ranted and raved, her mother looked at her with something like disappointment in her eyes, while Jez stood in the centre of the Sihnon-weave carpet, her hands held tightly in front of her still-flat stomach, the natural stoicism of her heritage about the only thing keeping her from falling apart.

“You’ll never see him again,” her father insisted.

“I love him.”

If anything her father’s face congested even more. “Love?” he scoffed. “What do you know about love? You’re a child.”

“I’m going have his baby.”

Her own mother put her hand to her mouth and ran from the room.

Her father glared at her. “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Alan loves me. We’re going to be together.”

“You think?” He stopped in his pacing. “Do you really think he’s going to want to be tied down to a wife and child at his age?”

“Yes.” She gazed at him, her stubbornness radiating from every pore, as sure in her love as she was in the world turning. “He loves me,” she repeated.

Unfortunately, her father was right. As much as Alan denied it, he was heir to the family fortune, and no matter that the Youngbloods had money, it wasn’t old, and to the Tennysons that was all that was important. He was shipped off to the family estate on Londinium, and in barely a month the engagement was announced between him and the youngest daughter of … Jez couldn’t read any more. She closed the Cortex link and rolled up into a ball on her bed, her heart breaking.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Jez was delivered of a healthy baby boy, his lungs announcing that he wasn’t happy to be thrust into the cold, cruel world. She named him Flynn.

For six months she fed, changed and otherwise did for her son, lea