Author's note: This is my first try in a purely romance fic, which I hope will not turn out to be a cliche... see if I can rein myself in, haha! Do review regardless of whether you find it bad or good! :)

Prologue: An Introduction to Almost Everyone

Until the day he was announced to be knighted, Sir Harry Cranley had always considered himself a most terribly underestimated man. He had a brilliant mind and enough charisma to charm angry geese, but the same merit cannot be afforded to his moral sense. While people would normally have trouble sleeping at night after denying a disabled, alms-begging… beggar from a few pennies from your purse, Sir Cranley, pleased to announce, has no such qualms. And he had a shrewd sense of humour that was appreciated by few, and which earned him few friends.

“Nice skirt,” he would comment every morning to his long-suffering secretary, Hannah Doburn. “But do us all a favour and get an asslift, won’t you?” To which, poor Hannah had no choice but to fake a good-humoured laugh.

And when it came to birthdays and anniversaries, well, the less said the better. If he could remember and recite the important battles during the Regency Era along with their exact dates and location, surely he could remember the day he and Mrs. Cranley were married. In order to save the face of the family, his wife, the elegant and high-minded Pauline Cranley, had begun taking such matters into her own hands after the third year of their marriage when it became clear that Sir Cranley wasn’t a man to bother with such trifles. She organised the birthday parties of her children, got them presents on his behalf, sponsored her own anniversary celebration and sent a birthday card enclosed with a modest cheque to his own parents every year; and all the while Sir Cranley was behind locked doors, playing on the piano self-composed pieces which no-one could appreciate. Ah, well, their loss anyway.

As is the case with such talented but socially-lacking people, luck came in no short order to Sir Cranley. Only luck could have enabled him to transform a small, languishing publishing company that he had bought over on a whim into a major publishing house in the United Kingdom. Only luck could have secured him a spot at Dame Marguerite Fletcher’s ancient piano during one of her spectacular birthday dinners and brought him to the attention of John Carr, the manager of the record label, Sounds of Strings, which specialises in contemporary instrumental, classical music. Only luck could have placed him, a man of lowly birth and modest income (but which grew at an astounding rate with each passing year) but an overbearing sense of overconfidence, into the list of noteworthy people to be knighted by the Queen of England after the release of his first and only debut album featuring his own string compositions.

But luck could not save him from this cruel destiny: at the relatively young age of 45, after buckling to his knees in a public speech at a writers’ conference, Sir Henry Cranley was diagnosed with ALS. Shortly after, he became kinder and more humane, even going so far as to set up several charity organisations and the now- famous St. Almond’s Hospital for Children. And shortly after that, just a year after his condition was found out, he died.

Besides being survived by the steadfast and sometimes haughty Mrs. Cranley, there were three children as well. The eldest child was a girl named Laura. At the time of his death, she was 27 and had a strong sense of responsibility. She alone among her siblings had vivid memories of life prior to the increase in the family’s wealth and the elevation of status that had come from it, and therefore, had no great love for Sir Cranley. Laura had, however, inherited her father’s intellect, which she acknowledged and which acknowledgement only filled her with bitter resentment for him. She was the only one who felt repulsion when the sudden change of character came with his equally sudden illness. He, who had no warmth whatsoever for the family during her early years and who had no consciousness of his duty as a father other than to supply them all with money as a substitute for affection, had no place in her heart. To mere observers such as you and I and the jobless dames and the acute observers of the who’s who in the ‘English Premier High Society League’ at this moment, it is worth to question what Sir Cranley could have felt for his eldest daughter – did he love her well enough to entrust his entire estate, including his illegitimate child the publishing house he christened House of Tomes, or was it because he didn’t have time to authorize his will?

The second child, also female, was Virginia, and called affectionately Ginny for short. If Laura had taken after Sir Cranley’s intelligence, then Ginny had his effortless charm, though none of his cruel irony. She was the liveliest, the bubbliest, and was a favourite with her father. Her sweet-natured disposition was liked by all matronly ladies as an compulsory quality in an unmarried woman, sought after by many male admirers and earned her a score of friends from the same sex. However, as easygoing and as cheerful as she was, that came with a weakness: Ginny was as gullible as a doe. How many times had she been forced to nurse her broken heart (or rather Laura nurse it for her) over a lad who she thought to be her one true love, only to be caught up again in the winged ecstasies of love over another man who did not seem to be much different from the same lad who had left her. Being an idealist and a romantic, she was number two on Laura’s list of worries.

Number one went inevitably to the youngest Cranley, Edmund or Ed for short. When Sir Cranley drew his last breath it was on his eighteenth birthday and Ed had had to be dragged out from his own impromptu birthday party in the infamous lap-dancing club called Burlesque Boudoir. His wild, reckless ways and a tendency to catch a new whim every few weeks worried not only Laura but also Sir Cranley when he was alive. Failed grades were of no consequence to Ed Cranley, if anything, it only served to instill in him the notion that he was better off not studying at all. This was the same congenital notion possessed by almost every irrepressible youth that was born into wealth. In fact to Ed, the very idea of the family having lived in a humble house in Surrey before their current grand abode in Kensington Park was inconceivable. However, his father’s untimely death had awoken a sense of self-consciousness in Ed. He realised his mistakes, but as the saying goes, old habits die hard, and it would take more than Ed’s own determination to get his act together before embarking on his last chance to improve his predicament.

Sir Cranley was never a big fan of his own relatives, much like most of us. He had had a strict Catholic upbringing and as such, despised going to church and saying his prayers before he ate. His younger brother George, followed suit, and as teens they would prowl the streets of Surrey at night, howling songs by The Doors and The Ramones and many other bands beginning with ‘The’, along with other like-minded rebellious youths. When both had matured into adults, they parted ways. George, under the pseudonym of Georgie Porgie, embarked on a mission to be England’s very own Evel Knievel, and as a result, died in a horrific fireball of a crash during a sold-out 8-o’clock performance. The hour of his death was the finest hour of his life.

He left behind a son whose mother’s identity remained shrouded in mystery to this very day, and when Sir Cranley and Mrs. Cranley adopted him for their own, Wilberforce Cranley (or Will for as long as anyone can remember) was eight and had enough sense to hate his name. George’s recklessness, it seemed, went to Ed instead of Will, for Will Cranley grew up to be an honest, sensible man with good manners and enough endeavour to earn him even the admiration of Sir Cranley. Growing up with the three Cranley children, Will had come to be accepted as one of their own, but he was especially close with Laura, with whom he shared the same temperament. Will, though like Laura did not love his father, was embarrassed with him where Laura was not with hers. When Ginny or Ed or even Mrs. Cranley and the other aunts and uncles teased him about following his father’s footsteps or his uncle’s, his ears would turn red and he would remain deathly silent until there was a change of subject. In this, Sir Cranley often chided him. His father was a hero in the eyes of many, surely he was a father any boy would be proud to have. Though Will was clever and well-spoken and honest, the history of his father more often than not stirred within him the sudden onset of an inferiority complex, so that the mere mention of his father’s name caused his knees to tremble and his confidence utterly shaken.

On the other side of the Atlantic lived a completely different story altogether. Mark Dressler was the fourth child of a huge family of nine, and as a kid he grew up in a stable and loving environment. He was close with all his siblings, his parents held a special place in his heart and he was only too happy to help out in the house whenever he could. In high school, he was a well-rounded student: his grades were not too bad, he played on the school basketball team, and he had had two girlfriends and he enjoyed an incident-free prom in senior year. Mark then went on to do a degree in Accounting in New York University, his state of origin, and life continued peacefully enough for him as an accountant for a small auction house that had never auctioned off anything worth more than US10000. He then acquired a girlfriend for himself, whose name was Christie. Christie was nice, sweet, passably pretty and was sufficiently in love with Mark to move in with him in his medium-sized, two-bedroom apartment in the Lower West Side.

And in these predicaments, all is relatively well in our heroes and heroine’s lives, until

Until...? Stay tuned to find out! And once again, please review and thanks in advance to those who do!