It's a cliche, Susan, but if he tried to wrestle the gun away from her and it went off accidentally, there's no way she could actually be blamed, is there? It would still look odd, there'd be a scandal, because what was he doing in her room? But it would ease her own conscience a bit if it was accidental, even if convenient.

If you decide to go with the cliche, then what you need to do is write the scene --or possibly their whole relationship--in a way that isn't a cliche. Which would be the challenge, I'd think.

I just saw what your DH said, and I seem to be agreeing with him. But I think you can take the snake's desperation far enough to make him jump for the gun, thus negating her familiarity with it.

If she has remorse, she's got a lovely reason to weep on our hero's shoulder as he explains that horrible things happen in desperate situations and she's not to blame.

I haven't been reading Anna, Susan, but it seems to me that, in that era, the bad guy is going to have to be seriously threatening her virture for the readers and the other characters to buy into it.

Deb, if you still need a beta, I'm home and able to turn something around pretty quickly.

Unless Tracy has someone who would push the point, the authorities would probably decide to let the matter go "to spare the scandal."

This, plus what Ginger said. Maybe things could appear to be going badly, but then someone comes forward as a character witness against Tracy. Maybe someone overheard T say something that would make it more believable that he would attempt to blackmail Anna into marrying him.

Modern readers would give her more slack than her contemporaries. Another source of reader sympathy: "She was defending herself!" But, yes, Tracy would at least need to have a hand on her in a definitively threatening fashion to justify killing him.

Ah, much to think about. Fortunately between rewriting Lucy and actually getting to that point in Anna's story, I've got a few months to make up my mind. t ponders

Um - why have her kill him?

Why not just have her wound him, badly enough to completely fuck up her head? The sort of wound that would effectively end his career, but leave him alive, and just as eager to hush it up as she would be?

Wouldn't leaving him alive make him something of an unresolved issue, a thorn in her side? I'd think it'd add an extra layer of hate to the issues he already has--I'm already planning to give him a run-in or two with Jack, and maybe even a snubbing by Anna, just so he already resents them even before he has something to blackmail them over.

What's wrong with the unresolved issue? It leaves a delicate flavour of possibility of a future book.

It gives him more importance, though, too. Whiny villains don't do well in returns unless they're mad genius whiny villains. Tracy is whiny, didn't you say, Susan?