Kate Matcham needs a fortune or a husband. She wants neither. With a tainted inheritance in the balance, she receives one offer to become a scoundrel's mistress and another offer of a marriage of convenience. Before resigning herself to a choice, she accepts the invitation to visit a childhood friend, considering it a last hurrah before embarking on a bleak future. The visit goes sideways when she falls for the gentleman her friend intends to marry, a man well out of Kate's league--and one...

2020 Whitney Award WinnerScotland 1794For more than twenty years, the Lowland village of Craigmuir has been untouched by smallpox, leaving the people vulnerable to a painful lesson on the price of belonging, belief, and survival.Isla Findlay belongs nowhere. The daughter of a disgraced woman and the Highlander who abandoned them both, she tries to be a dutiful niece to the uncle who has taken her in, blending into the village as bes...

Christina MacKinnon is secretly relieved to be a widow. She is equally desperate to distance herself from the clan of her dead husband, but as the heir to his estate—one she needs in order to support her siblings—she must first stave off both the advances and threats of the man next in line to inherit. It seems the only person she can turn to is a nearby stranger who seems inclined to help her. But he has a request…. Freshly returned from the war, Lachlan Kincaid has one aim: to see justic...

Cecilia Cosgrove’s beauty opens doors and hearts everywhere she goes. With a marquess courting her, the status and wealth her family is counting on her to obtain is finally within her reach—until she meets Jacques Levesque, the French nobleman who immediately pegs her as affected and superficial. While piqued and offended, Cecilia secretly begins to wonder whether he might not have a point.Poor French émigré Jacques Levesque has been disguised as a French nobleman for almost as lon...

When Isabel Cosgrove is informed by her father that he lost her hand in marriage while playing cards with Charles Galbraith—the gentleman she’s been admiring from a distance for years—she is filled with dismay. How can she agree to wed a man whose reason for marriage is part-revenge, part-indifference? Intent on avoiding a painful union where her regard cannot be returned, she concocts a plan.Charles Galbraith didn’t intend to become engaged as a result of a drunken wager at cards,...

**Previously published as True of HeartLove lessons have never gone so awry.Miss Ruth Hawthorn helps support her fatherless family the only way she can: doling out love advice in a local newspaper column under an assumed name, The Swan. When she receives a lucrative request for an in-person consultation from someone signed "O," her brother persuades her to go to London with him, teaching him what he needs to know in order to survive the short appoi...

Lydia Blakeburn, Baroness Lynham, wants nothing more than to present her husband with an heir, but after five years of marriage, she has all but given up on doing so. What started as a love match has since begun to sour, yet there is nothing Lydia can do to free Miles from a marriage she is certain he regrets. The future they had envisioned together is slipping farther and farther away.Miles Blakeburn is at his wit's end. Not only has he failed to produce an heir to the family's an...

She dreams of marrying a nobleman. Too bad he's only pretending to be one.Cecilia Cosgrove’s beauty opens doors and hearts everywhere she goes. With a marquess courting her, the status and wealth her family is counting on her to obtain is finally within her reach—until she meets Jacques Levesque, the French nobleman who immediately pegs her as affected and superficial. While piqued and offended, Cecilia secretly begins to wonder whether he might not have a point.Poor French...

A gentleman‘s impulsive wager to marry a stranger. A young woman’s determination not to marry the man she wants.When Isabel Cosgrove is informed by her father that he lost her hand in marriage while playing cards with Charles Galbraith - the gentleman she’s been admiring from a distance for years - she is filled with dismay. How can she agree to wed a man whose reason for marriage is part-revenge, part-indifference? Intent on avoiding a painful union where her regard cannot be retu...

**Previously published as My Wild HeartCan a ruse turn to romance?No one stands in doubt of Edith Donne's opinion on marriage—or of her ability to ward it off using nothing but her stinging wit. With the fortune her aunt has left her, Edith has no reason to marry and certainly no intention of it. When she inadvertently overhears that her lifelong archrival is in love with her, she is stunned, but she has no compunction in setting him straight.Elias Abram trusts no w...

He came for her votes. He stayed for her heart.When Frederick Yorke arrives in the Cornish fishing village of Trelowen, he knows exactly what he a seat in Parliament and the recognition that has always eluded him.Unfortunately, that ambition runs straight through Lady Caroline Radcliffe—a young and intelligent widow who controls the votes he needs and has no patience for charming men with hidden agendas.Caroline has already pledged her support elsew...

A reputation to reclaim, a matchmaking mother to thwart, and a most inadvisable arrangement.Nell Prescott brings the whiff of scandal wherever she goes. Surrounded by proper ladies and gentlemen ready to be matched, she has a different object at the Countess of Dalmeer’s grand house party: to prove herself a model of propriety worthy of a better reputation.When an unwanted admirer proves difficult to discourage, however, she finds herself in need of an ally...