Families of Dorset

When Kate Matcham's choices are tainted by scandal and secrets, she faces a dilemma: become a scoundrel's mistress or enter into a marriage of convenience-little does she know, her heart has other plans. With a dubious inheritance hanging in the balance, Kate Matcham is confronted with two offers: one, to become the mistress of a notorious scoundrel, and the other, a marriage of convenience. Reluctant to choose, she embarks on a final adventure-a visit to a childhood friend. However, what should have been a last hurrah takes an unexpected turn when Kate finds herself falling for the very man her friend intends to marry, a gentleman of higher station harboring enigmatic secrets. As smuggling operations grip the county, shrouding everyone in deceit, Kate's options dwindle. Torn between her deepening affection for a man of duplicity, her loyalty to her friend, and a long-standing promise to avenge her father's murder, Kate's path to destiny is fraught with peril and passion.

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 returned, she concocts a plan. Charles Galbraith didn't intend to become engaged as a result of a drunken wager at cards, but after the woman he loves spurns him, what does it matter whom he marries? But even Miss Cosgrove, the fiancée he won by wager, seems intent not to marry him-a fact that both relieves and piques him. She instead suggests a plan that has the potential to temporarily appease her father's demand of marriage while also winning back the love of the woman Charles truly wants. But when Charles and Isabel are thrown into the midst of a brewing scandal and another man's potential disinheritance, their plan begins to unravel thread by thread, challenging what Galbraith thinks he wants-and just how much more time with him Isabel's heart can stand.

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 émigré Jacques Levesque has been disguised as a French nobleman for almost as long as he can remember, trying his hardest to keep his head down in a society obsessed with rank and high birth. But when Cecilia Cosgrove comes into his life, he finds it hard to maintain his façade-or to want to. While Cecilia struggles between the desire to please others and the wish to pursue her own course, Jacques's interest in her provokes a powerful enemy intent on taking him down. With love, acceptance, and the future on the line for them both, Cecilia and Jacques must decide whether a life lived behind a mask is any life at all.

It started as a marriage of convenience, but falling in love has made it anything but convenient. Fresh from the humiliating annulment of the love match she always wanted, Lady Anne Vincent meekly agrees to the marriage of convenience her father has arranged. She feels hopeful that this marriage can be one of cordial indifference, protecting her from the hurt she knows so well. Tobias Cosgrove isn't meant for marriage, free spirit that he is. And yet, as the only son, marry he must. He is thus relieved when his father reveals his future wife to be the calm, collected Lady Anne Vincent, for he is confident she won't plague him with neediness or hysterics like so many of the other young women in society. But when Lady Anne's past reappears on their doorstep, she and Tobias are forced to confront whether a marriage of convenience is the type of marriage they wish for after all.