For seven years, Julia Benton was trapped in a loveless marriage. Despite risking everything – even her very health – to be the wife and mother she thought her husband wanted, it was never enough. And when she is suddenly left a widow after a tragic accident, her life quickly settles into an obscure existence, alone and forgotten, watching her days slip away from her one by one.
When she stumbles across a free-spirited child one icy day, Julia is more than willing to take on employment as the girl’s governess. The child has no mother, and Julia has no means of supporting herself in her widowed state. But her employer is Alexander Halberd. Gruff and enigmatic, mourning the loss of a wife who died in the same accident as her husband, he seems at turns both distant and endearingly kind. And Julia cannot stop herself from thinking of what more there could be between them…
But secrets lie thick as dust in her new home. What she thought she knew of her dead husband might have been nothing more than a carefully constructed facade, and the things Alexander won’t tell her could destroy their growing passion before it even has a chance to begin.
Regan isn’t looking for a husband. She has her children to raise, an estate to manage, and the role of perpetually grieving widow to uphold. So when she stumbles into Thomas Cranmer, a man so young he is better suited for her own daughter than herself, she is shocked by the immediate spark of desire that ignites between them.
Thomas is indeed young, handsome, and not at all the sort of gentleman who should be catching her attention. But the lure of an affair with him is too tempting to ignore, even as rumors swirl about what sort of man he really is.
It’s not until Regan finds her heart is in danger that she wonders if there can be life beyond grief, and if someone can have a second chance at love…
Charlotte Claridge lives a life dictated by her stepmother’s whims. Sent to live with one family member and then another, she finally arrives in Scotland, on the doorstep of a crumbling estate abandoned by its owner. With her aunt, she spends her days mending curtains and peeling potatoes, a quiet existence that changes with the appearance of a carriage bearing a coat of arms.
From out of the carriage falls Hartley, also known as Lord Cowden. Drunk, unconscious, and bleeding, Charlotte and her aunt carry him into his ancestral home. As he recovers in Charlotte’s care, Hartley confesses to a crime that nearly sent him spiralling towards his grave. But can she entrust him with her own secrets while coaxing him back from the dead?
***
Ruined in her first season in London, she is given no choice but to wed her father’s pick for a husband, or be cast out from her home. Emily agrees to marry William Hazlitt, a man she hardly knows. But William remembers her. Growing up as a tenant on her father’s estate, he admired her from afar, their lives kept separate first by class, and then by loss.
Emily seeks to begin a new life with this quiet man to whom she finds herself wedded. But the scandal she escaped in London soon finds her again, the very man who destroyed her reputation threatening to tear down the happiness she’s found with her new husband. To keep from losing everything, she must either make a deal with a devil… or learn how to defeat one.
Can they put aside their differences for the sake of an innocent child?
Sophia has sacrificed everything for her younger sister, Lucy. She has removed them from the only home they ever knew, taken on the care of Lucy’s illegitimate son, George, and even assumed the role of a widow and mother in order to erase all hint of scandal from the boy’s birth. But rumor continues to follow them like the darkest of clouds, and Sophia must adapt to her new existence as a false widow with no prospects beyond the doors of her small cottage.
Lord Haughton will stop at nothing to prevent the slightest whiff of disgrace from tainting his family’s name. When he learns of his younger brother’s latest indiscretion-one that leaves a bastard child in his wake-Haughton rushes across the country to offer the boy’s mother a comfortable living in exchange for her silence about the child’s true parentage. But he arrives only to have his generous offer thrown back in his face by Sophia Brixton, a sharp-tongued and sharper-witted woman who proceeds to toss him out of her house. But just because he is banished from her home does not mean he is so easily banished from her life.