Running into the arms of a handsome, powerful laird will either be her greatest folly or a profitable gamble. Donovan Ewan Campbell-Ainsley, Earl of Hollandbane, and the current sitting Laird of Lyon Castle is not best pleased when scandal lands on his doorstep in the form of a pretty young woman with nothing but gossip attached to her name. Though he’s half-Scottish and lives in London, he spends the summers and autumns at his castle in the Highlands for reasons he wishes to keep to himself. Yet she’s in immediate danger, and he’s nothing if not a gentleman. The Honorable Emma Radcliffe is no stranger to scandal, but when an arrangement her father made in her infancy comes due, she’s forced to flee from a life she never wanted. Resourceful and smart, she implores a friend to go with her over the Scottish border, and that’s when the trouble really begins. The moment she lays eyes on the laird, she knows he’ll be the perfect man to discourage her would-be suitor. It takes next to no time to hatch a haphazard plan: they’ll pretend an engagement. It will silence his family’s blather for him to find a bride as well as remove her from the snatches of a bounder. There’s one problem: neither of them expected to actually like the other. As the days go on, the fiction grows bigger until desire can no longer be denied, but unless she’s released from her prior betrothal, a happily ever after between them will be forever out of reach.