First love is like the measles—a hot rash one is stronger for surviving. Good English families all have a house in the country with a deer park, a trout stream, and an army of gardeners. They should have a son and if it can be managed, he should be handsome. Cleverness isn’t important. Daughters in limited quantities are fine so long as they are pretty. Bastards are inconvenient and best ignored. It's not a big problem, unless you are one. Unfortunately, Sophy is. Sick of her outcast role, she escapes her father’s house, only to fall from her horse during a spring storm. Injured, soaked, and shivering, she stumbles to a stranger’s door—Tom, a blunt edged merchant from a family of vulgar upstarts. Mistaking Sophy for the genuine article, he takes her in. Sophy can’t resist twisting the truth. Soon she’s caught in her own snare—and it might just be a noose.

There are worse things than being spectacularly jilted. Losing a leg, for instance, or getting shot—well, perhaps not: The bullet Alistair took fighting in the peninsula never landed him in London’s scandal sheets. Captain Alistair Beaumaris never dreamed he’d be tossed over by Lord Fairchild’s bastard daughter, losing both her and her fortune—a singular humiliation that should have taught him a lesson. But when your luck is out, you do foolish things, like quarrel with your oldest friend. Or mistake a perfectly respectable widow for a lady of easy virtue. Unfortunately, that kind of blunder needs fixing. Yielding to his troublesome conscience, Alistair tracks down the elusive widow . . . but the only thing he doesn’t find is an easy way out.

Jasper Rushford doesn’t want drama—when visiting a sister who’s about to give birth, the more placid the event, the better. But when he recognizes the doctor’s mousy sister as the darling of London’s stage, theatrics are inevitable. Laura Edwards took to the stage to support her brother’s medical career. Now he’s established he wants her to turn respectable, landing her in the country, hiding in plain sight from one of her biggest admirers. And her alter ego, celebrated actress Gemma Holyrood, would be having so much more fun… Caught in the English countryside amidst Jasper’s dazzling and dizzyingly complicated family, it’s no place to let Laura’s secret come out.