Families of Dorset

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 who seems to be hiding something.

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. 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.

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 a French nobleman who immediately pegs her as affected and superficial. Poor 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.

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.