Rich, handsome, and fashionably jaded, Jason, Lord Radford, knows he must marry to get an heir, but assumes that any well bred young lady will do, so he offers for Caroline Hanscombe, whose name he draws at random. Caroline is pressured by her family to accept, but shy and musical, she finds her new fiancé alarming. Will this be a match made in heaven or hell? Or might Caroline quietly find herself a man who suits her better?

Tired of dealing with legalities relating to his father's unexpected death, new baronet Sir Philip Selbourne is ready to leave London and head home for Christmas. But having spent a boyhood rescuing strays, he's unable to resist helping a desperate young woman with speaking brown eyes and a kitten in her pocket.

Lonely and depressed by far too much rain, Lord Randolph Lennox decides on impulse to take the first ship leaving London for the sunny Mediterranean. Chance brings him to Naples - where it's also raining. But the rain clears, and as he discovers the city, a pleasant young English governess rescues him from an altercation with a flirtatious girl and her protective family. Miss Elizabeth Walker is between jobs and taking a holiday in Naples when she meets the quiet, handsome Englishman.

Known as the despair of the Davenports, Reginald is a disinherited, disgraced alcoholic who is headed for a bad end - that is until the new Earl of Wargrave gives him one last chance at redemption by letting him take his place as the heir of Strickland, his lost ancestral estate. Masquerading as a man in order to obtain a position as estate manager of Strickland, Lady Alys Weston came to Strickland after having fled her home, her wealth, and her title due to betrayal and despair.

James Markland, Lord Falconer, knows that he is ugly, very ugly, and he lives a life of seclusion, wearing a heavily cowled mantle to conceal his face from the world. When he learns that a neighboring girl, the exquisite, young Ariel Hawthorne, is about to be sold into marriage with a revolting lecher, he offers her the only protection he can: his name. Of course it will be a marriage in name only, because what woman could want him? A talented artist, Ariel is cursed by her beauty and vulnerability. Though she never sees her husband's face, she is drawn to his kindness and generosity.

As heir to a title and great wealth, Will Masterson should have stayed home and tended his responsibilities. Instead he went to war. Now, after perilous years fighting the French, he intends his current mission to be his last. But all his plans are forgotten when he arrives in the small mountain stronghold of San Gabriel and meets her. Knowing herself to be too tall, strong, and unconventional to appeal to a man, Athena Markham has always gloried in her independence.

Freya de Moray is many things: A member of the secret order of Wise Women, the daughter of disgraced nobility, and a chaperone living under an assumed name. What she is not is forgiving. So when the duke of Harlowe, the man who destroyed her brother and led to the downfall of her family, appears at the country house party she's attending, she does what any Wise Woman would do: She starts planning her revenge.

They called him the Demon Earl. They said he could do anything. Son of a rogue and a gypsy, Nicolas Davies was a notorious rake until a shattering betrayal left him alone and embittered in the Welsh countryside. Desperation drives quiet schoolmistress Clare Morgan to ask the Demon Earl to help save her village. Unwilling to involve himself in the problems of others, Nicholas sets an impossible price on his aid-only if Clare will live with him for three months, letting the world think the worst, will he intervene.

Forced to wed to keep her inheritance, independent Lady Jocelyn Kendal finds an outrageous solution: she proposes marriage to Major David Lancaster, an officer dying from his Waterloo wounds. In return for making her his wife, she will provide for his governess sister. But after the bargain is struck and the marriage is made, the major makes a shocking, miraculous recovery.

Major Jack Howard, a weary veteran of the Peninsular Wars, has just returned to England and intends to travel to an unwelcoming family home for Christmas. But when a pompous secretary gives him too many orders, Jack hops on the next stagecoach leaving the London inn, not caring where it’s going. Too much whisky to stave off freezing leaves him sleeping it off in a different inn - and when an attractive young woman asks if he’s Jack Howard, he happily goes home with her.