Lord Percival Bretagne is used to playing games. He survived being a spy for a decade using his wits alone. But that was just life and death. Now he’s playing for the most important prize of all — love.

England, 1887
After a near-death experience in the Theatre Royal fire, Angeline wants to find love and have a family. But her mother has other plans. Marriage is overrated. Power is the only thing that matters.

Angeline is supposed to follow in her mother’s steps: become the mistress of many rich lords, collect compromising material on them, blackmail them, and make a lot of money. That’s the recipe for a happy life.

Not for Angeline.

A drunken laugh, a roll of the dice... and Aurora Sprague finds herself a child bride, married in haste to a young man she's never met to settle her father's gaming debt. Moments after the ceremony, the new groom gallops off to the army and Aurora is banished to a remote estate, married in name only.

Flame-haired Irish lass Mara Despencer embarks upon a plan to take back her family's castle, Kulhaven, after it was confiscated by the English government under Oliver Cromwell's brutal Protectorate. She will lure the castle's new master, the scandalous Hadrian Ross, the Bastard Earl of St. Aubyn, into a marriage that will allow her to become mistress of Kulhaven once again.