Lady Annabelle Huxley believes anything worth doing is worth doing boldly, and that includes adoring Robert Conrad. As a girl, she chased him with reckless abandon, and he always rescued her when she pushed too far, until the day rescuing her cost him everything - and lost her the boy she loved as no other. 

Hugh Philemon Ancaster, seventh Duke of Ripley, will never win prizes for virtue. But even he draws the line at running off with his best friend's bride. All he's trying to do is recapture the slightly inebriated Lady Olympia Hightower and return her to her intended bridegroom. For reasons that elude her, bookish, bespectacled Olympia is supposed to marry a gorgeous rake of a duke. The ton is flabbergasted. Her family's ecstatic. And Olympia? She's climbing out of a window, bent on a getaway.

Lord Nathaniel Harte, the disagreeable duke of Beswick, spends his days smashing porcelain, antagonizing his servants, and snarling at anyone who gets too close. With a ruined face like his, it's hard to like much about the world - especially smart-mouthed harpies (with lips better suited to kissing than speaking) who brave his castle with indecent proposals. But Lady Astrid Everleigh will stop at nothing to see her younger sister safe from a notorious scoundrel, even if it means offering herself up on a silver platter to the forbidding Beast of Beswick himself. 

Cassandra DeWitt has seen her husband only once - on their wedding day two years earlier - and this arrangement suits her perfectly. She has no interest in the rude, badly behaved man she married only to secure her inheritance. She certainly has no interest in his ban on her going to London. Why, he’ll never even know she is there. Until he shows up in London too, and Cassandra finds herself sharing a house with the most infuriating man in England. Joshua DeWitt has his life exactly how he wants it. He has no need of a wife disrupting everything.

Lady Linnet Cadwallader has been raised a helpless invalid in her own castle. Brought up to believe she will "never make old bones" she lives a quiet and lonely existence, hiding away her excessive freckles and red hair from a world that believes her to be hideously misshapen and ugly. Until one day her uncle arranges a marriage of convenience for her, a marriage in name only with a young puppet groom...but Sir Roland does not show up. In his place turns up his base-born brother Mason Vawdrey. And dark, forceful Mason is no one's puppet.