Was she really going to go through with this? It had seemed a good plan, in the safety of Grosvenor Square. Her stomach knotted with a grim sense of foreboding. A church bell tolled somewhere in the darkness, a forlorn clang like a death knell. They rose into the mist, five stories high, a vast expanse of brickwork, bleak and unpromising. Georgie peered out into the rain-drizzled street, then up, up the near-windowless walls. A felon she would marry before the night was through. Or, in this case, for a desperate felon about to be hanged. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Until three days ago, enlisting a husband from amongst the ranks of London’s most dangerous criminals had not featured prominently on her list of life goals. “Your father would turn in his watery grave if he knew what you were about.”

The salt-weathered Dutchman always used her full name whenever he disapproved of something she was doing. Georgie frowned at her burly companion, Pieter Smit, as the nondescript carriage he’d summoned to convey them to London’s most notorious jail rocked to a halt on the cobbled street.

“Georgiana Caversteed, this is a terrible idea.” It was just that, at present, Georgie couldn’t think of any. Soon Wylde finds himself courting his own wife, hoping to win her heart since he already has her hand.There were worse places to find a husband than Newgate Prison. Georgie doesn’t realize who he is when she marries him-and she most certainly never expects to bump into her very-much-alive, and very handsome, husband of convenience at a society gathering weeks later. What could possibly go wrong?īenedict William Henry Wylde, scapegrace second son of the late Earl of Morcott and well-known rake, is in Newgate prison undercover, working for Bow Street. All she has to do is find an eligible bachelor in prison to marry her, and she’ll be free. widowed? Georgie hatches a madcap scheme to wed a condemned criminal before he’s set to be executed.

Even worse than the ton’s lecherous fortune hunters, however, is the cruel cousin determined to force Georgie into marriage. Shipping heiress Georgiana Caversteed is done with men who covet her purse more than her person. WILL A FALSE MARRIAGE LEAD TO TRUE AND LASTING LOVE? Introducing the Bow Street Bachelors-men who work undercover for London’s first official police force-and the women they serve to protect.and wed?

This Earl of Mine by Kate Bateman