THE COUNTERFEIT FIANCEE

She came to Ashby Court for the letters. She stayed for the library. She did not account for the Earl.

Miss Phoebe Davenport runs a lending library, composes letters she never sends, and applies the same rigorous cataloguing system to everything in her life, including, as it turns out, the Earl of Ashby, against whom she has been constructing a watertight argument for four months.

Edmund Cavendish, Earl of Ashby, requires a convincing temporary fiancée to manage a situation involving two determined aunts and a perfectly pleasant woman from Bath. He requires her for a fortnight. He does not require complications.

Their arrangement is negotiated by letter, in terms of considerable precision, with conditions on both sides. Phoebe's conditions involve library access. Edmund's involve honesty.

Honesty, it will turn out, is where things become complicated.

Because Phoebe is not only there for the early printed books. Somewhere in the magnificent private library at Ashby Court, in a Parliamentary digest that should have been burned in 1812, are five letters belonging to her late father, letters that could be made to look rather worse than they are by the right person with the wrong intentions. She needs them back before anyone finds them.

She has agreed to tell him what she is looking for before she finds them.

She is going to have to be very quick.

Set in 1814, The Counterfeit Fiancée is a Regency romance about two people who fall in love primarily through the medium of arguing about cataloguing systems, and about what happens when the most careful plan meets the one thing it did not account for.