Emmaline Alcott runs a marriage brokerage using the last name of Stanhope and pretending to be a widow. When the Royal Mail coach outside her door runs down a Mr. Burwell, life takes an unexpected turn. Burwell worked in the war office and was being investigated for treason. After his death, a flyer linking him to Emmaline and her other side venture, fortune telling, raise suspicion that she may have been involved somehow. Adrian St. Ledger, the Duke of Trent has been asked by his uncle to check out Emmaline and see if she could be guilty of either treason or murder. He does so – grudgingly. He decides to pose as a man needing a wife in order to gain Emmaline’s trust. Emmaline thinks he’s going to need more than a wife, he is going to need one major attitude adjustment.

Adrian is a very cold, detached man. He doesn’t feel he can trust people or emotions so he loses himself in science and an incredibly structured and confining lifestyle. He comes to believe that while Emmaline had nothing to do with Burwell’s death, she is a charlatan out to rob people of their money by making them believe in magic. For her part, Emmaline has tried to stop believing in magic and fairy tales and a knight on a white horse, but it’s easy to see that deep down, she still believes in happy endings.

Adrian realizes that Emmaline is in danger from people who still think she may have been involved with Burwell’s death. Outside of a flyer, Emmaline’s involvement is extremely circumstantial. It seemed incredibly obvious that she wasn’t involved, and the plot to pin the crime on her was haphazard and unbelieveable. The suspense portion of the story was such a small part of the book that when it finally came into the forefront, I really didn’t care; it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on. I guessed pretty early who the villain actually was.

I also have a confession to make – I did not like Adrian St. Ledger. Towards the beginning of the story, Emmaline gets dizzy and reaches out to Adrian, who backs away from her. This means that Emmaline has to steady herself. I found this to be not only rude, ungentlemanly behavior, but also unheroic-like behavior. One would hope he had a really good reason for this and while his childhood caused him an immense amount of pain, I found this one transgression very difficult to get over.

Adrian and Emmaline have an extremely unsatisfying romance as well. It’s one of those “I hate you. . .take me. . .I still hate you” type relationships. They keep saying how much they dislike each other but they can’t stop thinking about each other. The following quote from the book sums it up well: “She was his. Now and always. At the moment she despised him with a passion that equaled the primitive pleasures he’d unleashed.” Their insistence that they hated each other was grating after the millionth time it was mentioned. Hate turning into love can work, Jude Deveraux’s Velvet series are proof of this, but here it rings completely false. I didn’t see any real emotion from Adrian until very near the end of the book. I never saw him try and work through his problems and I never saw him apologize to Emmaline for thinking the worst of her.

Emmaline is an adequate heroine who does what she needs to do in order to take care of herself and her aunt without losing her integrity. While I found nothing special about her, she was too good for the likes of Adrian. More enjoyable was the relationship between Emmaline’s aunt Heloise and Adrian’s man Gibbons (there is a secret here too which you can see coming miles down the road). They were far more interesting than the main couple. While this was not the worst way to spend a Saturday night, I am afraid that I cannot recommend this book.