This rollicking tale has a villainous heroine of grand proportions and a hero who is a real sweetheart and all-around good guy! It’s an impressive STEM romance and the second book in the Damsels of Discovery series. It’s angsty and dramatic but the hero melted my heart and I found it to be an entertaining read.

Lady Phoebe Hunt is back in London after being sent away when she got mixed up in a sinister plot and accidentally shot a man. She has spent the last four years in America where she worked for an agency as a detective which she loved. (It was a little hard for me to imagine her as a detective, but she is brilliant, so I went along with it.) She is twenty-six years old and returned to London after the death of her father, to help her mother and sister who must sell everything to pay off her father’s massive debts. She places an advertisement in the newspaper for an auction to sell her family’s home in London as well as their country estate.

Sam Fenley knew Phoebe when she had been a friend of his sister at Athena’s Retreat, a secret group of women scientists. Since then, Sam has made good investments and at twenty-five is very wealthy. (He seems a little young to have earned so much wealth so fast, but I went along with it.) He owns the paper that Phoebe ran the ad in and goes to see her to make an offer for her home.

Sam was recently turned down for a railroad consortium he wanted to invest in because he didn’t have a title and he resents it. When he’s at Phoebe’s home, he meets her younger sister and asks to court her. He likes the idea of having children that have blue blood. But he finds himself attracted to Phoebe, even with the scandal in her past. He can see that, underneath icy layers, she is broken and he wonders what happened to make her this way. (I should share that his attraction for Phoebe does not upset her sister because they both agreed they didn’t suit.)

Phoebe has been through a lot of abuse (her father was a tyrant) and she feels she is unlovable plus she has a lot of secrets. The secrets unfold throughout the story and we see how she has dealt with the terrible things that have happened to her – it’s very emotional. She is a scientist and is fascinated with the study of electrical currents and Michael Faraday’s work and I liked how she found comfort studying his experiments.

Sam is a wonderful hero who comes from a loving family (plus they have pet hedgehogs!). As he and Phoebe grow closer, some of Phoebe’s past secrets catch up with her and Sam comes to her rescue. He hides her while they decide what to do and I couldn’t wait to see how it would all work out – it was pretty angsty and spicy. Also, we see many interesting characters in this story from the author’s Secret Scientists series (which I haven’t read yet, but now I want to).

One quibble I had was that a few things in the story were hard for me to imagine (as mentioned already) but I went along with them. I ended up loving how the story ended – there was a big grand gesture that was fun.

If you’re in the mood for an emotional historical STEM romance with a villainess heroine and kind, gentle hero, this story could spark a flame for you.