A passionate, yet tender love story that begins on Bow Street and ends in a graveyard…featuring some of your favorite tropes (and mine): London’s Notorious Matchmaker, Marriage of Convenience, Forced Proximity, Hardheaded Hero, Bow Street Runner, Widowed Heroine, Feisty Heroine, and of course the all-important Happily Ever After!

He has never forgotten how he failed her!

Gavin King has been with the Bow Street runners for years, has twenty men who report directly to him–a handful of whom he trusts implicitly to handle any issues that come up regarding the Duke of Wyndmere and his family. King has investigated crimes that still keep him up nights. One of those crimes involved the gruesome sight of Lord Hughes’s body stuffed into a sea chest. Though he solved Hughes’s murder, and the killer was brought to trial, he will never forget the anguished look, nor the tears that followed, when he delivered the news to Lady Lucretia Montfort as he promised. God help him, he felt helpless bearing witness to her pain.

She has no choice but to enter the Lyon’s Den!

Widowed for a decade, Lady Montfort hoped to find contentment when Lord Hughes proposed a marriage of convenience. His brutal murder was the catalyst for the recent salacious rumors, and the wager in White’s betting book that threaten the widow’s reputation.

King vows to keep another promise–one that he made to himself–that he would add Lady Montfort under his broad wing of protection. The rumors escalate and turn ugly. King receives an urgent missive from one of his longtime contacts, Mrs. Bessie Dove-Lyon, advising Lucretia asked for her help finding a husband. King demands Bessie sever the contract. She refuses. Little does he know Mrs. Dove-Lyon has a plan of her own!