After years of loving the rakish Lord Vale from afar, Melisande Fleming finally gets the chance to prove her feelings for him when he is jilted on his wedding day and she boldly offers to marry him, but his dark nightmares of his military career in the colonies and a deadly betrayal from the past threaten to tear them apart.

"After seven years in hellish captivity, Raynaud St. Aubyn busts into his ancestral home half mad with fever, demanding his due. Can this wild man truly be the last earl's son, thought murdered by Indians? Beatrice Corning is the niece of the present earl and a proper English miss. Yet she has a secret: No real man has ever excited her more than the handsome youth in a certain portrait. Now, suddenly, he's here, in the flesh--and luring her into...