Too beautiful and too enchanting not to attract the young man her cousin charlotte hoped to marry – Melinda felt only withering hatred from the family that had taken her in. Penniless and therefore of no consequence, she would be married off to the highest bidder – a lecherous old friend of her uncle's. After a brutal beating, she had no choice but to flee – to the callousness and terrors of Victorian London – and into the clutches of a seemingly kindly woman who offered her lodgings for the night. Drugged and locked in, she then receives a fantastic offer of five hundred guineas to pretend to marry the notorious Marquis of Chard.

How Melinda accepts this extraordinary proposal, how she is shocked by the Marquis and his friends and how she saves his life, is all told in this thrilling and passionate romance.