Lady Sweetbriar had always led a pragmatic life for a proud but not so proper English woman caught in a world where single women were scorned with scandal. She fought gossip with gumption and poverty with a preposterous plot to keep her family jewels. But the plot goes awry and amorous missteps manage to threaten the one thing that propels the soft center of Lady Sweetbriar’s pragmatic heart, the passionate love of Sir Avery, the one man who didn’t care what anyone said, the one man who could make her contemptuous life calm again.