When Rebecca Russell’s brother marries, she finally has the opportunity she has been dreaming of: to leave the seclusion of her reclusive grandfather’s home and enter into society. But when her inexperience has her making blunders and courting embarrassment, help comes from an unexpected source: the brooding, irritable brother of her chaperone. Valentine Donovan is a rake, mountains of gaming debt and all. With his only hope for financial relief tied up in the Admiralty Court, he must temporarily rely on his father’s charity–and all the strings attached to it. His father demands Valentine show evidence that he is changing his ways, so when the engaging but naive young woman living with his sister presents a plan, he can’t refuse the opportunity to fulfill some of his father’s requirements, albeit reluctantly. But Valentine is unprepared for Rebecca’s guileless optimism and how impossible he finds it to say no to her increasingly onerous requests–requests that put both their hearts and reputations in danger. A Confirmed Rake is the second in Martha Keyes’s The Donovans regency-set romance series. Each book can be treated as a standalone.

Phineas Donovan is possessed of a sharp intellect. Fresh from Cambridge, he obtains a generous live-in position as tutor for the son of the wealthy Lord Bettencourt. If he can prove his value, he has hopes of being given the patronage of his employer, allowing him to take up a position as vicar. There, he can pursue his intellectual endeavors in peace and relative financial comfort. In her humble but informed opinion, Lady Sarah Danneville is possessed of an even sharper intellect. If anyone should be tutoring her younger brother, it is she, not the reserved, bespectacled gentleman her father has employed to do the job. He is not fit to instruct a Danneville of Bettencourt. But as Sarah works to undermine him, Mr. Donovan shows more pluck than she expects, not to mention that he harbors a secret hobby that would be laughable if it weren’t so dreadfully unsophisticated. If she can use this secret against him, she can finally persuade her father she is more than bait to lure a prosperous match. Now, if only she can avoid being drawn into the dearth of sophistication—and Mr. Donovan’s eyes—herself. Battling the Bluestocking is the third in Martha Keyes’s The Donovans regency-set romance series. Each book can be treated as a standalone.

She dreams of marrying a nobleman. Too bad he’s only pretending to be one. Cecilia Cosgrove’s beauty opens doors and hearts everywhere she goes. With a marquess courting her, the status and wealth her family is counting on her to obtain is finally within her reach–until she meets Jacques Levesque, the French nobleman who immediately pegs her as affected and superficial. While piqued and offended, Cecilia secretly begins to wonder whether he might not have a point. Poor French emigre Jacques Levesque has been disguised as a French nobleman for almost as long as he can remember, trying his hardest to keep his head down in a society obsessed with rank and high birth. But when Cecilia Cosgrove comes into his life, he finds it hard to maintain his facade–or to want to. While Cecilia struggles between the desire to please others and the wish to pursue her own course, Jacques’s interest in her provokes a powerful enemy intent on taking him down. With love, acceptance, and the future on the line for them both, Cecilia and Jacques must decide whether a life lived behind a mask is any life at all.

It started as a marriage of convenience, but falling in love has made it anything but convenient. Fresh from the humiliating annulment of the love match she always wanted, Lady Anne Vincent meekly agrees to the marriage of convenience her father has arranged. She feels hopeful that this marriage can be one of cordial indifference, protecting her from the hurt she knows so well. Tobias Cosgrove isn’t meant for marriage, free spirit that he is. And yet, as the only son, marry he must. He is thus relieved when his father reveals his future wife to be the calm, collected Lady Anne Vincent, for he is confident she won’t plague him with neediness or hysterics like so many of the other young women in society. But when Lady Anne’s past reappears on their doorstep, she and Tobias are forced to confront whether a marriage of convenience is the type of marriage they wish for after all.

A gentleman’s impulsive wager to marry a stranger. A young woman’s determination not to marry the man she wants. When Isabel Cosgrove is informed by her father that he lost her hand in marriage while playing cards with Charles Galbraith – the gentleman she’s been admiring from a distance for years – she is filled with dismay. How can she agree to wed a man whose reason for marriage is part-revenge, part-indifference? Intent on avoiding a painful union where her regard cannot be returned, she concocts a plan. Charles Galbraith didn’t intend to become engaged as a result of a drunken wager at cards, but after the woman he loves spurns him, what does it matter whom he marries? But even Miss Cosgrove, the fiancee he won by wager, seems intent not to marry him – a fact that both relieves and piques him. She instead suggests a plan that has the potential to temporarily appease her father’s demand of marriage while also winning back the love of the woman Charles truly wants. But when Charles and Isabel are thrown into the midst of a brewing scandal and another man’s potential disinheritance, their plan begins to unravel thread by thread, challenging what Galbraith thinks he wants – and just how much more time with him Isabel’s heart can stand.

2020 Whitney Award Winner Scotland 1794 For more than twenty years, the Lowland village of Craigmuir has been untouched by smallpox, leaving the people vulnerable to a painful lesson on the price of belonging, belief, and survival. Isla Findlay belongs nowhere. The daughter of a disgraced woman and the Highlander who abandoned them both, she tries to be a dutiful niece to the uncle who has taken her in, blending into the village as best she can. But when a young Highlander’s arrival in the area coincides with an outbreak of dreaded smallpox, it stirs up questions about Isla’s past and forces a confrontation between the beliefs she holds and the community she wants to belong to. Dr. Graeme MacNeill killed the only patient he ever had: his own father. The only way he can think to atone is to cut all ties from the Lowland world his father hated–including his education as a physician–and embrace the Highland heritage he used to be ashamed of. He travels to Craigmuir to sell the unwanted estate he has inherited from an uncle and return home, but fate–and the red-headed young woman he encounters in the village–have no intention of letting him leave things so easily behind.

Diana Donovan was raised aboard a naval ship on a steady diet of war strategy, so when her orphaned friend, Lucy, is denied a perfectly respectable love match by her controlling guardian, Diana sees an opportunity to put her battle knowledge to use in service of a deserving friend. But Marmaduke Russell is not the middle-aged curmudgeon Diana is expecting. He is a maddeningly cool unmarried gentleman who seems uniquely able to parry her tactics–and infuse her with even more determination to win. As battle ensues, though, it becomes clear that there may be more hearts in the balance than just Lucy’s. The Art of Victory is the first in Martha Keyes’s The Donovans regency-set romance series. Each book can be treated as a standalone.

A babe in a manger once saved the world. Can this one save a failing marriage? Lydia Blakeburn, Baroness Lynham, wants nothing more than to present her husband with an heir, but after five years of marriage, she has all but given up on doing so. What started as a love match has since begun to sour, yet there is nothing Lydia can do to free Miles from a marriage she is certain he regrets. The future they had envisioned together is slipping farther and farther away. Miles Blakeburn is at his wit’s end. Not only has he failed to produce an heir to the family’s ancient title, his wife has withdrawn from him entirely. The one thing in the world she wants, he has thus far been unable to give her: a child. He is a failure in every regard. When they happen upon an abandoned baby at the Frost Fair, Miles simply can’t resist the light he sees sparked in his wife’s eyes as she holds the child. He agrees to take the foundling in until Christmastide is over, when they will find the babe a permanent home. But, for a couple who’s been yearning for a baby for years, the infant can’t help but expose all the feelings Lydia and Miles have long been trying to bury, feelings that have the power to bring them back together—or estrange them forever. *This book deals with the topic of infertility, which can be triggering for some Five Christmas romances and the Frost Fair that started them all. This is the fifth book in the clean and sweet Regency romance Belles of Christmas: Frost Fair series. Although this second chance romance is a stand-alone novel, the books are best enjoyed when read in order. Book 1: Her Silent Knight by Ashtyn Newbold Book 2: All is Mary and Bright by Kasey Stockton Book 3: Thawing the Viscount’s Heart by Mindy Burbidge Strunk Book 4: On the Second Day of Christmas by Deborah M. Hathaway Book 5: The Christmas Foundling by Martha Keyes

Elizabeth Innes has a tongue too sharp for her own good, and she is never more ready to employ it than when faced with the MacKinnons. With just one piece of evidence connecting their clan to a near-deadly attack, she is determined to prove the laird guilty and see him brought to justice. So when chance throws her in the company of one of the MacKinnon men, she resolves to take advantage of the opportunity to glean more information. Malcolm MacKinnon has long lived under the thumb of his cousin and laird, Angus, who keeps a secret with the power to ruin him. With his mother and siblings entirely dependent upon Angus’s capricious generosity, he cannot afford to offend his cousin. When Angus proposes a way for him to finally be free of his shackles, Malcolm is more than ready to oblige. All he must do is help Angus seek revenge upon the rival neighboring clan. The way to do it? Gain the trust–and love–of one of their young women. As Malcolm and Elizabeth pursue their goals, they find their tasks much more difficult than anticipated, with challenges to their loyalties at every turn.

Glenna Douglas may be the daughter of a humble crofter, but she dreams of becoming the innkeeper of Glengour Inn, where she has worked for years. Her problems are two-fold: first, she cannot read or write; second, the landlord has chosen a gentleman who has never set foot in Glengour to manage the inn. She is determined to prove herself more capable than the newcomer–but she may need a bit of help from him to do it. With confidence, charm, and a bit of assistance from his good looks, Alistair Innes has found achieving his goals fairly straightforward thus far in life. His next ambition is somewhat more daunting: return his childhood home and birthright to its former glory so he can inhabit it himself–hopefully with a genteel wife at his side. His plans are temporarily foiled, though, when those capable of financing his venture require him to prove himself first. The challenge? Turn a Highland inn to a higher profit. Alistair and Glenna are not the only ones concerned with the future of Glengour though. Indeed, Angus MacKinnon–newly appointed justice of the peace–seems in turn determined to help and hinder them. With the vision of Alistair’s future at stake and the desires of Glenna’s heart rapidly expanding far beyond a simple inn, they must determine how far they are willing to go for their dreams–and exactly who those dreams include.

After nearly ten years in the army, Hamish Campbell is ready to settle in and call a place home. His sights are set on Dalmore House, the Campbell family estate seized by the Crown after the ’45 uprising. To have any chance at all of regaining it, he must not only find the money to pay off the estate’s debts but also persuade the man who has charge of it to relinquish the property into the hands of a Jacobite’s son. With the help of his brother-in-arms, Hamish finds employment at an inn near to Dalmore’s overseer, putting him in an ideal location to seek the man’s favor. Ava MacMorran cannot marry Angus MacKinnon. Any fate would be preferable. Escaping her father’s threats of force, she sets out for the home of the childhood friend she knows will help her–perhaps even marry her. But when the merchant meant to take her there is nowhere to be found and Ava is mistaken for a long-awaited inn servant, she determines to go along with the misconception until she can be rescued by her friend. With Ava ignorant of Hamish’s goals and Hamish unaware that he is harboring the fugitive daughter of the lynchpin of his plan, attachment between them deepens and the threat of discovery looms large, making a satisfactory outcome seem all but impossible.

Christina MacKinnon is secretly relieved to be a widow. She is equally desperate to distance herself from the clan of her dead husband, but as the heir to his estate–one she needs in order to support her siblings–she must first stave off both the advances and threats of the man next in line to inherit. It seems the only person she can turn to is a nearby stranger who seems inclined to help her. But he has a request…. Freshly returned from the war, Lachlan Kincaid has one aim: to see justice served to the MacKinnons for betraying his family years ago and depriving him of his inheritance. While biding his time at a nearby inn, he discovers the death of the MacKinnon laird–whose widow has inherited everything. The way to accomplish his goal is becoming more evident, but the path is murkier than he could have foreseen. As their lives intersect, it becomes clear Lachlan and Christina have to join forces. But to do so courts more danger, and it requires a sacrifice from Christina.

Elena MacKinnon has spent the last seven years training to become a proper English lady. When her childhood friend, Captain Theo Donovan, returns from serving in the Navy, he brings along with him Elena’s humiliation for the ill-advised and ardent love letter she wrote him before his departure, which he ignored entirely. Elena hopes to simultaneously stifle his memory of the letter and make him regret overlooking her, showing him just how fine an English lady she can be. The only problem? She is not English but a proud Scot—and her heart may be more enamored with Theo than ever.

Kate Matcham needs a fortune or a husband. She wants neither. With a tainted inheritance in the balance, she receives one offer to become a scoundrel’s mistress and another offer of a marriage of convenience. Before resigning herself to a choice, she accepts the invitation to visit a childhood friend, considering it a last hurrah before embarking on a bleak future. The visit goes sideways when she falls for the gentleman her friend intends to marry, a man well out of Kate’s league – and one who seems to be hiding something. Smuggling has overtaken the county, and it seems that everyone is complicit in the trade that killed her father. One by one, her options dwindle as she struggles against her strengthening feelings for a duplicitous man, a determination not to hurt her friend, and keeping the promise she made long ago: To stand up to the people who killed her father.