SMUG, SELF-SATISFIED, AND SLIGHTLY SCANDALOUS...

That, thought Joan Pennington Amory, Countess of Sutherland, summed up Sir Adam March to a tee! The dashing rake dared to pry into her past, and his concern with her future was utterly inappropriate. Mind you, lovely Lady Sutherland was not being ungrateful; she was merely looking out for her own interests. The darkly handsome nobleman had, after all, rescued her when she had been wounded by highwaymen--and he suspected that she was not all she appeared to be. Indeed, Lady Sutherland was traveling incognito; having donned a disguise and fled upon being ordered by her grandmama to marry an unknown distant cousin. She had, it seemed, turned down one suitor too many. Yet her attempt to find a life of her own had simply placed her in the path of an arrogant and most notorious rake. Though they tiffed from the moment they met, Joan soon realized that the sparks that flew between them camouflaged something less furious, gentler, more tender... Was it love?