The Rakish Viscount's Pretend Wife

Six years of relentless propriety have kept Delilah Pearce employed, respectable, and entirely alone. Then a snowstorm strands her at a coaching inn, and she climbs the stairs to the room she paid for and finds a stranger sprawled across the mattress, one boot on, snoring like a man trying to expel his own soul.

Simon Cathcart has woken in a great many beds that were not his. This is the first one that arrives with a wife attached, since he apparently announced the imminent arrival of one before the brandy finished with him, and the innkeeper believed every word.

The storm will not lift for days, and a governess caught sharing a room with a rake has no career left to speak of. So Delilah sets her terms. He will play the adequate husband, keep to the left side of the bed, and keep his hands, his remarks, and his eyebrows entirely to himself.

The terms hold rather better than either of them expected. What refuses to hold is everything underneath them.

A clean, closed-door Regency novella about a fake marriage, a snowbound inn, and two people who agreed on the rules long before they understood the cost.