GENTLEMEN OF VIRTUE
A Merry Christmas
A fairytale Christmas setting with childhood friends thrown together at every turn. What could go wrong?
Joshua Fielding is looking forward to a quiet Christmas-tide, something he has desperately missed during his time with the army. His loud, boisterous family celebrate the festivities in a manner far different from that of his aristocratic colleagues. It promises to be all he has hoped until a name from the past comes back to haunt him. His childhood nemesis: Barnaby Tremaine.
Merry Roxton loves Christmas. This one promises to be the best yet, since Barnaby Tremaine, son of the local lord, has been courting her. Merry has never been permitted a London Season, Due to her father’s refusal to be shunned for making his money in trade. However, she is determined to make a grand match. Then Captain Joshua Fielding returns and challenges everything she thought she believed.
The Lost Cipher
He would unravel this mystery…or it would unravel him.
Captain Edmund Cholmely has been in the doldrums since his brother’s exposure and death as a traitor. A coded ledger is stolen from the War Office, however, threatening to expose every secret operation Colonel Renforth’s men have ever undertaken, not to mention other war secrets. The cipher is being used again and Renforth sets Edmund to discovering who has the code, seeing it as an opportune task with which Chum might break his melancholy.
Edmund follows the leak to a seaside town where a reserved widow keeps a school, mostly for the daughters of naval officers and those wounded in the war. Her husband created the cipher...
Elise Larkin, widow of Captain Charles Larkin, has run a boarding school for the young ladies of naval officers ever since the loss of her husband. When the stranger comes to the village, she is torn between fear of his purpose and an attraction she cannot deny. Elise is one of just two people still alive who her husband entrusted with the key to a cipher he created for sending coded messages, and she is afraid it will be used for ill.
Edmund knows that recent messages have surfaced using the highly secretive code which is supposed to be dormant. Does the widow know the cipher or hold the key? If released, documents and informants’ names could be revealed, putting them at risk. A mutual need to discover the truth throws Edmund and Elise together, but she suspects him and he suspects her. Gradually, however, Edmund’s rigid notions of guilt and loyalty crumble. He must decide whether love requires trust even when honour forbids it.