Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by the removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce A Courageous Outcast . . . Rosamunde Baird has lost everything and has no choice but to accept an invitation to spend a season with a dowager duchess and her clandestine ladies club. Determined to stay in the shadows and live quietly, she has sworn never again to come face...

Victory is sweet-but England's triumph was Georgie's rout. Now that she's widowed, the loathsome marriage her father first arranged has simply been renegotiated. With neither money nor rights, and nowhere to flee, all she can do is cherish her last weeks of freedom...until a band of ruffians overtake her carriage and kidnap her. When she escapes in seaside Brighton and encounters her brother's rather wild friend, Lord St. Just-whom she suspects aspires...

Lady Charlotte Cavendish is still the spirited girl who tried to elope in the name of love. That dream was thwarted by her father who trapped her in a loveless, passionless marriage. But now widowed, Charlotte is free to reenter the giddy world of the ton-and pursue her desires. Hardly a typical widow, she remains innocent of pleasures of the flesh. Yet now that her life is finally her own, she intends to keep it that way. Nash, the twelfth Earl of...

"Maria just gave birth to her first child, a beautiful daughter - but the event is shrouded in sorrow. A month earlier, Maria's husband, Lord Kersey, was killed in a duel under compromising circumstances. Worse, Maria's failure to provide a male heir has stripped her of any hope of an inheritance. Scorned by the ton, one of her few allies is her late husband's steward, Hugh Granger. Hugh is everything her husband was not - warm, charming - and penniless....

"The widowed Lady Stephen Tarkington, Fanny to her friends, has finished mourning her cad of a husband and is ready to enjoy her freedom. The kind of freedom neither a gently bred miss nor a close-watched wife is permitted: dressing up as Aphrodite for a masquerade, drawing gentlemen away from the party, and hinting at late-night assignations with her dance partners. All is going pleasurably according to plan--until the Roman god Fanny kisses during...