After three years' imprisonment for high treason, a jaded princess is given one last chance of freedom through an arranged marriage to a foreign prince, but she quickly learns that she has traded one cage for another. __ Princess Alexandra has spent three years imprisoned in a tower for the crime of high treason, awaiting her execution. On the night she is to die, a reprieve comes: rather than be executed, she will be exiled to the far-away duchy of Selica to marry a foreign prince. It is a second chance. Her last chance. But in Selica, Princess Alexandra quickly realizes that she has traded one cage for another. The people of Selica despise her. Prince Marisuz, her husband, cares nothing for her. And the palace is full of dark secrets and dangerous conspiracies, which threaten not just Alexandra, but the home she can never return to.

Sophia has sacrificed everything for her younger sister, Lucy. She has removed them from the only home they ever knew, taken on the care of Lucy's illegitimate son, George, and even assumed the role of a widow and mother in order to erase all hint of scandal from the boy's birth. But rumor continues to follow them like the darkest of clouds, and Sophia must adapt to her new existence as a false widow with no prospects beyond the doors of her small cottage. Lord Haughton - "Finn" to those close to him - will stop at nothing to prevent the slightest whiff of disgrace from tainting his family's name. When he learns of his younger brother's latest indiscretion-one that leaves a bastard child in his wake-Haughton rushes across the country to offer the boy's mother a comfortable living in exchange for her silence about the child's true parentage. But he arrives only to have his generous offer thrown back in his face by Sophia Brixton, a sharp-tongued and sharper-witted woman who proceeds to toss him out of her house. But just because he is banished from her home does not mean he is so easily banished from her life.

James Redwood has always loved women and feared marriage. When his parents force him into an arranged marriage against his will, he finds himself engaged to a woman he cannot stand and powerless to avoid what he fears the most. His only hope lies in prudish Grace Follet, his unwanted fiancee: if she breaks the engagement, he will be free. But how can James make Grace break the engagement when she has everything to gain by marrying him and everything to lose by leaving him?