The Bluestocking's Yuletide Bargain

He arrived with a list of requirements for a wife. She arrived with nowhere to live after March.

Miss Cecily Thornton reads Gibbon for pleasure, argues the Corn Laws at dinner, and has until March before her late father's house passes to a cousin. She would much rather solve that problem with logic than with romance.

Julian Radcliffe, Viscount Haverleigh, has a new seat on an agricultural reform committee and a bachelor household that cannot support it. He also has a list headed Requirements, and one line on it matters more than all the rest: a wife who will tell him the truth.

At the Dowager's Christmas house party, a rigged game of charades, a skating lesson and a lame carriage horse on the road to the village leave them walking the last half mile together through the snow. Somewhere on that road they agree to a sensible bargain. A marriage of convenience, with clear terms, her own allowance, her own reading mornings and no sentiment required.

The terms hold up beautifully in the firelit library. It is everything else that keeps straying from the agreement.

A sweet, closed-door marriage-of-convenience Regency Christmas romance full of clever banter, a bluestocking heroine and a hero who learns that feeling is not the same as folly. Book 2 of The Langford Christmas House Party. Each book is a complete story with a happily-ever-after.