Deeply introverted Catriona Campbell wants the right to vote and a professorship at Oxford. She dreams of romance, too, but since all her attempts at love have ended badly, she now keeps her desires firmly locked inside her head - until she climbs out of a Scottish loch after a good swim and finds herself face-to-face with a stranger… who turns out to be her father’s attractive new colleague.

London banking heiress Hattie Greenfield wanted just three things in life:

Acclaim as an artist

A noble cause

Marriage to a young lord who puts the gentle in gentleman

Why then does this Oxford scholar find herself at the altar with the darkly attractive financier Lucian Blackstone, whose murky past and ruthless business practices strike fear in the hearts of Britain’s peerage? Trust Hattie to take and invigorating little adventure too far. Now she’s stuck with a churlish Scot who just might be the end of her ambitions…

When the daughter of his business rival all but falls into his lap, Lucian sees opportunity. As a self-made man, he has vast wealth but holds little power, and Hattie could be the key to finally setting long-harbored political plans in motion. Driven by an old desire for revenge, he has no room for his new wife’s apprehensions or romantic notions, bewitching as he finds her.

But a sudden journey to Scotland paints everything in a different light. Hattie slowly sees the real Lucian and realized she could win everything - as long as she is prepared to lose her heart.