The Reluctant Heir

An artist, a grieving gentleman, a forbidden love.

Isabella dreams of little but renown as an artist and the local competition offers her one chance at an apprenticeship under the town's most celebrated master. But when a grief-stricken gentleman of mysterious circumstance beseeches her aid in locating his late brother's lost love, she cannot bring herself to refuse him. The search draws her from her canvas and into his world, and, most perilously, into a regard she has no right to feel for a man so far above her station.

Rowan owes his brother one final act of devotion: to find the woman he loved and was never permitted to wed. Armed with little more than a handful of obscure clues and the company of a spirited, unconventional young artist, he embarks on a search that leads him where he never anticipated -- an attachment he never thought to want. But honor and family exact their price, and it may cost him the very lady who has, against all reason, come to mean everything.