The Reluctant Bride

On the morning she is meant to marry a man she does not love, Cassandra Fairfax boards the northbound mail coach instead — bound for a governess's post in Yorkshire, and a life she means, for once, to choose for herself. She has packed one trunk, one small private habit of testing anything uncertain against her own good sense, and no intention whatsoever of being surprised by anything else this road has to show her.

The road has other plans. An ostler who cannot possibly be in two places at once. A hold-up that takes one gentleman's papers and troubles itself with nothing else aboard the coach. A fellow passenger, a Mr. Hawke, whose boots cost a great deal more than his plain coat lets on.

Cass soon learns that Hawke is a Bow Street officer travelling incognito, tracing a run of robberies that look, to every other passenger, like nothing worse than an unlucky stretch of road. Together they must clear an innocent man the whole coach is all too eager to convict, before the true danger, hiding behind the warmest welcome on the entire route, closes in on the coach itself.

A slow-burn Regency romance and fair-play mystery for readers who love a heroine who trusts her own eyes, a hero already investigating before he is courting, and a villain whose wrongdoing costs him everything precisely because he never meant it to go this far.