Lara, Lady Hawksworth, is sure her husband died in a shipwreck off the south Indian coast, but three years later someone answering to the name of Hunter, Lord Hawksworth, reappears. He's accepted by everyone save his uncle, who'd claimed the earldom in his absence, and Lara, who had hated being married to him. How Hunter wins Lara with his exquisite lovemaking and becomes a better husband than the man who left her is the heart of this sweetly sensual,...

"It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper--and cousin by marriage--of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully...