Author Note

A year ago, I asked my followers on social media what sort of story they would like to see next. I had two ideas. Both of which I liked a great deal. The first was a marriage-of-convenience story involving a governess and an earl, and the second an enemies-to-lovers story that centered around the heroine’s misdeeds in the past before the hero went off to war.

Assuming my followers would be as excited as I was about these two stories, I stupidly put it to a vote—where all my best-laid plans unraveled like knitting.

You see, my followers had another idea. Because clearly my job wasn’t hard enough already, they wanted me to write an amalgamation! An enemies-to-lovers marriage-of-convenience story!

But I listened, threw my other two perfectly good ideas out of the window and went back to the drawing board. Therefore, there is no governess in this book. The hero isn’t an earl, either. The heroine doesn’t have a checkered past and nobody went to war.

Now my story involves the explosive end to a forbidden first love, a former stable boy turned convict and an aristocratic heroine sold to pay her family’s crushing debts...