'You forget yourself, your lordship. You have no rights to allow or disallow anything I may choose to do. You have, in fact, no claim over me whatsoever - a circumstance for which I thank the Lord on a daily basis I am neither your ward nor your dependent, and I will not allow you to talk to me in that odiously overbearing fashion ' High-spirited Artemisia Grantley has never made any attempt to conform to the feminine ideal expected of a lady of quality, nor has she ever had the benefit of an unfavourable opinion formed against her. But when the Marquess of Chysm enters her life, it seems to her that his lordship is always at hand to witness her shortcomings and bring them to her attention, inciting her temper and leaving her flustered.As she reluctantly embarks upon her first London Season, a scandalous family secret and a conspiracy that stretches all the way to Napoleonic France threaten to entangle her with the one person she could happily throttle.