Gallant Scoundrel

Harry Thatcher, once a celebrated war hero, returned to England a dissipated wastrel and avowed lifelong bachelor. In hopes of preventing Harry from degenerating into the most disreputable rake in Regency London, his best friend persuades him to take up the mantle as the Saint of Seven Dials, a role Harry adopts wholeheartedly. But even his friends don't know the secret in Harry's past that first set him on the path to ruin. Most assume it was his battlefield injury that transformed him from a valiant soldier into the embittered, reckless man he is now, but long before that injury, there was a woman.

Xena Maxwell was a most unusual woman, even at nineteen, when Harry first met her, clad in breeches, in a rough-and-tumble Army camp on the Peninsula. Heedless of convention after traveling the world with her scholarly father, Xena could fight and shoot as well as most men and was every bit as gifted at repairing wounds as she was at causing them. Harry's fascination and Xena's disregard for propriety landed them in a marriage neither intended, disgrace for Harry and exile for Xena. Her ship foundered before reaching England, however, and Harry was never the same again. Now, just as he's coming into his own as the newest Saint of Seven Dials, Harry finds himself face to face with the wife he's believe dead for the past seven years. Will her miraculous survival prove an answer to prayer or a curse upon them both?