Beguiled

The second book in the Beaumont series, following the younger generation of the Beaumont family as they navigate obligations, ambition, and the search for love.

Is choosing the one your heart desires worth losing the esteem of those you love best?

After failing to land a husband during her first Season, Alice Pembroke has been sent to the country home of her cousin, Marchioness Priscilla Beaumont, for tutelage. Anxious to meet her fathers ambitions of a high ranking marriage, Alice is willing to do anything her cousin instructs, but being assigned to oversee the gardens of Hampton House wasn’t what she anticipated. Neither is working in proximity to the handsome new Estate Manager, who is the exact sort of man she’s been taught to look down upon.

Having recently vacated his position as a Solicitor catering to the Peerage, Ethan Beaumont is eager to prove himself at Hampton House. He plans to make his cousin West’s estate a leading example within the Aristocracy by using new, more ethical land management practices—making it worth disappointing his father by leaving his law practice. Those ambitions are quickly hampered when Ethan must oversee garden renovations alongside a beautiful, vain, debutant who embodies the very life he finally escaped from.

Suppressing their objections to working together after a terrible first encounter, unbidden attraction begins to bloom over long days spent turning the soil. Impressions that were planted early on are soon found to be flawed and assumptions proven false, but both know the other is a distraction toward reaching their ultimate goals. Will they be able to acknowledge growing feelings and find a path forward together, even if choosing one another means uprooting envisioned futures?