The Governess and the Viscount

She swore she would never set foot in Halewood Priory again.

Eight years ago, Anna Ellis refused a viscount's proposal in the muniment room and walked away with eleven pounds in her reticule and a decision she has spent a lifetime not regretting - out loud, at least.

Now she's back, and this time she didn't even choose the house. The letter that sent her north named a salary, a six-year-old boy, and a county. Not until the papers were signed did she think to ask whose roof she'd be living under.

Christopher Hale, Viscount Halewood, has a son who won't stop asking about his dead mother, a solicitor who won't stop asking about his marriage license, and a leaf cut clean out of the parish register - the one that would prove his eight-year-old marriage actually happened. Six weeks, his lawyer warns him. Six weeks to prove a wedding the law no longer has any record of, or lose everything to a cousin who doesn't even want it.

Anna wasn't hired to solve his problems. She was hired to teach his son sums. But arithmetic has always been her particular talent - and some debts, she's beginning to understand, were never meant to be paid alone.

Then Thomas finds a bundle of letters hidden in the false back of a nursery cupboard. Letters written by a man twenty-six years dead. Letters that were never supposed to be found at all.

Blackwood House teaches its young ladies that the hardest sum a woman ever does is the one that includes herself.

THE GOVERNESS AND THE VISCOUNT is Book Four in The Ladies of Blackwood House, an eight-book Regency series following the graduates of a finishing school that teaches settlement law, inheritance, and how to recognise a dangerous man - one question nobody has been able to ask aloud for twenty-six years.