Lady Anne Hatley -- the only daughter of the Viscount of Roxborough -- is not a woman to bow before any man. Raised to manage her family's estates better than any suitor, she has no intention on stepping aside for any would-be husband to add her family titles and estates to his own. Her ailing father, however, knows that inheritance laws are unjust at best and confiscatory at worst when an unwed woman stands as the sole heir. Vultures are circling and the pressure is mounting for the fiercely independent Lady Anne to find a man who is strong enough to be the husband she wants instead of what society expects.
Lawrence, Duke of Amhurst, lives in the shadow of his father's vices. Worried that he, too, shares his progenitor's brutish nature, he has shunned courting to the point that he has gone from one of the nation's most eligible bachelors to a man surrounded in whispers of deviant tastes, which keeps away even the most determined romantic young women who might wish to scale the walls he has built around his heart.
But circumstance brings this unlikely pair together. Though they do not yet know it, they will have to overcome challenges both physical and political as they fall into each other's hearts -- at first reluctantly, and then with unbridled passion.