The Battle of Waterloo lost Jack Wrath the use of one arm and ended his career in the cavalry. With nothing better to do and nowhere else to go, he sees his doctor home to Reabridge—and stays because of Gwen, the female farrier he rescues from a lustful lord. After all his years of wandering, Gwen's cottage feels like home.

Gwen Hughes is taller and stronger than many men, and runs her own business. Perhaps she intimidates the men of the town, but that is fine with her. She doesn't have time for courtship. She’d be a fool to refuse Jack’s offer to help her father, who is in his second childhood, and even more of a fool to read too much into his kindness.

Under the harvest moon, two people who believe romance has passed them finally reach their season for love.

One of nine stories in Desperate Daughters, the 2022 Bluestocking Belles Collection with Friends, Lord Cuckoo Comes Home brings a tired soldier who has not had a home in nearly 20 years, and a girl from the country who has never had a chance to be even a wallflower.

A run-in with the adult son of the household leads to dismissal for governess Zahrah ibnit Yousef, or Zara MacLaren as the household knows her. Turned out of on a Christmas Eve, her circumstances go from bad to worse when she is robbed and then arrested.

Goldsmith and jeweler Simon Marshall recognizes the locket a young aristocrat tries to sell, and it leads him on a hunt for Zara, the friend of his childhood. He finds her. He finds trouble, too, and joins her incarceration.

They need a Christmas miracle. It will take a pair of charitable goalers, a little Christmas cheer, and the timely intervention of family to bring this story to a happy ending.

As the Duchess of Haverford’s companion, Cedrica Grenford is not treated as a poor relation and is encouraged to mingle with Her Grace’s guests. Perhaps among the gentlemen gathered for the duchess’s house party, she will find a suitable husband?
Marcel Fournier has only one ambition: to save enough from his fees serving as chef in the houses of the ton to become the proprietor of his own fine restaurant. An affair with the duchess’s dependent would be dangerous. Anything else is impossible. Isn’t it?

Holidays, relatives, pressure to marry—sometimes it is all too much. Is it any wonder a woman may need to escape? The heroines in this collection of stories aren’t afraid to take matters into their own hands when they’ve had enough.

James must marry to please his grandfather, the duke, and to win social acceptance for himself and his father’s other foreign-born children. But only Lady Sophia Belvoir makes his heart sing, and to win her, he must invite himself to spend Christmas at the home of his father’s greatest enemy. Sophia keeps secret her tendre for James, Lord Elfingham. After all, the whole of Society knows he is pursuing the younger Belvoir sister, not the older one left on the shelf after two failed betrothals.

(This novella has been rewritten and republished as a novel in the Children of the Mountain King series. It's called To Wed a Proper Lady.)

Burned in their youth, neither Tad nor Lottie expected to feel the fires of love. The years have soothed the pain, and each has built a comfortable, if not fully satisfying, life, on paths that intersect and then diverge again.
But then the inferno of a volcanic eruption sears away the lies of the past and frees them to forge a future together.

A novella in the 2017 holiday box set from the Bluestocking Belles

Six charming holiday season romances from award-winning and best-selling authors.

The Bluestocking Belles and Friends brighten your holidays with:

• A beleaguered uncle whose wards have run off every governess--what he needs is a wife, if only he can persuade the latest applicant
• A country solicitor who becomes an earl and then finds a secret that changes everything
• A very proper clergyman battles very improper urges when he and a lady with a murky past find themselves snowbound
• A viscount whose search to unearth generations-old family secrets kindles the fire of love for his lovely search partner
• A former army captain wonders if the best friend of his ex-fiancee is the woman he should have married
• A vicar with a misspent youth and the duke’s daughter who brings out the best in him

Six gentlemen and the ladies with whom they discover the power of a Christmastide Kiss.