Not Even If You Begged

Widow Traci Evans happily sits in on meetings with the lovely ladies of the Invincible Sisterhood solely because they reached out to her first. A loner, Traci feels for the first time she belongs. All of the official members are sweet older women who have lost the love of their lives, their husbands. Unknown to them, Traci is more angry than she is grief-stricken because her husband died in the midst of cheating on her with another woman. Her husband's deception has hardened Traci's heart so much that even close friend and next door neighbor Maureen can't convince her to open it again. But when a playful kiss with Maureen's gorgeous son Ryan turns passionate, Traci starts to rethink everything she knows about love.

There's a new governess at Fairmont House, and she's going to be nothing but trouble. Emily Laurence is a liar. She is not polite, she's not polished, and she has never taught a child in her life. This position was meant to be her sister's - brilliant, kind Amy, who isn't perpetually angry, dangerously reckless, and who does (inexplicably) like children. But Amy is unwell and needs a doctor, their father is gone and their mother is useless, so here Emily is, pretending to be something she's not. If she can get away with her deception for long enough to earn a few months' wages and slip some expensive trinkets into her pockets along the way, perhaps they'll be all right. That is, as long as she doesn't get involved with the Edwards family's dramas. Emily refuses to care about her charges - Grace, who talks too much and loves too hard, and Aster, who is frankly terrifying but might just be the wittiest sixteen-year-old Emily has ever met - or the servants, who insist on acting as if they're each other's family. And she certainly hasn't noticed her employer, the brooding, taciturn Captain Edwards, no matter how good he might look without a shirt on . . . As Fairmont House draws her in, Emily's lies start to come undone. Can she fix her mistakes before it's too late? Praise for Lex Croucher: 'Bridgerton's wild little sister. So much fun!' Sarra Manning 'Witty, whip-smart and full of characters I totally fell for. I didn't want it to end' Laura Kay 'Beyond entertaining - high debauchery with a feminist swing' Abigail Mann

The first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language.