A New York Times–bestselling author’s “satisfying” historical romance features a matchmaking housekeeper who falls for the man she is to find a wife for (Booklist).

Jude Deveraux tempts the heart in this warm and wonderful early twentieth-century romance featuring a feisty heroine, a hidden family treasure, and a Scottish laird who would rather die than be married.

It is 1909 and Temperance O’Neil is a woman ahead of her time. She’s happy and devoted to her career helping single mothers on the streets of New York. But her new stepfather, Angus McCairn, does not approve. He makes her an unlikely offer: to go to Scotland, pose as housekeeper to his nephew James, and find him a wife, secretly. If she succeeds, he’ll allow her back to New York.

Temperance—smart, passionate, as stubborn as her stepfather—is determined at any cost to win her return passage. But she has taken on far more than she expected. James McCairn, Laird of Clan McCairn, is no cultured gentleman but a strapping, rough-mannered farmer, rude and brusque. There are pigeons roosting in the kitchen and chickens in the bedroom. Marriage is the last thing on his mind . . .

“Deveraux[‘s] lively pace and happy endings . . . will keep readers turning pages.” —Publishers Weekly