An innocent letter inspires a wanton passion . . .

Virginal Beatrice Clemens had only the most noble of intentions in mind when she began a correspondence with Captain Percival Carterton, her brother's comrade-in-arms. She meant for her warm and open letters to ease a brave soldier's loneliness far from home. For Percy, however, each word was passionate fire, inflaming his need for the unsuspecting young nurse . . . and his desire to touch, taste, love, and possess her forever.

Now back in London, Percy has resolved to win the lovely Beatrice before she is betrothed to another man. Percy charts a course of brazen seduction designed to awaken Beatrice to hitherto unexplored delights, thereby compromising her reputation and forcing her to wed him instead. A bold plan of action involving scandal and surprise, it may open a Pandora's box of hot, unrestrained sensuality that could carry the virile soldier and his willing lady to ruin—or to breathtaking new heights of ecstasy.

"What is the opposite of déjà vu?

Louisa Clemens entered the parlor, stopping in consternation barely a few paces into the room. Peculiarly, the room felt different, as if she had never set foot in it before. After working six years for the Winterbottoms she knew every inch of their parlor: the blue carpet patterned with roses, the chintz-covered sofas, the ormolu clock on the mantel, the glass case full of ferns in the corner of the bay window - and yet she felt as if she had never been here before.

Plastering a façade of normality over her feeling of sudden strangeness, a difference caught her eye, and she turned her head to look to the side of the room where a man stood – a man who was unabashedly staring at her. He was definitely not the sort of man she would expect to see in the Winterbottom’s parlor, assembled amidst all their other guests. Once more she faltered, the sensation of foreignness overcoming her."

In this opening to CAPTIVE Louisa first sets eyes on the man that will change her life, the exotic Khair Bey."

"Usually life changes slowly, almost imperceptibly, as one day slides seamlessly into the next. And sometimes life changes in the blink of an eye, with only the turn of a door handle to demarcate the end of one life and the start of another. Emily Clemens stood dead in the street, an island of stillness amidst the scurrying crowds, and stared at the wooden door in front of her. Clutching her reticule before her like a shield, as if to buffer herself from the change that turning the handle would bring, she twisted the straps around with cold fingers until they dug cruelly into her flesh. Should she open the door and go inside? Or turn tail and walk away again through the crowds, her dignity intact, back to the school where she worked as an assistant teacher." So begins the story of Emily, Caroline's younger sister, continuing the saga of the Clemens children, orphaned at a young age and left to die in the poor house with nothing but their wits to make themselves a better life.