Fall of the Lyon — Chasity Bowlin

“It's all a bit sleight of hand, isn't it? This business of seduction.”

Faced with the devastating and impending loss of her stepfather and the all too real threat of unscrupulous relatives who would have her inheritance at any cost, Miss Margaret Upshaw flees to London. Her stepfather has tasked her to make her way to the Lyon's Den to seek the assistance of Mrs. Bessie Dove-Lyon, the most scandalous matchmaker in all of London. Her matches aren't made in the ballrooms of Mayfair, but over the faro tables and a notorious betting book in the gaming hell she rules with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Leander Thurston-Hunter, Viscount Amberley, or Leo as he prefers, is a man with a very particular problem that can only be solved with money. And as a nobleman, there's only one way to get a lot of cash and get it quickly -- you have to marry it. When Mrs. Dove-Lyon informs him that she's made the perfect match for him, he's not exactly thrilled, but certainly willing to do his duty to preserve his family's standing. But then he meets Meg Upshaw. Beautiful, vulnerable, terribly alone… and she makes him question for the first time whether a marriage born out of duty and necessity has to be an unhappy one.

But there's one terrible catch… Meg's family, the relatives who would have her fortune by any means, are the very ones responsible for the brutal events that nearly ended his life and left him permanently scarred. But that isn't the only secret they're keeping, and those secrets are worth dying for and worth killing for. Leo and his new bride find themselves in danger of far more than simply falling inconveniently in love.

Even in the Lyon's Den, the stakes have never been higher.