2020 Whitney Award Winner Scotland 1794 For more than twenty years, the Lowland village of Craigmuir has been untouched by smallpox, leaving the people vulnerable to a painful lesson on the price of belonging, belief, and survival. Isla Findlay belongs nowhere. The daughter of a disgraced woman and the Highlander who abandoned them both, she tries to be a dutiful niece to the uncle who has taken her in, blending into the village as best she can. But when a young Highlander's arrival in the area coincides with an outbreak of dreaded smallpox, it stirs up questions about Isla's past and forces a confrontation between the beliefs she holds and the community she wants to belong to. Dr. Graeme MacNeill killed the only patient he ever had: his own father. The only way he can think to atone is to cut all ties from the Lowland world his father hated—including his education as a physician—and embrace the Highland...

A gentleman‘s impulsive wager to marry a stranger. A young woman’s determination not to marry the man she wants.When Isabel Cosgrove is informed by her father that he lost her hand in marriage while playing cards with Charles Galbraith—the gentleman she’s been admiring from a distance for years—she is filled with dismay. How can she agree to wed a man whose reason for marriage is part-revenge, part-indifference? Intent on avoiding a painful union where her regard cannot be returned, she concocts a plan.Charles Galbraith didn’t intend to become engaged as a result of a drunken wager at cards, but after the woman he loves spurns him, what does it matter whom he marries? But even Miss Cosgrove, the fiancée he won by wager, seems intent not to marry him—a fact that both relieves and piques him. She instead suggests a plan that has the potential to temporarily appease her father’s demand of marriage while also winning back the love of the woman Charles truly wants.But when Charles and Isabel are thrown into the midst of a brewing scandal and another man’s potential disinheritance, their plan begins to unravel thread by thread, challenging what Galbraith thinks he wants—and just how much more time with him Isabel’s heart can stand.

**Previously published as A Foolish Heart. She wants him back. He'll have anyone but her. Mercy Marcotte doesn't deserve a second chance at love. At least, that's what she's believed since jilting Solomon Kennett, the man she loved, when his fortunes took a turn for the worse. But Solomon is back from the West Indies, rich, aloof, and about to offer for Mercy's best friend. Mercy resolves to stay out of it—until her friend runs off with another man. She can't stand by while Solomon is humiliated yet again. Whatever the past, Solomon Kennett is taking control of the future. He is certain he will get what he wants now that he has proven himself worthy of consideration by even the most fastidious of fathers. When the woman he is supposed to propose to is kidnapped by another man, he feels honor-bound to go after them—only to be followed by Mercy, the woman who spurned him years ago. With end goals, loyalties, and history at odds...

He jilted her sister. She will never forgive him for it. Can her anger survive a snowing in and a Christmas truce? Emma Caldwell doesn’t hate anyone—except for Hugh Warrilow, the man who jilted her older sister and left like a coward to join the army. Men are clearly not to be trusted, and Emma is determined not to give her heart to one. No, a marriage of convenience is the very thing to suit her. Hugh Warrilow has been secretly in love with Emma Caldwell for years, so when the time comes to live up to both families’ expectations and marry her sister, he can’t find it in himself to do it. Disgraced and misunderstood, he joins to fight Napoleon on the Continent, hoping he will forget Emma and be forgotten by everyone he has disappointed. An injury brings Hugh home—just in time for Christmas and the snowstorm that leaves him trapped under the same roof as Emma. How will he explain that his unforgivable act was motivated by how desperately he loved her? Her icy reception doesn’t leave him the chance, nor does it offer much hope for the season’s expectation of peace on earth and goodwill to men.