Her Secret Desire (A Novel of Lord Hawkesbury's Players)

Previously available as A Secret Life.

Prepare for a romp through Elizabethan England, where finding love is written in the stars...

Comely, courageous Minerva “Min” Peabody, a poor but passionate playwright, is determined to make her mark. Ill-fated to live in Elizabethan England, when women—deemed the inferior sex—most assuredly did not write plays, Min will prevail. With her finished play in hand, she implores Roger Style, a local theatre manager in London, to read it. Though desperate in his own right—due to a string of commercial failures—all Style sees before him is a woman playwright, and refuses to even look at her work.

On impulse, Min changes her story, claiming the play was written by the man standing across the street, and secures the manager’s agreement to review it. But her choice of surrogate, Robert “Blake” Blakewell, promises to be a mixed blessing indeed. Blake, a handsome blue-eyed sea captain with his own agenda, is a man with a mysterious past, a pair of breathtaking shoulders, and an irresistible aura of intrigue. Though he agrees to her outlandish proposal, she has to wonder, as she gets lost in his eyes, what in the world she’s gotten herself into.

Blake’s own mission? To ferret out the cad in Roger Style’s theatre company responsible for getting his sister with child. And when that objective threatens to derail Min’s nascent career, his dilemma is a daunting one: protect either his family’s honor or the woman who’s slowly but surely softening his heart and winning his love.

Funny, fast-paced, and with a deliciously dark edge, Her Secret Desire speaks to any woman who’s ever had to fight for her dreams in a world that just won’t take her seriously.