An Arranged Marriage

Eleanor Chivenham never expected her own brother to ruin her—yet one night and one catastrophic misunderstanding later, she finds herself married to a stranger who has every reason to think the worst of her. Nicholas Delaney is charming, enigmatic, and clearly hiding something. Their marriage begins in suspicion and barely contained resentment, but what makes this story compelling isn't the conflict itself—it's watching two intelligent, wounded people navigate intimacy when trust has been poisoned from the start. The emotional stakes are quiet but sharp: can a marriage built on someone else's lie become something real?

Beverley's particular gift is restraint. She trusts her characters to be complicated and her readers to keep up, never over-explaining motivations or softening edges for easy sympathy. The Regency setting feels inhabited rather than decorative, and the social pressures that box Eleanor in are rendered with enough specificity to feel genuinely suffocating. The prose is clean and controlled, the wit dry without tipping into parody. As the opening installment of the Company of Rogues series, it also establishes a world and a circle of characters whose pull becomes difficult to resist.